Plight Of The Palestinian

‘You Can’t Go Home Again!’

By David Dugas, United Press International

Plight Of The Palestinian — Odessa American, 10 November 1959 — Odessa American · Odessa, Texas · 10 November 1959

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Transcribed from the clipping

“BEIRUT (UPI) — Eleven years ago a Palestinian farmer named Yusif and his family joined thousands of their countrymen in an exodus from Palestine during the Arab-Israeli war. The departure was a speedy one and there was no promise of a speedy return.

Today Yusif is one of the more than one million men, women and children known as Palestinian refugees whose problem apparently is among the world’s most hopeless. But Yusif is not without some hope. With encouragement from Arab governments, he believes the vanished Palestine must be recreated and that he will return to it.

The United Nations has promised him compensation for his losses, or repatriation. He demands only the latter. He has neither. To take care of Yusif’s immediate needs and to help him and his fellow refugees start life anew, the U.N. in 1950 set up the U.N. Relief and Works Agency as a temporary solution.

On that basis it has been continued, receiving contributions from U.N. member nations that have amounted so far to about 263 million dollars. The present five-year mandate for UNRWA expires next June 30. There is no real doubt that its life will be extended, as asked by U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, by the refugees and by the host Arab governments.

But the problem illustrated by Yusif and his family remains. When he fled his farm in Palestine in 1948 he took with him his wife, an aging uncle and an eight-year-old son. Now his family is bigger… Most of the time there is nothing to do but sit idly, discussing with friends the day when all will return to their own land.

Yusif and the others could choose to remain in Jordan. There they have been officially welcomed as full-fledged citizens — a status not accorded refugees in Syria, Gaza or Lebanon. But Yusif does not choose to stay. He wants to go home. Yusif and his family draw rations from UNRWA whose workers distribute flour, rice and other staples regularly at the camps.

The death of his uncle a few years ago has never been recorded and the old man’s ration is still included in the family quota. But there are two younger children now, born in Jordan, who are not eligible for rations.

Neither are the other 105,000 refugee children born since 1951, although they receive other UNRWA services such as schooling, shelter and medical care…”

How this transcription was made

The clipping in this archive is the headline block. The first two columns were read from the paper’s own page, The Odessa American of 10 November 1959, page 2, and are transcribed here in full; the third column runs on past what could be read cleanly and is not transcribed. The dispatch carries a photograph of a Palestinian man above it.

Context added by this archive

A named Palestinian in an American paper in 1959, five years before the PLO existed: Yusif, a farmer, who left his farm in 1948 with his wife, an aging uncle and an eight-year-old son.

The detail that does the work is the ration book — the dead uncle is still on the family quota because his death was never recorded, and the two children born since are not on it at all, along with 105,000 other refugee children born after 1951. The headline is the singular noun, Palestinian, and the line under it is a borrowed American book title.

The same United Press dispatch ran in at least 24 American papers in the autumn of 1959, from Springfield to Macon to Jasper to Richmond to Buffalo. The Herald of Jasper, Indiana headlined it a week earlier with the plural — Plight Of The Palestinians — so the two forms of the word were set from one piece of copy in the same month.

Cite this clipping

"Plight Of The Palestinian," Odessa American, 10 November 1959, p. 2. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1959-002. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1959-002

This clipping is read closely in the section below

When American papers started saying Palestinian