What’s Happening In Gaza

Palestinian Arabs Give No Allegiance

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“VIOLENCE in Gaza would surprise no one who has visited it since the partition of Palestine. Previous to partition Gaza was an administrative unit of Palestine, subdivided into Gaza-Beersheba. The territory was almost wholly Arab and was largely awarded to the Arabs in the United Nations partition scheme.

But the Arab-Israeli war put into Israeli hands all but the narrow Gaza ‘strip’ where the inhabitants of the whole territory are crowded on less than three per cent of the land they formerly owned, their numbers augmented by refugees from other parts of Palestine… The ‘strip’ is policed by units of the Egyptian army, there at the armistice.

But the people in Gaza have little love for Egypt, or the United Nations relief administration that feeds the refugees among them 1,700 calories a day—or for anyone. Those who are natives and not encamped cannot easily be controlled.

The land they and their ancestors owned or worked for hundreds of years lies all around them, and to them that land is theirs, never transferred by any title.

So, as opportunity offers, they raid it, to carry off crops if they can, or leave upon it the bodies of a few dead Israeli, or their own dead bodies, killing being a vengeful pleasure and dying a matter of indifference… The United Nations Armistice Commission found no evidence of such fight but declared the Israel attack to have been prearranged and planned on order of the Israel authorities and carried out by a unit of the Israel regular army with rifles, submachine guns, mortars, bazookas and grenades, resulting in 38 Egyptians killed and 31 wounded.

Yet it undoubtedly was a retaliation for something. For eight Israel killed somewhere, 38 Egyptians paid. That Israeli were ambushed by Egyptian soldiers is unsubstantiated. But dispossessed Palestinian Arabs do maraud upon ‘our own land.’ Peace is made by a state with other states.

But the Israel problem is to make peace with Palestinian Arabs, who give allegiance to no country but Palestine, recognize no external disciplines, and whose cause has the sympathy of all Arabs… Even if the Arab states should make peace, these Palestinians would not accept it, and this knowledge makes it politically impossible for any Arab state to do so, no matter how many eyes are taken for one.”

Context added by this archive

A nationally syndicated columnist in 1955 setting out who the people in Gaza are, where their land is, and why a treaty between states would not settle it. The subheading is the paper’s: Palestinian Arabs Give No Allegiance.

Cite this clipping

"What’s Happening In Gaza," Southern Illinoisan, 10 March 1955, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1955-002. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1955-002