The New York Times · New York, New York · 10 March 1947

CP-1947-059

BEERSHEBA ARABS FLEEING TO EGYPT

Worst Drought in 80 Years in Southern Palestine Destroys All Crops

By CLIFTON DANIEL

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Transcribed from the clipping

BEERSHEBA, Palestine, March 9—“And Israel took his journey with all that he had, and came to Beersheba.”—Genesis xlvi, 1.

Almost unnoticed amid the furor of Palestine politics and terrorism, the classic journey of Jacob and his tribe in Egypt is being re-enacted on a colossal scale by the Arabs of southern Palestine, driven from their grainfields and grazing lands by the worst drought in eighty years or more.

“It is bad, very bad,” Abdel Razzak Kleibo, district officer of Beersheba, said today. It was hot as Georgia in July. All around Beersheba, red and yellow hills lay baking under the unseasonable sun and the unpromising blue sky. The fields had long since been plowed and sown but had yielded nothing except a few stunted sprouts of barley.

In the Beersheba district, which is one-third of all Palestine, he said, 100,000 Bedouin tribesmen normally dwell, tending their flocks and tilling the arid earth. This is the area that maps call the Negev, that the Zionists wish to develop by irrigation and that the British are reputed to want as one of the Middle East military bases. Today Mr.

Kleibo estimated that 60,000 of the 100,000 members of the five Bedouin tribes in the Negev had evacuated their villages and gone northward in search of water and grazing-land. Those who could afford it hired trucks to carry their sheep and goats to greener pastures. Those who could not have been slowly driving their herds toward the hills.

The men of the village of Masmith declared that they had seen forty trucks a day, every day for a month, driving north from Gaza.

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