Arab Refugees

H. Y. Orgel, Information Attache, Embassy of Israel

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Transcribed from the clipping

“In his column ‘New Serajevo in Jordan crisis?’, published on April 25, your columnist, Constantine Brown is completely wrong when he writes that ‘hundreds of thousands of Arabs were forced out of the country (Israel).

All the refugees moved across the border into the little kingdom which in the past was barely capable of supporting its own small population of nomads.’ The unfortunate human beings who are today known as the ‘Arab refugees’ were not ‘forced out’ but left at the behest of their own Arab leaders.

The Jewish agency for Palestine, which was preparing itself to become the ‘provisional government of Palestine’ was at that time making its plans on the understanding that the Arab inhabitants of the area to become Israel would remain as full citizens of the State of Israel.

Indeed, Israel’s Declaration of Independence contains an appeal to the Arabs of Israel and the neighboring countries to co-operate in living in peace with the new state for the well-being and development of the whole Middle East area. Furthermore, the refugees did not go into a ‘little Kingdom.’

Those who moved eastwards into the area controlled by the King of Transjordan went into a country which was at that time in the process of swallowing up the larger part of an area originally intended to be an independent Arab state, linked economically not with Transjordan but with the newly-established Jewish state.”

Context added by this archive

The claim in its finished form, in 1957, in a letter from the Israeli Embassy correcting the paper’s own columnist for having written that the Arabs were forced out. Nine years after the fact and two months after the same paper printed Dorothy Thompson saying the opposite.

Cite this clipping

"Arab Refugees," Evening Star, 18 May 1957, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1957-017. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1957-017