ARABS ‘WILL FIGHT’ U. N. PALESTINE PLAN

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CAIRO, Nov. 30 (AP).—With Arab bitterness mounting in the Middle East, Syrian demonstrators set fire to the United States legation in Damascus Sunday and the Arab League’s secretary general declared his people will never permit the United Nations to partition Palestine.

A reliable source here said King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia had agreed to contribute the oil revenues of his kingdom—paid to him by American oil companies and estimated at $18,000,000 a year—to support Arab military forces to fight partition.

There was no indication the Arabs planned immediate military action, but six Jews were killed and 16 wounded in Palestine outbursts Sunday. In Damascus 6,000 youths, dominated by Moslem brotherhood members, marched to government house and asked for arms and a jihad (holy war).

Premier Jamil Mardam Bey told them: “President (Shukri) Al-Kuwatly approves your demands because partition threatens not only Syrian independence but the very being of all Arab nations.” On their way to the presidential palace the demonstrators set fire to the legation and to a legation car, and tore the American flag from a pole.

They also looted the Russian-Syrian cultural center. The U. S. charge d’affaires, Robert Memminger, protested to Mardam Bey. The demonstrators also attacked and damaged the French legation and clashed with members of the Syrian Communist Party at a Soviet cultural center building. ‘By Force.’

In Cairo Abdel Rahman Azzam Pasha, secretary general of the Arab League representing seven Arab countries with a population of 33,000,000, told newsmen the U. N. decision would be resisted “by force” and added: “I can not say where and when I will place my troops. I can only say we will fight and are preparing for victory.”

How this transcription was made

This scan is a newspaper page carrying TWO complete articles side by side, and the archive holds a record for each. This record transcribes the left-hand story under the page’s main headline, “ARABS ‘WILL FIGHT’ U. N. PALESTINE PLAN”, an Associated Press dispatch from Cairo. The right-hand story on the same page, “Arabs Begin ‘War;’ 10 Jews Slain”, an International News Service dispatch from Jerusalem that reports the Acre Prison clash and the first Arab families leaving Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, is a separate record, o471201beginwar. Both records show the whole page as it was printed rather than a crop of half of it, so the archive’s claim that every record is a photograph of the page its story ran on stays true; the cost is that the same photograph appears twice under two ids. A third, unrelated column is trimmed to a few words a line down the right edge of the scan and is not identified in either record. The paper on BOTH records rests on deck order and elimination and is the weakest attribution in the batch.

Cite this clipping

"ARABS ‘WILL FIGHT’ U. N. PALESTINE PLAN," Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 1 December 1947. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1947-069. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1947-069