The Register · 25 June 1967

CP-1967-049

ARAB REFUGEES LIMP TO JORDAN, VICTIM OF MIDEAST HERITAGE

By RAY MOSELY and JOSEPH GRIGG, United Press International

Scan 860 × 947 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

They come from Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron, struggling across the Judaean wilderness on foot, in stifling buses, ancient automobiles or oxcarts. Hour after hour, day after day, they limp through biblical Jericho, hard by the banks of the River Jordan.

Tens of thousands of them, loaded down with pots and pans, baby carriages and whatever else they can salvage from the Middle East war. They are the refugees, the human flotsam and jetsam of war. The children in their ranks face long years—perhaps a lifetime—in the spirit-destroying hopelessness of refugee camps.

All have a single goal: The Allenby Bridge leading from Israeli-occupied Jericho into Jordan. The bridge’s steel girders, destroyed by the fleeing Jordanian army, sag into the muddy, brown waters five miles east of Jericho. … Israel has not said it would take them and the Arab states in the past have refused to absorb them. Why do they flee, those who are able?

For a multitude of reason. Said a student waiting at the Allenby Bridge: “My father works in Kuwait. He used to send me money but he don’t now and I’m broke. That’s why I am going to Amman.” “Some are going because they are afraid,” said an Arab cab driver shuttling back and forth to Jerusalem.

“Some are uncertain about the future. Some are going because they are separated from their families.” Jericho’s only remaining mailman sought Israeli permission to cross over into Jordanian Jordan and bring back his family. He was told this was impossible and he, too, joined the one-way traffic across Allenby.

A man from the Old City of Jerusalem drove some friends to the bridge. “The Jews drove me from my home once,” he said. “They won’t again. Nothing will get me to leave.”

How this transcription was made

Transcribed from the scan at 6x to 18x, column by column; nothing here was read at page scale. The date and the newspaper are printed on the page: the folio across the top reads “A16 The REGISTER Sunday June 25, 1967”, and 25 June 1967 was a Sunday. The folio names no city, so which Register this is cannot be settled from the page. The excerpt carries one elision, marked …: the first four paragraphs are the article’s opening and the passage after the mark comes from the eighth column, where the three Palestinian speakers are; nothing between the two is represented. One sentence immediately after “east of Jericho” has been left out rather than guessed — three of its words sit exactly on the limit of what this 860-pixel page scan resolves, and a sentence with three coin-flips in it does not belong in the press text. “he don’t now” inside the student’s quotation, “a multitude of reason”, and “into Jordanian Jordan” are as the paper set them; the last was checked on its own crop at 16x and is not a transcription slip. United Press International copy, so the same dispatch will have run in other papers that week.

Cite this clipping

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