Interviews With Arabs In Palestine Indicate Unity In Determination To Combat Partition

By Philip Potter, Sun Staff Correspondent, Jerusalem

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“Jerusalem, Nov. 18 (By Mail)… a score or more Arab spokesmen with whom this correspondent has had interviews in the past two weeks. They include men and women, Moslems and Christians, labor leaders and newspaper publishers. On the record they are all opposed to partition. Let some of them speak for themselves. Mrs.

Matiel Mogannon is president of the Ramallah chapter of the Arab Woman’s Union, which has units throughout the country and is affiliated with similar organizations in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Trans-Jordan… Mrs.

Mogannon, a Christian Arab, spent most of her childhood in the United States, coming back to Palestine after her marriage… ‘When it comes to national interest we are all, Christians and Moslems, Arabs. Our religion doesn’t count at all. It’s the Arabs against the Zionists. We have set aside petty quarrels in the interest of unity on Palestine.’

‘It is true there have been family feuds—feuds between the Husseinis and the Nashashibi, and it may be there will be again once Palestine is an independent state.

But on this issue we are united.’ … Raja el-Issa, proprietor of Felastin, Arab language paper of Jaffa, one of four Arab dailies in Palestine… ‘We’ll never come to any understanding with the Jews on the basis of partition or a separate state for them.

We’ll give them equal rights here, but there is to be no more immigration.’ … Mustafa Ibrahim Mustafa, 35, is an Arab journalist who returned from a nine-month tour of the United States, where he visited New York city, Washington, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles.…

Jaffa Mayor’s Opinion. The mayor of Jaffa, Yusuf Haikal, looks like the scholar he is, a doctor of philosophy who studied for two years under Prof. Harold Laski at the London School of Economics…

Office Supported By Iraq. At the Arab Office, propaganda agency which was founded by Musa Al Alami, I met Darwish el Makdadi and Anwar Khatib, the latter in charge of a land development scheme under which agricultural properties in Palestine are bought up from their Syrian and Lebanese absentee landlords and distributed to small Arab landholders… Khatib was irritated by questions seeking to bring out the degree to which the Husseinis control Arab public bodies.

‘This business of the Husseinis maintaining a reign of terror over Palestinian Arabs is all Jewish propaganda,’ he said. ‘Family rivalries are something of 30 years ago. Now all the Arabs are united.’

People’s Attitude Cited. ‘The Arab Higher Executive, of which the Mufti is chairman, is a political body to represent the Arabs in the country,’ he said. ‘We have a definite role, that of presenting the Arab case abroad.’

Makdadi admitted that there are differences between various Arab rulers and governments, but insisted that in opposition to any partitioning of Palestine there would be growing unity. ‘It’s not a question of rulers, but a question of the people’s wishes,’ he said.

‘If they are united against the creation of a Jewish state, the rulers will have to go along.’… ‘The Jews say they can’t have security in an independent Palestine, only in a land of their own. Let them get an empty land.’ ‘Where is such a land?’ I asked him. ‘In hell, I don’t care,’ he replied.”

Context added by this archive

Nine Palestinians named and quoted in one American newspaper page, two weeks before the fighting began. The page also carries a Senate warning about U.S. troops, the naming of a U.N. body for Jerusalem, Dixie Belle gin at $3.17 a quart and a Kayser lingerie advertisement headed Dear Santa!

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"Interviews With Arabs In Palestine Indicate Unity In Determination To Combat Partition," The Baltimore Sun, 3 December 1947, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1947-014. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1947-014