Arab Refugees -- Human Bombs Of Middle East; No One Knows How Many

By JOHN P. LEACACOS

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Transcribed from the clipping

Jerusalem, Jordan Sector NEARLY a million “human bombs” walk the Middle East—a million agents for Arab nationalism and stooges for Russian communism. These are the 922,279 registered Arab refugees, half of whom are children. They are the human debris of the Palestine war of nine years ago.

The problem of the Arab refugees holds the key that will open the door to the overriding problem of the Middle East: peace between Arab and Israeli. Everyone here—Westerner, Israeli and Arab—says so. And nobody does anything about it.

The refugees are not only ready-made tools for Arab demagogues but a gigantic pressure group that in turn pushes Arab leaders to extremes. In Gaza, 217,000 refugees out of a 300,000 population supply Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser with fedayeen terrorists against Israel and a “controlled laboratory” for virulent anti-Western propaganda.

In Jordan, 551,000 refugees, plus another 400,000 Palestinian cousins, in a population of 1,400,000, have been a prey to Baathist leader Abdullah Rimawi’s constant subversion. … Harder Line A U. N. chief relief supervisor in Jordan summed it up recently: “Things have changed here in my time.

In 1953 all that the refugees wanted was a chance to go home, even if it were Israel. Now they do not want to go back to live under Israel rule nor go to other Arab countries. Now they say they want to eliminate Israel and take their own.” The Arab line has hardened as compared to the pre-Suez war climate, observers agree. Even when advised of the possibility that U.

N. may sooner than later give up financial responsibility for refugees, the refugees answer: “We don’t care. We will eat thistles and wild potatoes.”

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 9x with the contrast stretched, column by column. The clipping carries no masthead, no folio and no page number, and its dateline is a place line only, “Jerusalem, Jordan Sector”, with no date. The YEAR is however fixed by the page’s own content, twice over: “the Palestine war of nine years ago”, which from 1948 gives 1957, and “the pre-Suez war climate” spoken of as past, which puts it after November 1956. The month and day come from the hand-typed slide label, as does the newspaper: this is syndicated foreign-service copy that could have run anywhere. THE EXCERPT CARRIES ONE ELISION, marked …. Before the mark are the byline block and the first seven paragraphs; after it are the crosshead “Harder Line” and the three paragraphs that close the article. Roughly five columns between the two were read at page scale only and are NOT represented. Of the two quotations in the closing passage, the long one is a United Nations official’s account of what refugees want and not a refugee speaking; only the short one is Palestinian speech. “Half Are Children, All Are Hungry” is a kicker set above the headline, not a deck. One further caution for anyone returning to this scan: the image is rotated about a degree clockwise, so a crop aligned to a column at the top of the page loses characters off the left at the bottom. One word was re-cropped at 22x on its own after appearing to read “cmpared”; the c was hidden under the column rule and the word is “compared”. The figure for Jordan was likewise corrected from a page-scale reading of 531,000 to 551,000 at 9x.

Cite this clipping

"Arab Refugees -- Human Bombs Of Middle East; No One Knows How Many," Southern Illinoisan, 15 July 1957. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1957-031. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1957-031