House of Palestine in Balboa Park, San Diego, California

My dear friend Amal Atieh Jubran at The Palestine House

Handala- the barefoot refugee whose face is always turned away from us, as he gazes out on the tragedy of the ongoing Nakba as the First and Forever People of Historic Palestine continue to be cruelly persecuted, impoverished and displaced by Zionist forces.  Handala's impact has grown in the decades after the Palestinian artist Naji al-Ali's 1987 assassination.  Today the character remains widely popular as a representative of the displaced Palestinian people.

Dispelling the myths about Palestinian refugees — in Jenin and beyond... With Israel's Jenin invasion sparking a new round of misinformation, here are the truths behind five hasbara tropes on Palestinian refugees.

A mural in the Jenin refugee camp, West Bank, October 10, 2006. (Anne Paq/Activestills)

By Anne Irfan   July 9, 2023

The Israeli army’s latest invasion and bombardment of Jenin refugee camp was accompanied by typical hasbara — Israeli propaganda — seeking to justify the illegal occupation as a necessary response to terrorism. It has also sparked another round of bad-faith arguments about the Jenin camp’s very existence, with a spike in social media rhetoric asking why there are refugee camps in the occupied West Bank.

While Palestinian refugees have long been the target of such misinformation campaigns, these hasbara efforts have escalated in recent years with the rise of the extremist right in Israel and an anti-Palestinian drive from Republicans in the United States.

The undermining of Palestinians’ refugee status and rights goes hand-in-hand with the denial of the Nakba (“catastrophe”), the uprooting and expulsion of around three-quarters of the Palestinian population in 1948, at the hands of Zionist militias and the new Israeli state. Denying the Nakba makes it possible to depict Israel’s establishment as liberatory and benign, while propagating myths about Palestinian refugees enables Israeli settler colonialism to continue today....

 As always please go to the original article to read in full--->  https://www.972mag.com/palestinian-refugees-hasbara-myths-jenin/

Palestinians from Tantura are expelled to Jordan, June 1948. (Benno Rothenberg/Meitar Collection/National Library of Israel/The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection/CC BY 4.0)

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Dr. Anne Irfan is the author of Refuge and Resistance: Palestinians and the international refugee system, available with Columbia University Press. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Refugee Studies, Journal of Palestine Studies, Contemporary Levant, Forced Migration Review and Jerusalem Quarterly. She won the 2020 Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies for her article ‘Educating Palestinian refugees: The origins of UNRWA’s unique schooling system’; the 2020 Contemporary Levant Best Paper Award for ‘Petitioning for Palestine: refugee appeals to international authorities’; and the 2017 Ibrahim Dakkak Award for Outstanding Essay on Jerusalem for ‘Is Jerusalem international or Palestinian? Rethinking UNGA Resolution 181.’