Israel's +972's Noam Sheizaf: "Leaving a place doesn’t make someone a refugee. It’s forbidding him or her from coming back that does it."

"Sheizaf wrote about the Nakba (catastrophe), as Palestinians refer to the 1948 war, commonly called in Israel the War of Independence. “Even after the New Historians of the nineties made the term Nakba a part of modern Hebrew and proved that in many cases, Israel expelled Palestinians from territories it conquered in ‘48, we were engaged in the wrong kind of questions, such as the debate on whether more Palestinians were expelled or fled,” he wrote. “The important thing is that they weren’t allowed to come back, and that they had their property and land seized by Israel immediately after the war (as some Jews had by Jordan and Syria, but not in substantial numbers). Leaving a place doesn’t make someone a refugee. It’s forbidding him or her from coming back that does it.”" Israel's New Left Goes Online

http://www.thenation.com/article/166264/israels-new-left-goes-online

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]