Ancient Port Of Phoenicia Still Resisting

By JOE ALEX MORRIS JR. / New York Herald Tribune News Service

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Transcribed from the clipping

TYRE, Lebanon.—This ancient Phoenician port, once the trade capital of the known world, is today reliving its historical tradition of resistance. Tyre is once again under a virtual state of siege. Ignited by the fiery Arab nationalism symbolized by Col.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, Tyre has emerged from centuries of sleepy tranquillity and, in the words of a Lebanese deputy, severed its relations with the rest of the jittery country. Lebanese army patrols in combat dress march through Tyre’s silent streets past the slammed-down corrugated iron shutters of its shops. In the main square armored car crews lounge against their vehicles.

An army command post run by a young lieutenant just back from six months training at Fort Benning, Ga., operates from the town prison. Tyre has a reputation for toughness. Its Arabic name “Soor” means rampart.

It successfully resisted a 13-year siege by Nebuchadnezzar and it took Alexander’s famed legions seven months to reduce the town to ashes and slaughter or enslave all its inhabitants. Two violent clashes with security forces rocked the town recently and left several dead and many wounded.

Dynamite and rocks were hurled at police by angered townspeople, many of them mere youths. Hundreds were arrested. The town has been on protest strike for a week, a strike which has been joined by other communities in the south and threatens to spread through the country.

It started with the sentencing of five youths for alleged defamation of the Lebanese flag during a demonstration celebrating the birth of Col. Nasser’s United Arab Republic. A protest demonstration was organized which Mayor Abdel Rahman Khalil feels would have taken place whether they were jailed or freed. “The Communists were behind it.

Their propaganda is very effective,” the jodhpur-clad mayor said. “As long as the Americans fail to offer a constructive solution for Palestine the Communists will continue to corrupt and mislead our people under the slogan for Palestine and the Arabs.” The Palestine-Israel question is close to the hearts of the people of Tyre.

They live but 20 miles from Israel and the normal population of 15,000 has been swollen by 30,000 refugees during the past decade. The sealed border has closed off normal commercial and trade routes to the south and upset the town’s economy.

How this transcription was made

Date confirmed on the page (slide label. No masthead or folio is present on the clipping strip and the dateline carries no date. Content is consistent with early May 1958 — see flags.).

Context added by this archive

For the archive the value is in the last two paragraphs: an American wire feature in 1958 recording that a Lebanese town of 15,000 was holding 30,000 Palestinian refugees ten years on, that the border was sealed and the town's economy broken by it, and that the mayor framed the whole crisis as a consequence of America failing to settle Palestine.

The paper calls it “what the Arabs like to refer to as their usurped homeland” further down the column — the distancing is the paper's own.

Cite this clipping

"Ancient Port Of Phoenicia Still Resisting," The News Tribune, 8 May 1958. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1958-026. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1958-026