The New York Times · New York, New York · 9 September 1977

CP-1977-030

West-Bank Voices

By John B. Oakes

Scan 450 × 1080 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

RAMALLAH, Israeli-Occupied Jordan—The prosperous Arab businessman sat quietly puffing away at his waterpipe in the garden of a comfortable home overlooking the lights of Jerusalem, a few miles away. “The water supply of this town is desperately inadequate. Even the hospital ran out of water the other day,” he observed.

“The Israelis have laid pipe within a few hundred feet of here and we could easily hook up our system to theirs as they want us to. We need it badly, but the people who run this town are so much under P.L.O. influence that they won’t move—and we’re without water for no good reason. What nonsense — and what stupidity.”

But “the people who run this town,” and virtually every other Arab town in the West Bank, retort bitterly that “if we link our water or our electricity to theirs, that’s just one more step extending Israeli influence and control to the West Bank. We’d rather make do with what we’ve got than give them another foothold.”

When the Israeli Government announced the other day that it intended to extend Israel’s much higher standards of social service to the West Bank as a “humanitarian gesture,” the reaction was equally hostile. Yet, though no Arab will admit it, this is surely one of the mildest military occupations in history. Israeli troops are hardly to be seen.

Arab inhabitants of the West Bank commute freely to work in fields and factories in Israel proper at wages far higher than they could hope to obtain from local Arab employers. A building boom is evident in every Arab town.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead, folio line or page date is on this clipping — it is a two-column cut of an Op-Ed page column. The tag line at the foot reads “John B. Oakes is Senior Editor of The New York Times.”, which agrees with `pub` though it is an author identification rather than a masthead.

The dateline carries no date, only “RAMALLAH, Israeli-Occupied Jordan”. Nothing on the scan confirms 1977-09-09.

Cite this clipping

More from The New York Times

• The Maine Colony in PalestineThe New York Times · 12 November 1866
• Jewish Colonization in PalestineThe New York Times · 9 December 1883
• Jewish State in Palestine OpposedThe New York Times · 9 July 1897
• ZIONIST CONGRESS IN BASELThe New York Times · 31 August 1897
• ROME FEARS THE ZIONISTSThe New York Times · 12 September 1897
• PROGRESS OF ZIONISMThe New York Times · 16 December 1901
• 852 more from this paper in the full text →

More from the 1970s

• Beersheba, Once Scorned by Israelis, Is Booming Amid the DesertThe New York Times · 29 January 1977
• Thousands Pay Respects To Palestinian LeaderThe New York Times · 9 February 1977
• U.N. Agency Says Israel Tortures and PillagesThe New York Times · 16 February 1977
• Carter Publicly Endorses Palestinian ‘Homeland’Poughkeepsie Journal · 18 March 1977
• Arafat Praises Carter's StandPress of Atlantic City · 18 March 1977
• Jimmy Carter shakes hands with a Palestinian andHouston Chronicle · 20 March 1977
• All 338 clippings from the 1970s →