UK Media Watch Prompts Guardian Correction to Palestinian Refugee Claim

Last week, we posted about a July 25th Guardian review of a new science fiction book by Palestinian writers imagining “what their country might look like in 2048” that included this historical inaccuracy by the journalist, Alison Flood: 

Twelve acclaimed Palestinian writers have imagined what their country might look like in 2048, 100 years after the Nakba saw more than 700,000 people expelled from their homes, in what is believed to be the first ever collection of science fiction from the occupied territories.

As we noted to Flood in a tweet, and to editors in our complaint, there are no serious historians who claim that all 700,000 Palestinians were “expelled” during the 1948 war.  It’s been demonstrated that most fled in the context of an Arab war of annihilation against the nascent Jewish state, not because of an expulsion order.  We reminded the Guardian that their own journalists are almost always careful with their language about this issue, merely claiming that “some were expelled and some fled”.

Though we never heard back from Guardian editors, Flood, to her credit, did eventually respond to apologise, and informed us that the sentence would be corrected. 

 

Here’s the new sentence:

Twelve acclaimed Palestinian writers have imagined what their country might look like in 2048, 100 years after the Nakba saw more than700,000 people flee or expelledfrom their homes, in what is believed to be the first ever collection of science fiction from the occupied territories.

 

This post originally appeared at CAMERA’s UK Media Watch.

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