The Rewriting of Hamas and the Rebranding of “Return” - by Gilead Ini

...That Erakat managed to squeeze so much misinformation into a segment that lasted nine minutes is a testament to the ideologue’s commitment. It is also a reason to disqualify her from being regarded, whether by CBS or her students at George Mason, as a “specialist” in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Caveat emptor.

Gilead Ini..
CAMERA..
08 June '18..

There was a time when those who wanted to demographically engineer an end to the Jewish state didn’t speak as smoothly as Noura Erakat does today.

Back then, when Arab leaders demanded a so-called “right of return” to Israel for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, their words were jarring, but at least candid and compact. Egyptian president Gamal Nasser, for example, approvingly told a Swiss interviewer in 1961, “If the Arabs return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist.”

A decade earlier, the Egyptian foreign minister was equally succinct in explaining the point of Arab calls for an influx of Palestinian refugees to the Jewish state: “To put it quite clearly, the intention is the extermination of Israel.”

At a 1957 Conference of Refugees in Syria, the participants formally resolved that any talk of ending the conflict without “ensuring the refugees’ right to annihilate Israel” would be regarded as treason.

This view about the utility of Palestinian refugees was so unexceptional that a 1966 article in Commentary declared about the topic, “It is pointless to multiply quotations from Arab statesmen — Iraqi, Saudi Arabian, or Syrian — since none pretends to any other purpose.”

That was then. And while we can still occasionally find forthright quotes translated from Arabic — for example, the 2004 reminder by senior Palestinian official Sakher Habash that, “To us, the refugees issue is the winning card which means the end of the Israeli state” — today, and in English, such straight talk about the “right of return” has mostly been supplanted with more alluring language.

Which brings us back to Noura Erakat.

(Continue to Full Article)

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