Needs of Palestinian Arab Refugees Are Ignored by the UN and the World

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“Needs of Palestinian Arab Refugees Are Ignored by the UN and the World. (Opinions herein expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily coincide with the views of the Citizen Patriot.) It is deeply regrettable that Henry R. Labouisse has resigned as director of the United Nations relief and works administration (UNRWA) — although nobody can blame him.

The former State department official who originally took the job for a year stayed four, far from his home and family. Mr. Labouisse has worked with unflagging vigor but with continual discouragement.

The plain fact is that with all the talk about the importance of the Middle East nobody wants to do much, if anything, about the Palestinian refugees, whose plight is, nevertheless, one of the scandals and these times and a chief impediment to stable conditions in the Middle East.

Meager Funds. Mr. Labouisse did all he could with the meager funds allotted by the UN for their relief, but even getting the pledged money was a continual struggle. What was pledged was wholly insufficient to do a job of rehabilitation, which was Mr. Labouisse’s ardent aim.

Recently he had been trying to increase $33,000,000 to $40,000,000 annually—which had been budgeted but was not forthcoming, and which in view of the magnitude of the problem is a pittance anyhow. The refugees number nearly a million. Their physical conditions have improved since I first visited their camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan seven years ago.

Most of them now have something more substantial over their heads than a leaking tent, or the roof of a cave, or an old Roman viaduct. They are no longer living in Damascus mosques, big families separated from each other only by burlap curtains and with sanitary facilities unspeakable.

People also now know that they exist, these victims of the partition of Palestine, forced out of the land of their ancestors to make room for a new immigration from elsewhere. For a long time there was a veritable conspiracy of silence about the expropriation of their lands and property, and the circumstances under which they fled or were forced out. Now people know.

But to do anything for Arabs is an unpopular cause. When Jews lost their homes first in Germany and then in Europe and were threatened with extinction, hundreds of millions of dollars were voluntarily raised for their aid, and tens of thousands of visas made available, in America and elsewhere.

There was an immediate response from the West to aid the victims of the Hungarian uprising a year and a half ago. But there are no visas, no chance for a new life for Arab victims.

Christians. The Palestinians, originally the Canaanites, are one of the most intelligent of the Arab groups. Most of them were agriculturalists, farmers or farm workers, craftsmen and businessmen, though among them were doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. A large proportion of them are Christian.

There are few American citizens of Arab extraction, but they are exceptionally peaceable, law-abiding, thrifty and self-supporting. You seldom find an Arab name among criminals, adult or juvenile. But the Arabs, from wherever they come, continue to be treated as Ishmael and Esau, done out of their inheritance by younger brothers.”

Context added by this archive

A nationally syndicated American columnist in 1958 calling the refugees “forced out of the land of their ancestors” and naming the silence about it. It runs above an advice column and beside a note about statues of American presidents in London.

Cite this clipping

"Needs of Palestinian Arab Refugees Are Ignored by the UN and the World," Jackson Citizen Patriot, 10 May 1958, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1958-004. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1958-004

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Both cases, printed in the same year: 1958