Gaza Strip—

Quarter-Million Wretched Arab Refugees Hate Everybody After 7 Years’ Waiting

By Margarita Dobert

Gaza Strip— — Evening Star, 13 March 1955 — Evening Star · Washington, District of Columbia · 13 March 1955

Send this clipping to somebody

A warning about this one

The piece is written with open contempt for the refugees it describes, from its deck onward, and repeats period stereotypes about Arab societies. It is transcribed as printed.

Transcribed from the clipping

“Thousands of Arab refugees in the Gaza strip rioted recently when Israel and Egypt had their shooting ‘incident’ near the city of Gaza; and the cries of the angry refugees illustrated the mood that has developed among them in their seven years of exile. They shouted ‘Down with Israel!’ ‘Down with Egypt!’

‘Down with the United States!’

‘Down with Britain!’ and ‘Down with the United Nations!’… About 250,000 of the refugees are jammed into the small Gaza strip, a narrow corridor controlled by Egypt, hemmed in on one side by the sea and on the other by Israel… I got my first look at Arab refugees in the old walled city of Jerusalem.

Six or eight people were living in each of the dank stone basements of the former Jewish quarter… UNRWA officials were handing out flour, beans, sugar, margarine, rice and dates, providing between 1,500 and 1,700 calories at the cost of about 6 cents a day… But building a mudhouse or planting a tree implies permanency.

It would mean that the refugees had accepted the fact of having lost Israel… But then, how could the refugees go back? Almost as many Jews have entered the country as Arabs who were driven, lured or panicked into flight. It is true that the 170,000 who remained behind, have profited by the economic progress of the country. Their wages, their income have doubled.

So—I was told—has the price of wives. But they are class B citizens and it says so unmistakably on their identity card. They live under military rule, they cannot travel freely or advance in the civil service, they have no educational equality. They have become foreigners on their own soil.

Israelis will tell you with conviction that they begged the Arabs to stay during the war; but today they are just as determined not to take them back. They do not trust them, they do not want them and they have no room for them. While Palestine was a home for Arabs and Jews, Israel is a home for Jews. The Arabs have become refugees from a never-never land.”

Context added by this archive

Seven years on, a correspondent walks through the camps and writes down what the arrangement amounts to: class B on the identity card, military rule, no free movement, no equal education, foreigners on their own soil.

The verb in the sentence about 1948 is three verbs — driven, lured or panicked — and the Israeli claim that they begged the Arabs to stay is printed in the paragraph after it. The tone of the piece toward the people in it is contemptuous throughout, beginning with the line under the headline.

Cite this clipping

"Gaza Strip—," Evening Star, 13 March 1955, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1955-003. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1955-003