Under the sinister slogan “Resistance until reclamation, generation after generation, until total liberation,” crowds of students gathered in downtown Portland, Oregon, on May 21, as they commemorated the 75th anniversary of the “Nakba” — what Palestinians regard as the “catastrophe” of Israel’s rebirth in 1948.
In videos posted online, protestors can be heard chanting the well-known call for Israel’s destruction and replacement with a Palestinian state cleansed of Jews: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Some attendees went as far as to invoke age-old antisemitic tropes, calling Israel a “beast without any remorse” while branding Zionism, the Jewish people’s national liberation movement, a “plague to the masses around the world.”
“Resistance by any means necessary,” one speaker then shouted, implying that murderous Palestinian terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians can somehow be justified as “resistance.”
Yet this is how the event, which was organized by Portland State University’s pro-Palestinian student contingent, was covered by KPTV FOX 12 Oregon, a local Fox-affiliated television station:
This week, some PSU students are commemorating Nakba, an event which refers to the destruction of Palestine [sic] and the permanent displacement of its people seventy-five years ago. This day of remembrance gives Palestinians the opportunity to share their Nakba stories, including Henna, a senior at PSU who has made it her mission to give a voice to Palestinians living in Portland. Fox 12’s Amal Elhelw has the story.”
Let’s look at how @fox12oregon‘s puff piece on a Nakba event in Portland, Oregon, sanitizes Palestinian extremism & anti-Israel activities. 🧵
1. Fox 12 says Nakba is “an event that refers to the destruction of Palestine,” despite no Palestinian state existing in 1948. pic.twitter.com/BzQIZyAn2G
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) May 25, 2023
Aside from blatantly whitewashing a rally that called for outright violence against Israeli Jews, Amal Elhelw’s three-minute video report contains numerous other factual errors, distortions, and omissions. In fact, the entire narrative that Israel’s re-establishment led to the “destruction of Palestine” is manifestly false, as no Palestinian state existed in 1948 — or at any point in history, for that matter.
In 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish leadership agreed to the plan, but the Arabs rejected it and turned to violence.
On May 15, 1948, mere hours after Israel officially declared its independence, the combined forces of five Arab armies attacked in an unsuccessful attempt to annihilate the nascent country. As a result of this war of aggression, some 450,000 to 750,000 Arab Palestinians fled, while Arab countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa expelled close to a million Jews.
Crucially, as HonestReporting detailed in a May 7 background article, the term “al-Nakba” (“the catastrophe”) was initially coined to refer to the Arab world’s failure to prevent the Jews from regaining sovereignty over their homeland — not, as Fox 12 claims, the “destruction of Palestine.”
However, not wanting to let facts get in the way of an anti-Israel narrative, the network turned to using recent, context-free footage of destroyed buildings to illustrate the family story of one of the Palestinian students, whose calls for violent “resistance” and the “reclamation of our homelands” go wholly unchallenged in Elhelw’s puff interview.
5. “We are doing it in order to commemorate the resistance that Palestinians have until the reclamation of our homelands, of our homes, of the lives we used to lead for hundreds of years.”
Will @fox12oregon ask what “resistance” and “reclamation” entails, if not violence? pic.twitter.com/F0HYCQrUvQ
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) May 25, 2023
Continuing its attempt to twist the truth, Fox 12 quotes one of the protest leaders as saying that “in 2023 alone, 100 Palestinians have been murdered.” Yet the channel fails to mention that over three-quarters of Palestinians who died at the hands of Israeli forces this year were members of internationally designated terrorist groups, or were neutralized as they carried out terror attacks on Israelis.
Furthermore, perhaps in an effort to put a kosher stamp on Jew-hatred, Elhelw notes that the Nakba rally “even garnered support from other cultural groups across the Portland area, including Jewish Voice for Peace.” But JVP is no “cultural group.” It’s a radical organization that advocates for the destruction of the State of Israel through boycotts and stands accused of whitewashing antisemitism.
Facts matter. We cannot let serious news outlets — no matter how small their audience — get away with distorting the historical record or spreading fake news about Israel.
Therefore, HonestReporting calls on its subscribers to reach out to KPTV FOX 12 Oregon by email or Twitter to — firmly but politely — request that the broadcaster issue a retraction or clarification of its May 24, 2023 Nakba report.
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Featured Image: John Rudoff / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
