Dear Letter to the Editor:
Hisham Mohammad and Ken Barnes propound the fiction of the "Palestine refugee" claiming "80% of Gaza's population are refugees who were displaced after the 1948 war" ("Trump's Gaza Proposal Offers Dangerous Illusion of Benevolence").
Any legitimate dictionary defines refugee as a person who has FLED their home because of religious or political persecution or military upheaval.. FLED is the operative word.
The overwhelming majority of the residents of Gaza were born in Gaza..They did not flee from anywhere.
If You Did Not Flee, You Are Not A Refugee.
Refugee is not a status that follows people for hundreds of generations like DNA. The 1948 War that started when five Arab armies invaded the nascent state of Israel in May 1948 ended in 1949. Any refugee from that war has to be 76 years old or older. It is unlikely that there are more than 5,000 refugees from that war living in Gaza. There may be many less. The fact that a great grandmother was a refugee because she fled her home has absolutely nothing to with whether her great grandchild is a refugee. If her great grandchild did not flee, he or she is not a refugee.
A Jew who was born in Los Angeles in 1970 is not a Polish refugee because his or her grandparents fled Poland in 1939. The fact that a person was born in a country that they may want to move from DOES NOT make them a refugee from anywhere. Mr. Mohammad and Mr. Barnes incorrectly using the term refugee is an obvious attempt to create totally undeserved sympathy for Arabs born in Gaza, and it represents an abysmal knowledge of the English language.
Richard Sherman
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