The Myth of the Palestinian 'Refugee Camps'

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.'"