The Myth of the Palestinian ‘Refugee Camps’

By Peter Wilson:

Controlling the vocabulary is a crucial part of any political debate, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically the 1948 exodus — or one should really say, the 1948 departure — of Palestinians from Israel, is no exception. A typical formulation, chock-full of code words, appeared in a recent letter to the Boston Globe: “Generations of families living in squalor in refugee camps still await their right to return under international law to their homeland Palestine.”

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Keep in mind also that the tent cities in the desert from 1948 are long gone. Over the past sixty-three years the United Nations and the United States have poured billions into the camps to upgrade living conditions. What Palestinian advocates like to call “camp shelters” or “CS’s” are typically 4-5 story concrete apartment buildings with electricity, kitchens, satellite television tuned to al-Jazeera, and municipal garbage collection. According to the UN, 99.8% of camp shelters are “connected to water networks” and 87% are “connected to sewerage networks.” In other words, Palestinian camps are modern cities. Yes, they are overcrowded, with high unemployment, and I wouldn’t want to live there. The infrastructure in these so-called refugee camps is however far superior to the shantytowns in Dhaka, Calcutta, Soweto, Kinshasa, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Jakarta, and many other cities where hundreds of millions live without running water, in shacks cobbled together from scraps of tin and cardboard, with open sewers running through the streets.

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