It took nearly two weeks of effort, but we – with considerable help from our supporters – finally convinced The Herald (of Scotland) to retract a historical lie that the flight of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 was caused by “Israeli aggression, including rape and torture”.
The sentence served as background in a May 25th article, by Political Editor Tom Gordon, about a Scottish politician who had referred to the Palestinian refugee issue as a “self-inflicted” tragedy.
As we noted at the time, an article at The Times (of London) on May 26th on the row included the exact same claim – which we convinced editors to remove a few days later. There are no serious, non-propagandistic scholars who’ve made such a claim – and in fact, when pressed, editors at both publications couldn’t provide the name of even one historian who holds this view.
Though we commend The Herald for removing the sentence from the article, unfortunately there’s no editor’s note acknowledging the error.
