The May 16 Washington Post article "Onetime Palestinian negotiator revisits boyhood memories in Jaffa" by William Booth describes the origins of the tragic Palestinian refugee problem as "the mass exodus of indigenous Arabs from British Palestine during the war and upheaval that attended the birth of the state of Israel in 1948".

In the Washington Post's Orwellian universe, the displacement was due to the "birth of the state of Israel"! This, despite the fact that no one disputes that the day that Israel declared Independence on May 14, 1948, there was no refugee problem. Right after Israel made the declaration, at least five Arab armies and the local Arabs started a war of genocide against the Jews, which if it had succeeded, would have caused back-to-back Holocausts for the Jewish people. Describing the birth of the refugee problem as if the displaced Palestinian Arabs were simply minding their own business when the displacement occurred is to take the conflict totally out of context and rewrite history. Would the Washington Post ignore the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in describing the onset of America's war with Japan in WWII?

There were people displaced on both sides of the 1948 war, but we hear only about the Palestinian Arabs because the Jews were resettled by Israel while the Palestinian Arabs were left in camps by their fellow Arabs. 

By continuing to propagate the Palestinian Arab narrative, and not pointing the finger where it belongs - at the Arab countries that, to this day, refuse to resettle their fellow Arabs -- the Washington Post doesn’t do justice to the Palestinian Arabs or their cause and takes the responsibility off the culpable party for their displacement: the neighboring Arab nations.