Kenosha News · Kenosha, Wisconsin · 26 October 1973

CP-1973-004

Arabs and Jews: To whom was the "Promised Land" promised?

To whom was the “Promised Land” promised? An historical perspective on the Middle East war.

Robert Cochnar

Scan 937 × 1500 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

“The Palestinian Refugees. An armistice was arranged in 1949, but there was no peace. The Palestinian Arab state was never created. Instead, Jordan annexed the territory west of the Jordan river, Egypt assumed a protectorate over the Gaza Strip, and Israel absorbed a part of Jerusalem, the Negev and parts of Galilee.

The general Arab reaction to the establishment of Israel was ‘one of bitterness, frustration, and a sense of humiliated impotence,’ according to the AFSC. ‘Their chief satisfaction for a long time came from a war of propaganda rarely matched in passion and vituperation . . .

But they have believed that their cause was just and that it would prevail in the end.’ But the establishment of Israel had another, more specific, result: a group of Palestinian Arabs, who had been promised a separate state, were now homeless refugees. Today a second generation of refugees live in squalid camps, eating food supplied by the U.N.

Relief and Works Agency, clinging to a dimmed hope that they will one day return to Palestine, a land which technically no longer exists. The refugees have no home left. Nor have they been compensated for the property they lost.

This is the source of their bitterness — a bitterness which has spawned the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the El Fatah, the Black September Movement and other groups which, encouraged by the Arab states, have staged hijackings, murders and terrorist attacks of protest around the world.

Moreover, the Palestinian refugees have been abandoned by the rest of the world. Arab countries have not attempted to resettle refugees because, they say, a successful resettlement would help the world forget Israeli injustice and would solidify the existence of Israel as a fait accompli.”

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The page is shared with Town ‘N’ Country supermarket advertisements: Schlitz, Cutty Sark, Halloween costumes, baby parakeets, trash bags.

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