← Covering Palestine

Tulsa Tribune · 21 November 1945

CP-1945-007

Iraq Irrigation Seen Arab-Jew Solution

Iraq Irrigation Seen Arab-Jew Solution — Tulsa Tribune, 21 November 1945
Tulsa Tribune · 21 November 1945

Transcribed from the clipping

“A possible solution of the critical Jewish-Arab problem in Palestine may lie in a large irrigation project covering approximately 10,000,000 acres adjacent to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq, a Middle East territory now little populated but which, when irrigated in Biblical times, provided a living for about 20,000,000 persons, a Tulsan said today. Former President Herbert Hoover, an engineer of international reputation, made the suggestion in response to a query of the New York World-Telegram. He suggested it might be possible to move the Arabs from Palestine to the irrigated territory in Iraq and that both Arabs and Jews would benefit from the project. Col. John H. Leavell, Tulsa, an expert on the Middle East and its economic and political problems, who returned home recently after spending four years as petroleum adviser to the United States state department, two years of which was spent in the Middle East and Africa, stated today irrigation of at least 10,000,000 acres in Iraq is entirely feasible. ‘The fact is,’ Col. Leavell said, ‘I recommended just such a project to the state department at least a year ago. The project should be much larger than Mr. Hoover suggested and there are two things absolutely necessary to make it a success. A harbor should be constructed on the Mediterranean north of Tripoli in Lebanon and a modern railroad should be built to that port from near the center of the irrigated area. Without these facilities the project would fail because of lack of a market.’ Col. Leavell stated the territory, if irrigated, would become one of the best farming areas in the world, where cotton plus wheat and other grains could be raised cheaper than anywhere else. ‘The area easily could become the bread basket for all southern Europe,’ the Tulsa oil and coal man said… Hoover said the irrigated land would provide room for more Arabs than there are in Palestine and would clear Palestine for a large Jewish emigration.”

Context added by this archive

Two days after the proposal, an oil and coal man in Tulsa who had been petroleum adviser to the State Department says he recommended the same thing a year earlier and that Hoover’s version is too small. Moving a country’s population is discussed here as a question of harbours, railroads and cotton yields. Printed above a notice of a crippled man killed by a car and a running tally headed “Metropolitan Tulsa Fatalities So Far in 1945.”

Cite this item

"Iraq Irrigation Seen Arab-Jew Solution," Tulsa Tribune, 21 November 1945. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1945-007. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1945-007

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1945-007.

See it in the archive reel · Full text of every clipping · Dataset