The Philadelphia Inquirer · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · 8 September 1948

CP-1948-043

Israel Plans to Claim Entire Palestine Area

Maurice F. X. Donohue, Inquirer Foreign Correspondent, Tel Aviv

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Transcribed from the clipping

“TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 7.—In response to Arab ‘intransigeance’ the Jews will ‘revert to their original position and claim all of Palestine,’ while at the same time the Government here bars ‘any mass return’ of 400,000 Arab refugees from Israel, Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok said today…

Britain Is Obstacle. The major obstacle to any real peace settlement remains Great Britain, which ‘still thinks it can bring us to our knees by the truce, the growing vexation of international control and the limits imposed on our sovereignty.’… The Jews believe they can hold western Galilee and their other war gains, and hope to persuade the world to internationalize only the Arab-held walled square mile of the Old City of Jerusalem, while Israel absorbs the Jewish-held new city… A forthright declaration on the delicate question of Arab DPs came in response to my comment on the systematic destruction I’ve seen of Arab villages and houses, the commandeering of dwelling quarters in Arab cities and the destruction of Arab household goods.

Shertok said: ‘The Government does not expect a mass return of the refugees. In the long run they will be happier with their own people, and our relations with the Arab States will be on a sounder basis if there is not this irritant of a very large minority—which we were, however, prepared to accept before this exodus, which did not come on Jewish initiative.’

‘Points of Friction’ ‘However fair and generous we would have been with the Arab minority, there would always have been complaints—any minority always complains—and thus cause for repeated interventions from outside Israel. The answer is to remove these points of friction.’”

Context added by this archive

The sentence about systematic destruction is the correspondent’s, not the minister’s: he is describing what he had seen and the question he put. The answer follows it. Both halves are on the page and both are here.

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