The Morning Union · Springfield, Massachusetts · 19 April 1983
CP-1983-001
Course supported by history: Let Palestine be Palestine
Stephen Chapman
Transcribed from the clipping
“‘Two million Palestinians already have a homeland in Palestine.’ So says a group called the Jordan is Palestine Committee in ads in The New York Times. It takes the same view as the Israeli government: The Palestinians already have a Palestinian state, namely Jordan.
This fiction helps to justify Israel’s expansionism and its resistance to Palestinian self-rule. But it is nonetheless a fiction… In any case, the Palestinians don’t regard themselves as Jordanians. The two groups are ethnically distinct.
Moreover, though a third of the world’s Palestinians live in Jordan, the bulk of them regard Palestine as their home and themselves as refugees… Accusing the Arab countries of failing to resettle the Palestinian refugees overlooks the crucial point, which is that the Palestinians don’t want to be permanently resettled in those countries.
They want the opportunity to go back to Palestine, preferably to an independent Palestinian state. If the Arab world has done too little for the Palestinians, that merely strengthens their claim to a state of their own… Those who fled to escape the fighting in 1948 and 1967 had their homes expropriated by Israel and were forbidden to return.
Having forced millions of Palestinians to become refugees, Israel now uses their residence in Jordan to justify making them permanent refugees… The only obstacle is the existence of 4 million Palestinians who insist on their right to just what the Israelis have — a sovereign homeland in Palestine.”
Context added by this archive
A syndicated American columnist in 1983 answering the Jordan-is-Palestine advertisement point by point. The paper ran a line of it as a pull quote.
Cite this clipping
"Course supported by history: Let Palestine be Palestine," The Morning Union, 19 April 1983, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1983-001. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1983-001
This clipping is read closely in the section below
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
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Read in: 34 years of plans to settle them in someone else’s country
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