Escanaba Daily Press · Escanaba, Michigan · 14 June 1949
CP-1949-004
Arab Refugees Are Problem
By Marquis Childs, Washington
Shown from the top. The whole column — 6.5 times taller than it is wide — is in the enlargement.
Transcribed from the clipping
“WASHINGTON — No one knows better than Dr.
Ralph Bunche, the skilled United Nations trouble-shooter, that the present peace in Palestine is no more than a temporary truce so long as certain causes of friction exist in the explosive Middle East… There can be no permanent peace, he reported, until some solution is found for the problem of the 700,000 to 800,000 Arab refugees who fled from their homes during the war.
These refugees are now being cared for with United Nations funds in temporary camps that are seriously overcrowded… A somewhat similar proposal comes from the American Zionist Emergency Council in a memorandum prepared by Eliahu Ben-Horin urging the extensive development of Iraq as a home for the refugees. A political issue arises here.
Israeli officials until recently opposed the return of Arab refugees to communities within Israel from which they fled, making an exception for broken families — where the man of the household left behind his wife and children. They have just announced their willingness to restore a larger number in the framework of a general peace treaty.
The Arab countries insist that the refugees be returned to the villages from which they came.”
Context added by this archive
A syndicated Washington column proposing Iraq as the answer, thirty-three years before the Jordan Is Palestine Committee bought advertisements making the same kind of case.
Cite this clipping
"Arab Refugees Are Problem," Escanaba Daily Press, 14 June 1949, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1949-004. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1949-004
More from Escanaba Daily Press
- Rear Attack By Israeli Clears Gaza TerritoryEscanaba Daily Press · 1957
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- Israel Speeds Resettlement of Areas Left by the ArabsThe New York Times · 18 January 1949
- All 334 clippings from the 1940s →
The same copy, in 3 other papers
Problem of Refugees in PalestineSanta Barbara News-PressSanta Barbara, California12 June 1949CP-1949-016
Arab Refugees A ProblemPasadena Star-NewsPasadena, California13 June 1949CP-1949-017
Palestine Peace Depends on Solving Arab Refugee ProblemThe Post-Crescent13 June 1949CP-1949-018
Their text and this one are nearly identical. Found by comparing transcriptions, not by reading them side by side, so this establishes that the text overlaps and not that these papers ran the same dispatch. How this was done.
Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
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-1949-004.
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