On May 18, we complained to Sky News editors about an entry in their Live Blog two days earlier concerning “rival Tommy Robinson and pro-Palestine protests” which took place in London on the same day.
The anti-Israel protests focused on the day on the English calendar in 1948 – May 14 – when Israel declared its independence and then defended itself from an invasion by five Arab armies, which Palestinians and their supporters refer to as “Nakba Day”.
Though much has been written by CAMERA about distortions surrounding Israel’s birth, and the displacement of Palestinians caused by the Arab war, Sky’s brief take was breathtakingly propagandistic – erasing the Arab invasion of the nascent Jewish state entirely, while claiming Israel was the aggressor:
Sky upheld the bulk of our complaint. The entry now notes the following below the “What is Nakba?” headline:
Here are the relevant paragraphs from the revised post:
It’s an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that is used to describe the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the period between 1947 and 1949, a period that saw the end of the British mandate in Palestine and, in 1948, the establishment of the state of Israel.
During this time, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled, were expelled or left due to the pressures of war, and more than 400 villages were depopulated or destroyed. This population became refugees in neighboring territories such as the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, as well as in a wider global diaspora.
Historians differ in their analysis of the causes and motivations behind this. For Palestinians, the Nakba is a foundational source of ongoing trauma. Many, along with a range of international historians, have described these events as ethnic cleansing that took people’s land and denied them the right to return.
For most Israelis, meanwhile, also supported by other historians, the events were part of the country’s existential War of Independence, waged against Arab states that refused to accept the UN’s Partition Plan in 1947. The Nakba, they say, can only be understood by recognising the impact of a broader regional conflict.
The revised text is still quite problematic, but is nonetheless a significant improvement over the original lie that “Jewish paramilitary forces” started the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.