West Bank Proves Israel’s Worst Occupation Headache

By ROBERT GAMZEY (Mr. Gamzey, author and journalist, is a special correspondent for The Courant in Israel).

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Transcribed from the clipping

TEL AVIV —The name of the game is “What to do with the West Bank.” Every Jew fancies himself a political expert and a military strategist, and so answers are freely offered, ranging from “Don’t give up an inch” to “Give it back—except—.” “Except” means Jerusalem and strategic border adjustments.

It’s no more than a game, apparently, because King Hussein of Jordan shows no inclination to negotiate with Israel for the return of the West Bank of his amputated kingdom. The same reluctance to face the Israelis at the conference table is reflected in Cairo and Damascus.

An Arab self-delusion, refusing to face up to the reality of their joint military disaster, forestalls peace talks with Israel, the victors have no alternative but to talk of possible solutions while preparing for an indeterminate period of occupying conquered territory in West Jordan, Syria and Sinai.

The West Bank of Jordan is the worst occupation headache for Israel, if long-range prospects are considered. More and more, Israelis are openly talking and writing about the demographic danger of being outnumbered by Palestinian Arabs, whose birthrate is far higher than Israel’s, should Israel eventually annex the West Bank.

The alternative to annexation which means granting equal voting rights in a democratic country is a repugnant prospect of suppressing the national and individual aspirations of more than a half million Palestinian Arabs in some sort of “buffer canton.”

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 11x to 13.7x, strip by strip. The folio reads “16 THE HARTFORD COURANT: Sunday, September 24, 19—”: the weekday, month and day are legible with the contrast stretched, but THE YEAR DIGITS ARE NOT. A blot, either ink or a scan artefact, sits over the last two figures and no magnification recovers them. 24 September fell on a Sunday in 1967 and also in 1961, 1972 and 1978; the year of 1967 comes from the slide label, and the content agrees with it unambiguously — the West Bank, Sinai and Syria under occupation, King Hussein, Moshe Dayan as Defense Minister — but it is not read off the page. The folio prints the paper’s name with the definite article; the archive’s existing spelling omits it, and the record follows the archive so as not to fork a title it already holds. “The alternative to annexation which means granting equal voting rights in a democratic country is a repugnant prospect” has no commas in the original, and the comma splice at “forestalls peace talks with Israel, the victors have no alternative” is also as printed.

Cite this clipping

"West Bank Proves Israel’s Worst Occupation Headache," Hartford Courant, 24 September 1967, p. 16. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1967-051. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1967-051