The Philadelphia Inquirer · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · 5 February 1978

CP-1978-006

A land so sacred to all who have held it

Transcribed from the clipping

“‘One day they came to me at the market and told me, “The Jews are working your land.” I went crazy. I stood right here and threw stones at the bulldozer until they made me go away and there was nothing I could do’… ‘They asked me to take money — 3 million Israeli pounds! But I don’t sell my grandfather’s land. It is my sister. My daughter. How could I sell my land?’… ‘Throwing the Arabs out would be the most humane solution to the demographic problem,’ he said. ‘If we don’t want to be another South Africa with a rule by a small minority, the most humane and life-saving solution would be to put all the Arabs on trucks and carry them outside.’”

Photograph caption

The new confronts the very old: The town of Kiryat Arba (foreground) was built in past eight years, across valley from Hebron, a site occupied for 6,000 years. Special to The Inquirer / Gideon Gitai.

Context added by this archive

A settler proposing removal by truck, in 1978, and naming South Africa as the thing to avoid. The scan is a dense jump page; only passages legible at full resolution are transcribed.

Cite this item

"A land so sacred to all who have held it," The Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 February 1978. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1978-006. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1978-006

Elsewhere in the archive

• Survivors: Israelis watched massacreThe Philadelphia Inquirer · 22 December 1982 · the same newspaper
• CelebrationThe Philadelphia Inquirer · 5 May 1994 · the same newspaper
• Tension Along the JordanThe Philadelphia Inquirer · 7 August 1949 · the same newspaper
• 3 Israeli Settlements On West Bank ApprovedLos Angeles Herald Examiner · 11 January 1978 · the same year
• Israeli SettlementsThe Times · 13 February 1978 · the same year
• Four Million Palestinian Refugees ‘Alienated, Dispossessed, Amputated’Omaha World-Herald · 22 October 1978 · the same year