The Associated Press (AP) on June 18 promoted a contentious Palestinian narrative in an article ostensibly focused on a United Nations report detailing the plight of millions of people displaced in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic. The piece, titled UN: Millions driven from homes in 2020 despite COVID crisis, was subsequently republished by news organizations such as the Los Angeles Times, ABC News, US News & World Report, Fox News and The Independent (UK).
AP’s move is important because it effectively conflates a central issue of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a story about how war, persecution and human rights violations last year caused millions of people to flee their homes despite the global health crisis. Indeed, the AP seemingly used the opportunity to promulgate the Palestinian leadership’s claim for a “Right of Return” to Israel of some 5.7 million so-called refugees, even though this would result in the end of Jewish self-determination.
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
AP Cites UNRWA STATS, But Not UNRWA
Instead of focusing on the issue at hand, the Associated Press piece written by James Keaten and Edith M. Lederer veers off course:
The [UN] report said that at the end of last year there were 5.7 million Palestinians, 3.9 million Venezuelans and an additional 20.7 million refugees from various other countries displaced abroad.…”
It is curious that AP uses the 5.7 million figure without citing its source: that is, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). This may have to do with the fact that the Palestinians are the only people in human history whose population of “refugees” has increased over time.
This is because UNRWA was created uniquely for Palestinians, and oversees only them.
Related Reading: Does UNRWA Violate International Law?
The UN Agency AP Does Mention
Meanwhile, AP does note the name of the UN agency that is tasked with caring for every other refugee in the world:
In its latest Global Trends report, UNHCR said the world’s cumulative number of displaced people rose to 82.4 million — roughly the population of Germany and a new post-World War II record.”
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was formed in 1950, with the explicit goal of helping displaced persons either return to their home countries or resettle elsewhere.
However, UNRWA does the exact opposite. The agency introduced a unique definition of “refugee” that applies only to the Palestinians, and which essentially transforms the status into a hereditary trait passed on to all descendants of the estimated 750,000 Palestinians that were displaced during the Arab-initiated war following Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948.
Incredibly, UNRWA somehow counts as “refugees” most Palestinians living in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, as well as a significant percentage of Palestinians living in the West Bank. The icing on the cake: Even those of Palestinian heritage granted citizenship by countries are by UNRWA’s standards in many cases still categorized as “refugees.”
Instead of attempting to integrate Palestinian refugees into their current host countries — primarily Jordan, Syria and Lebanon — UNRWA has created a cradle-to-grave welfare system for them that has exacerbated the matter. Moreover, Arab nations have actively prevented Palestinians from becoming citizens and have implemented discriminatory policies against them.
In other words, the agency has essentially weaponized the concept of displaced persons so that it can be used as a tool to attack the Jewish state.
Related Reading: VICE Perpetuates Palestinian Refugee Myth, Blames Israel For Hamas’ Attack on Women’s Rights
200,000 Reasons AP Got It Wrong
With the help of HonestReporting, UNRWA’s deception was exposed in January by former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
We suspended funding to UNRWA, which is riddled with waste, fraud & concerns of support to terrorism. UNRWA is not a refugee agency; it’s estimated <200,000 Arabs displaced in 1948 are still alive and most others are not refugees by any rational criteria. https://t.co/SdyigJPHiH
— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) January 14, 2021
Yet, the Associated Press, the self-proclaimed “definitive source for independent journalism from every corner of the globe,” has opted to ignore the facts, or, at the very least, cannot be bothered to explain the complexity of the issue.
Rather, it just parrots a figure pushed by a dubious organization.
In doing so, the wire service is minimizing the very real suffering of tens of millions of displaced persons.
Let AP know what you think by demanding that the news wire service correct the 5.7 million refugees figure cited.
