Every clipping in this archive printed between 1950 and 1959: 77 of them, oldest first, as plain text that can be read, searched and quoted without running any code. Each entry links to its own record, where the scan is.
· El Reno American · page 1
Arab Refugees Come Home
Associated Press Wirephoto
ARAB REFUGEES COME HOME—Arab families are reunited in Acre following repatriation of Arabs, both Christian and Moslem, who fled Palestine during the fighting. Many of these refugees were separated from their families for 18 months or more. Armistice Commission and United Nations personnel are preparing for the homeward flow of Arabs who took refuge in neighboring countries.
A photograph of Palestinians going back, and a news agency expecting more of it. The caption stands in for a headline; the scan carries none.
UN Ignores Tragic Plight Of Palestine’s Christians
Dorothy Thompson, On the Record, New York, Jan. 24
“The United Nations never took one step to guarantee the lives or property of the indigenous Arab population in Jewish Palestine. Hundreds of thousands of them have been turned into refugees… It apparently surprised Americans to learn that there were any Christians in Palestine! Yet they constitute a tenth of the Arab-speaking population… Israel and its American supporters are claiming an absolutely unique immunity from criticism—as recently pointed out by pro-Israel Walter White.”
A nationally syndicated columnist noting, in January 1950, that the existence of a whole population came as news to American readers. The Walter White she cites is the secretary of the NAACP quoted in the Alabama Tribune of 29 October 1948 on “genocide, Palestine, and the basic issue of colonies.” Seven years before this column, the Southern Jewish Weekly had invoked Thompson as the keener analyst who disagreed with the anti-Zionists.
“TEL AVIV, Israel—(AP)—The Israeli custodian of abandoned property is turning former Arab properties over to new immigrants. A government bulletin said 83,000 rooms and 7,800 shops, offices and workshops which once belonged to Arabs are being used for the housing of 170,000 newly arrived Jews and former soldiers. The custodian also has charge of nearly 900,000 acres of land which Arabs once occupied and farmed. About 62,500 acres are now being used for plantations. Most of the Arabs who once held all of these properties are now war refugees in the Egyptian-held Gaza coastal strip or elsewhere in the Middle East.”
One of three papers running this dispatch. The verb in this headline is use.
Correction: {'note': 'The dateline is not visible on this scan. The identical dispatch in the Star Herald is datelined 26 August, so the 20 August date comes from the presentation caption and has not been confirmed on the page.'}
“TEL AVIV, Israel—(AP)—The Israeli custodian of abandoned property is turning former Arab properties over to new immigrants. A government bulletin said 83,000 rooms and 7,800 shops, offices and workshops which once belonged to Arabs are being used for the housing of 170,000 newly arrived Jews and former soldiers. The custodian also has charge of nearly 900,000 acres of land which Arabs once occupied and farmed. About 62,500 acres are now being used for plantations. Most of the Arabs who once held all of these properties are now war refugees in the Egyptian-held Gaza coastal strip or elsewhere in the Middle East.”
The same dispatch. The verb in this headline is get.
“TEL AVIV, Israel—(AP)—The Israeli custodian of abandoned property is turning former Arab properties over to new immigrants. A government bulletin said 83,000 rooms and 7,800 shops, offices and workshops which once belonged to Arabs are being used for the housing of 170,000 newly arrived Jews and former soldiers. The custodian also has charge of nearly 900,000 acres of land which Arabs once occupied and farmed. About 62,500 acres are now being used for plantations. Most of the Arabs who once held all of these properties are now war refugees in the Egyptian-held Gaza coastal strip or elsewhere in the Middle East.”
The same dispatch again. The verb in this headline is taking over.
Paul W. Ward, Sun Staff Correspondent, Lake Success, N.Y.
“Lake Success, N.Y., Oct. 16 — The United Nations spotlight today shifted momentarily away from Korea, Indo-China and other foci of the world-wide Communist infection and turned instead on Palestine and ‘genocide.’ The shift was impelled by two developments besides the fact that the General Assembly’s 60-member political and security committee was bogged down throughout the day in repetitious technical arguments over a single section of the American ‘uniting for peace’ plan which Moscow opposes. Between Two Orthodoxies. One of the two impelling developments was the plight of Israel’s Government. It was caught between two orthodoxies — Jewish orthodoxy which had unseated David Ben-Gurion’s Government at the time and Moslem orthodoxy which arraigned Israel before the United Nations Security Council here today on charges of ‘Zionist aggression.’ The other development was a signing ceremony here bringing into effect 90 days hence a United Nations convention defining and outlawing as ‘genocide’ all measures undertaken in peace or war ‘with intent to destroy, wholly or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.’ The convention binds its ratifiers to have their national legislatures enact complementary domestic laws, pledges them also to prosecute in their own courts persons accused of ‘genocide’ and to grant extradition of persons wanted in other countries for prosecution on the same count, and, finally, projects the possible creation of an international tribunal to try ‘genocide’ cases. Representatives of Jordan and Israel clashed in the Security Council this afternoon as Jordan’s envoy joined with Egypt’s in virtually accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ by charging it with attempts to wipe out Palestine’s Arab population in certain sections. Earlier Than Hitlerism. Another link between the Near Eastern situation and the ‘genocide’ convention was created by events here today. For Lemkin began his crusade to outlaw organized mass murder on racial or religious grounds long before the Nazis destroyed his family in Poland. It was not Hitlerism, but a massacre of Christian Assyrians in Iraq that caused him, he says, to first propose a ‘genocide’ convention to the League of Nations in 1933…”
The Genocide Convention signed and the word used of Palestine in the Security Council on the same afternoon, reported in one story. The paper records where Lemkin says the idea came from: a massacre of Christian Assyrians in Iraq, proposed to the League of Nations in 1933, before Hitler.
“NEW YORK CITY — (AJP) — Key figures of anti-Zionism in America and England conferred in London recently and swapped shop talk in the problems of combatting world-wide proponents of the Jewish State, the American Jewish Press learned. Rabbi Elmer Berger, executive director of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, met with leading anti-Zionist and non-Zionist personalities in Britain during a two week stay in the country. Returned to the U. S., Rabbi Berger told the American Jewish Press that English anti-Zionists are ‘putting up the best fight they know how.’ Following conferences with several of the anti-Zionist leaders, Rabbi Berger said that ‘their only hope to combat Jewish nationalism’ lies in making their influence more strongly felt in the English-Jewish Association. The Association, which prior to the establishment of Israel maintained a neutral stand on Zionism, was reported by Rabbi Berger as now ‘pro-Zionist.’ ‘What the anti-Zionists in England are trying to do,’ he said, ‘is concentrate their energies on bringing the English-Jewish Association back to its pro-Israel stand.’”
A Jewish weekly reporting on Jewish anti-Zionists as a movement with officers and meetings. The last quoted line says pro-Israel where the sense of the sentence requires the opposite; it is transcribed as the paper set it.
Urge $800,000 UN Project To Resettle Arab Refugees
“An $800,000,000 program, under the auspices of the United Nations, to resettle the Palestine Arab refugees in the Arab states, is proposed in a comprehensive memorandum submitted to the UN General Assembly by nineteen American leaders… In making the proposals, the group points out that ‘the Arab refugee exists, his plight is tragic and his problem is the responsibility of the international community.’ But, it underscores, this is not a responsibility which ‘can be discharged by protracted palliative measures or by pressures on Israel to open its doors.’”
The headline says $800,000. The story says $800,000,000. The memorandum asks for resettlement in the Arab states and for no pressure on Israel to open its doors.
“PARIS, Jan. 11 (Reuters).—Lebanese Foreign Minister Charles Helou told the United Nations today the Arabs would accept any form of negotiations in the Palestine dispute if Israel respected UN resolutions calling for the repatriation of Arab refugees. Repatriation of the refugees was ‘the one condition,’ he told the No. 2 political committee, which is considering resolutions on the Palestine conciliation commission. If Israel did that, the Arabs would be willing to become a member of the conciliation commission, or leave decisions to the commission or any other body, Helou said.”
One condition, stated at the United Nations and printed in St. Louis.
“There are an estimated 850,000 of them, living in poverty and idleness on the fringes of Palestine… THERE ARE, according to independent and reliable sources, 170,000 heads of families among the 850,000 refugees, 70 per cent farmers.”
“Caution: Inflammable!—The seething Middle East is packed with situations that carry the label, ‘explosive,’ but one of the most dangerous tinderboxes is the case of Arab refugees. Map above indicates where these thousands of refugees are located. (Associated Press map.)”
An Associated Press information graphic in which 821,000 people are drawn as faceless robed figures standing on four countries, under the words Caution: Inflammable. The 1929 map gave Arabs a dot apiece; this one makes them the territory’s principal hazard. The story’s own sourcing says seventy per cent of them are farmers, two paragraphs after the word idleness.
Ernie Hill, Special Press Correspondent, United Nations
“United Nations — The director of the United Nations agency trying to resettle Arab refugees claims that ‘better days are ahead for the 830,000 unhappy, dislocated people’ chased out of what now is Israel. In a press conference before returning to the Middle East, John P. Blandford, director of the UN Relief and Works Agency, claimed that the first houses were being built, vocations taught and sites for towns staked out in the $250,000,000 program. Blandford, a former United States housing expert and ambassador, is remarkable in that he refuses to become discouraged by the Arab populations which tell him the program is doomed to failure. Won’t Resign. His organization hounded by Arab newspapers, Blandford stands almost alone in the conviction that the refugees will move into towns and housing developments and get off the UN charity rolls if they are assured the move in no way prejudices their political rights to return to what used to be Palestine. Blandford denied the rumor printed in the Middle East that he had returned here to resign. ‘I am optimistic,’ says Blandford. ‘If I were not, I could not go on with this job.’ Arab newspaper reporters heckle the UNRWA director in his press conferences but he refuses to become angry or annoyed. ‘Isn’t it true,’ asked Abed Bouhofa of Cairo’s Al Misri, ‘that you are trying to bribe or blackmail the Arab countries into resettling the refugees with promises of money for projects?’ Implore Living Conditions. ‘Those are your words, not mine,’ said Blandford. ‘It is true that some projects could be available for those countries that show a humanitarian approach to helping with the refugees.’ Blandford refuses to use the words ‘resettle’ or ‘reintegrate.’ He claims that UNRWA is only trying to ‘improve living conditions and help the refugees become self-supporting.’ The main trouble in the Arab refugee camps is that thousands are convinced that if they take regular jobs they will never get a chance to return to their homes in Israel. Technically, they are waiting for Israel and the Arab states to complete a peace agreement, settle boundary disputes and allow them to return to their homes now occupied by Jews. The refugees have been told recently that they will never be allowed to return but most of them refuse to believe it. Convince Governments. Blandford’s job is to convince the governments involved that they should set aside land on which the UN can build villages and resettle the refugees. The director says that a plan to irrigate the Jordan valley and to spend $11,000,000 on vocational training should take care of 100,000 of the 450,000 refugees in Jordan. It is hoped that 300,000 can be moved to Syria and Iraq. There are only 80,000 refugees in Syria and projects under contemplation could absorb them quickly. Iraq has only a handful. The 200,000 in the Gaza strip which is administered by Egypt provide the most difficult problem.”
A U.N. official refusing to use the words resettle or reintegrate, and an Egyptian newspaperman named in the story asking him whether the agency is bribing Arab governments. The paper writes “chased out of what now is Israel” in its own voice, in the first sentence.
Million Homeless Palestinian Arabs Camped in Middle East
By Cynthia Davis, Women’s National News Service, Beirut, Lebanon
“Beirut, Lebanon — Nearly a million homeless Palestinian Arab refugees are camped out in the torrid lands of the Middle East today. In Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, women and their husbands and children are living in tent cities or mud huts, cellars or stalls of horse barracks — one stall to a family, with a curtain of tattered potato sacks for a doorway… ‘This is my only home,’ said a middle-aged woman in tears as she surveyed her dirty cellar. ‘I am ashamed to live in such filth. We were never rich, but my husband used to own his own drygoods store, and we were clean.’ Down the road an aged grandmother was sitting cross-legged on the ground. Before her was a tiny bundle of burlap, and suddenly it stirred. ‘This is my granddaughter,’ the white-haired woman said, raising her hurt and bewildered eyes. ‘Her mother is dead. How am I going to take care of her?’ … in a tent city, only one family in every four or so has a kerosene stove to cook on… With a rationing of one half a cake of soap per person every two weeks, there is not much hope of keeping things clean.… “Communists in the area are making hopeful gestures toward these refugees, displaced when their Palestine homes became part of the new nation of Israel.”… “‘This is my granddaughter,’ the white-haired woman said, raising her hurt and bewildered eyes. ‘Her mother is dead. How am I going to take care of her?’” How Indeed? “All of the refugees are lacking in proper housing and adequate food and medical care. Their clothing is in rags.”… “In a tent city, only one family in every four or so has a kerosene stove to cook on and what furniture they own is composed of second-hand scraps. With a rationing of one half a cake of soap per person every two weeks, there is not much hope of keeping things clean. Time hangs heavy on everyone’s hands. But adults, after all, usually learn how to take things in their stride.” What of their children? “Skinny, big-eyed toddlers—both boys and girls line up at the clinics. ‘This child has only six months to live,’ is the message doctors and internes give over and over again to the grieving parents. For lack of tents and teachers only one child in four can go to school, and then only through the sixth grade. Many of the adolescent boys who should be doing productive work are roaming the roadways or listening to the flowered phrases of Communist agitators. There is no vocational training for these youths, no opportunity for them to obtain even the most menial jobs. The few orphanages are jammed to overflowing with lonely waifs.”
“Rags are their only clothes” · “Many live in ‘caves’ made from huge rocks, roofed with rags” · “‘De luxe’ housing is this barracks. Each family has a compartment”
Printed directly beside a Genesee Furniture advertisement: a free plastic lounge rocker with any living room suite, and a two-piece Kroehler suite in mohair frieze at $149.95.
U.N. Urged To Set Up Fund To Resettle Arab Refugees
Associated Press, United Nations, N.Y.
“UNITED NATIONS, N. Y., Oct. 25 (AP)—A group of 33 American educators and religious leaders called on the U.N. today to set up funds totaling nearly a billion dollars to develop Middle East resources and resettle Arab refugees as a step to peace in the region. Their memorandum was sent to top U.N. officials and to delegation heads of the 60 member nations with a plea that some U.N. committee take it up. Needs Official Sponsor. Private communications of this sort, however, are generally merely filed here unless some delegation officially sponsors it. Among signers were Sumner Welles, former U. S. under secretary of state; William Emerson, Boston financier and president of the American Association for the United Nations; Paul Porter, former U. S. representative on the U.N. Palestine Conciliation Commission; and Jacob S. Potofsky, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. Council Meets Tuesday. The Security Council will meet Tuesday to hear Syria’s charge that Israel’s irrigation and power projects in the Jordan Valley violated 1949 armistice agreements. The United States has cut off financial aid to Israel during a hearing of these charges. A Council meeting Tuesday afternoon has been scheduled to hear an over-all report on the Israeli-Arab armistice situation from Gen. Vagn Bennike, Danish chief of the U.N. Truce Supervision Commission. His report and questioning by Council members in subsequent sessions is expected to delay further action on the Syrian complaint for some time. Recent Israel-Jordan border clashes, which drew blasts against Israel from Britain and the U. S. State Department, are at the base of the meetings with Bennike.”
Resettlement proposed as the solution, by thirty-three American educators and clergy, with no Palestinian among the signatories named. The item beneath it on the page is a Portuguese swimmer breaking the Gibraltar record.
“It surprises me that the recent incident of Kibya village… gets all this attention while it really does not count when compared with previous inhuman acts committed against Arabs during previous years. Those incidents, I believe, never had been mentioned by the newspapers, fearing that the advertisement business may go down… My home is in Jerusalem.”
A Palestinian in Kentucky telling an American newspaper, in its own letters column, that American newspapers do not report massacres of Arabs, and naming advertising as the reason. The mechanism he names is an accusation, not a finding. What is not in doubt is that the complaint was being made in print in 1954, which means the silence this archive measures was audible to the people it was about while it was happening.
“In the letter captioned, ‘Calls Palestine Deal All Wrong,’ Yasir A. Khammash talks about the ‘massacre’ of Deir Yassin… I ask him to produce the evidence; heresay and generalities are not proof.”
The reply, eleven days later, from one of the three writers Khammash had been answering. The word massacre goes inside quotation marks and the evidence is demanded. By January 1954 testimony from Deir Yassin had been in the Evening Star of Washington for nearly six years, in a survivor’s own words. The material existed. It had stopped being in anyone’s hands. “heresay” is as printed.
Palestine Refugees Who Lost ’48 War Between Israel And Arab Neighbors Still Ragged, Sullen
Lynn Heinzerling, Associated Press, Jerusalem
“These are the Palestine refugees — 868,350 of them officially… Each year, 25,000 new refugees are born… all line up and receive from UNRWA 22 pounds of flour… This totally lasts about 20 days… The Palestine Arabs always were among the most literate of Middle Eastern peoples… Dr. Izzat Tannous… calls the UNRWA ration one on which ‘an animal could hardly live.’”
First of a series; the correspondent travelled 2,600 miles and talked with scores of people, which this collection holds very little of. The bottom half of the page is a January furniture sale.
“To the Editor of The Sacramento Union: I would like to give ‘country parson’ some information concerning his letter to The Sacramento Union of December 31st. It is an incontrovertible fact that Palestine belongs to the Arabs, lock, stock, and barrel. More, it has been the cradle of Arab culture and civilization from time immemorial. The sons of Israel did come there but for an asylum in the good old days of Moses — but in order to escape the wrath of the persecuting Pharaohs of Egypt, who were bent upon their extermination. In fact, there is no historical evidence now to show that they continued to live there — as ‘country parson’ completely fails to understand or realize. Even if that is granted, they must have been absorbed by the inhabitants of the place and have so mixed and mingled with the indigenous population that after a few centuries they came to be known as Arabs, and, as such, it is nothing less than absurd to build the theory, as has been done since the ’20s, that the immigration of Jews, drawn from diverse nationalities and scores of countries, is just the return of the original inhabitants of their land. The fact is that the huge influx of ‘Jews’ is nothing less than an invasion of Palestine by aliens, and exploiters. That there was no legal, much less any moral basis to deprive the Arabs of their homes, there can be no doubt. It was ultra vires and against the very fundamentals on which the United Nations is supposed to stand and to safeguard which it claims to exist. As for ‘parson’s’ professed ‘understanding’ of Bible prophecy: After the Seventh Century A. D., the sons of Isaac, and those who observed the letter of the law of Moses had to withdraw from Manaan (see history). The sons of Ismael (from whom the Arabs are descended) instead, became its political as well as its spiritual leaders. The fact that the sons of Israel had to surrender the land of Canaan shows that they had become unworthy of the divine promise which God made to them through Abraham… Palestine is for those who keep the covenant which Abraham made with God. Christians also, no doubt, claim to fulfill the covenant. But they seem to forget that the covenant lays down an important external sign, and that sign is circumcision of the male population. Only Ishmaelites have kept the sign both before and since the revelation of the Holy Quran. The prophecy of Abraham promised blessings to both Isaac and Ishmael. According to this promise, the sons of Isaac were established over Canaan and the sons of Ishmael over Arabia. But when the last day arrived for the sons of Isaac, then, in terms of the prophecy of David, the promise was transferred from Israel to Ishmael. The claim of Israel was now only a racial claim, that of Ishmael was spiritual. On the basis of their racial claim, the sons of Ishmael held Mecca and the territory around. On the basis of their spiritual claim they added Canaan to their possessions after the religious deterioration of Israel.”
A reader answering another reader in a Sacramento letters column in 1955, arguing the case entirely on scripture and history. The archive holds it because the argument is being made by name, in an American paper, nine years before the PLO.
“VIOLENCE in Gaza would surprise no one who has visited it since the partition of Palestine. Previous to partition Gaza was an administrative unit of Palestine, subdivided into Gaza-Beersheba. The territory was almost wholly Arab and was largely awarded to the Arabs in the United Nations partition scheme. But the Arab-Israeli war put into Israeli hands all but the narrow Gaza ‘strip’ where the inhabitants of the whole territory are crowded on less than three per cent of the land they formerly owned, their numbers augmented by refugees from other parts of Palestine… The ‘strip’ is policed by units of the Egyptian army, there at the armistice. But the people in Gaza have little love for Egypt, or the United Nations relief administration that feeds the refugees among them 1,700 calories a day—or for anyone. Those who are natives and not encamped cannot easily be controlled. The land they and their ancestors owned or worked for hundreds of years lies all around them, and to them that land is theirs, never transferred by any title. So, as opportunity offers, they raid it, to carry off crops if they can, or leave upon it the bodies of a few dead Israeli, or their own dead bodies, killing being a vengeful pleasure and dying a matter of indifference… The United Nations Armistice Commission found no evidence of such fight but declared the Israel attack to have been prearranged and planned on order of the Israel authorities and carried out by a unit of the Israel regular army with rifles, submachine guns, mortars, bazookas and grenades, resulting in 38 Egyptians killed and 31 wounded. Yet it undoubtedly was a retaliation for something. For eight Israel killed somewhere, 38 Egyptians paid. That Israeli were ambushed by Egyptian soldiers is unsubstantiated. But dispossessed Palestinian Arabs do maraud upon ‘our own land.’ Peace is made by a state with other states. But the Israel problem is to make peace with Palestinian Arabs, who give allegiance to no country but Palestine, recognize no external disciplines, and whose cause has the sympathy of all Arabs… Even if the Arab states should make peace, these Palestinians would not accept it, and this knowledge makes it politically impossible for any Arab state to do so, no matter how many eyes are taken for one.”
A nationally syndicated columnist in 1955 setting out who the people in Gaza are, where their land is, and why a treaty between states would not settle it. The subheading is the paper’s: Palestinian Arabs Give No Allegiance.
Quarter-Million Wretched Arab Refugees Hate Everybody After 7 Years’ Waiting
By Margarita Dobert
“Thousands of Arab refugees in the Gaza strip rioted recently when Israel and Egypt had their shooting ‘incident’ near the city of Gaza; and the cries of the angry refugees illustrated the mood that has developed among them in their seven years of exile. They shouted ‘Down with Israel!’ ‘Down with Egypt!’ ‘Down with the United States!’ ‘Down with Britain!’ and ‘Down with the United Nations!’… About 250,000 of the refugees are jammed into the small Gaza strip, a narrow corridor controlled by Egypt, hemmed in on one side by the sea and on the other by Israel… I got my first look at Arab refugees in the old walled city of Jerusalem. Six or eight people were living in each of the dank stone basements of the former Jewish quarter… UNRWA officials were handing out flour, beans, sugar, margarine, rice and dates, providing between 1,500 and 1,700 calories at the cost of about 6 cents a day… But building a mudhouse or planting a tree implies permanency. It would mean that the refugees had accepted the fact of having lost Israel… But then, how could the refugees go back? Almost as many Jews have entered the country as Arabs who were driven, lured or panicked into flight. It is true that the 170,000 who remained behind, have profited by the economic progress of the country. Their wages, their income have doubled. So—I was told—has the price of wives. But they are class B citizens and it says so unmistakably on their identity card. They live under military rule, they cannot travel freely or advance in the civil service, they have no educational equality. They have become foreigners on their own soil. Israelis will tell you with conviction that they begged the Arabs to stay during the war; but today they are just as determined not to take them back. They do not trust them, they do not want them and they have no room for them. While Palestine was a home for Arabs and Jews, Israel is a home for Jews. The Arabs have become refugees from a never-never land.”
Seven years on, a correspondent walks through the camps and writes down what the arrangement amounts to: class B on the identity card, military rule, no free movement, no equal education, foreigners on their own soil. The verb in the sentence about 1948 is three verbs — driven, lured or panicked — and the Israeli claim that they begged the Arabs to stay is printed in the paragraph after it. The tone of the piece toward the people in it is contemptuous throughout, beginning with the line under the headline.
Arabs, Jewish Immigrants Now Live, Work Side by Side In Jaffa, Israel
James M. Long, Associated Press, Jaffa, Israel
“Quiet, in his dignity of years, the Arab patriarch sits in the sidewalk shade, with his hubble-bubble pipe and his unspoken thoughts of the old Jaffa and the new… But only 6,500 Arabs are left of a crowded population of 60,000… Since the last of the Iraqi troops withdrew and Israeli soldiers dynamited and mortar-fired their way through Jaffa’s Manshiye slum quarter, 50,000 Jewish immigrants have been moved into the city.”
A correspondent standing beside a man, noticing there is something he is not saying, writing the observation down, and moving to the next paragraph, which is about a Jewish shoemaker. The archive’s Jaffa section gives seventy thousand people, then two thousand; this printing gives sixty thousand, then six thousand five hundred. Both are American newspapers and neither is the archive’s own count.
“An Egyptian spokesman at Gaza charged that the Israelis opened the shooting at 4 a.m. with automatic weapons fire from the Damra sector northeast of Gaza. The spokesman said the Israel’s opened fire later at El Burej, north of Deir El Ballah. The exchange lasted four hours. An Israeli army spokesman, on the other hand, accused the Egyptians of starting the shooting. He said rifle and machinegun fire was directed at three Israeli outposts in the Kissufim area in the central sector, beginning about 7:30 a.m., and about three hours later rifle and machinegun shots were aimed at Israeli positions in the northern sector. Meanwhile a sombre mass funeral for 59 Arabs, killed in a heavy cross-shelling Thursday, took place in Gaza. Most of those killed were civilians. Four Israeli’s were killed earlier this week in the Gaza area. The Israeli’s said the Thursday exchange was started by repeated shooting directed at Israeli settlements along the border. Dispatches from Gaza said that except for the funeral the Gaza inhabitants were going about their business with schools and business places open as usual. The American Southern Baptist mission hospital in Gaza, it was said was continuing its usual operations despite some slight damage from the Thursday shelling. The Egyptian Red Crescent Hospital, however, was reported more seriously damaged. Nine of the victims of the shelling were said to have been women patients of the hospital.”
Fifty-nine dead, most of them civilians, and nine of them women who were patients in a hospital. Each side’s account of who fired first is printed in consecutive paragraphs under the subheading “Each Blames Other,” and the subheading after that is “Business As Usual.”
Egypt, Israel Hurl Charges In Security Council Notes
United Press, United Nations, N.Y.
“UNITED NATIONS, N.Y., April 9 (UP)—Israel charged Monday night that Egypt established fortified emplacements within cities of the Gaza Strip, making it ‘imperative’ for Israeli forces to silence the Egyptian batteries. EGYPT CHARGED Israel with ‘aggression against peaceful civilians’ of the towns of Gaza, Khan Yunis and Dier El Balah last Thursday, killing 59 civilians and wounding 93. Both Israel Ambassador Abba S. Eban and Egyptian Ambassador Omar Loutfi sent letters to the United Nations Security Council. ‘ISRAEL HAS once again proven that its policy is based on aggression and that it does not hesitate to massacre civilians, women and children, without any consideration for law and tradition or its responsibilities,’ Loutfi said in his note to the council. Eban charged Egypt with sending ‘armed sabotage and murder gangs’ into Israeli territory ‘for the terrorization of the civilian population’ in a ‘warlike act.’”
Both notes to the Security Council, printed side by side in one brief. Fifty-nine dead is a number inside a quotation, attributed to Egypt. “Dier El Balah” is the paper’s.
· Pueblo Star-Journal and Sunday Chieftain · page 1
Palestinian Arabs Talking Of Mass March On Israel
The Associated Press, Gaza
“GAZA (on the Egyptian-Israeli Frontier) (P)—More than 250,000 Palestinian Arab refugees were reported Saturday to be threatening to stage a mass march on Israel. U. N. relief agency officials said reports of the march were circulating through the overcrowded refugee camps in the Egyptian-held Gaza strip. The officials said there were increasing indications that the patience of the poverty-stricken Arab refugees with the United Nations’ eight-year efforts to solve their problems were wearing thin. They said such a march along the 27-mile long border would be almost impossible to stop. ‘If they decide to march,’ one U. N. official said, ‘Who can stop them? You can’t shoot a quarter of a million people.’ Despite their exile, the refugees maintain a fanatical determination to return to their ancestral homes and farmlands in what is now Israel. School children salute the Palestine flag every morning and chant: ‘We salute you Palestine.’ Lt. Col. Mahmoud El Massri, chief Egyptian medical officer in the strip, described the refugees as ‘multi-injured’ people. He said they suffer dangerous psychoses and neuroses as well as physical ailments. The situation could easily lead to such desperation measures as the mass march on Israel, he said… They said reports circulating through the camps since February predicted the refugees would return to their homes by June 1. The basis for the rumors could not be pinned down, they said, but were believed by a large number of the refugees. Some 215,000 Arabs who fled Palestine during the Arab-Israel War are concentrated in eight camps in the Gaza strip. Others live in poverty in towns and villages on nine cents of food daily. Most are jobless.”
Printed above an item about an industrial research report at a chamber of commerce luncheon. The page is dated on the clipping: Page 6A, Sunday, April 29, 1956.
“The Voice of Israel, Jerusalem radio station, warned the refugee-packed Gaza Strip that it soon would be cut off from Egypt. It asserted Israeli military operations in the Sinai Peninsula soon would be concluded with the defeat of Egyptian forces. About 250,000 Arab refugees from Palestine’s 1948 war are packed in the 26-mile-long, 8-mile-wide area sandwiched between the Mediterranean coast and Israel’s Negeb Desert. The Israelis claimed to have destroyed scores of Egyptian vehicles in air attacks on convoys east of Ismailia, and claimed their forces had reached within 10 miles of the Suez Canal, the ‘ultimatum’ line set by Britain and France.”
The subheading is the count: 250,000 Refugees Warned. Twenty-six miles by eight, given in the second paragraph, in 1956.
Israel Claims Smashing Victory In Ground Action / Gaza City Surrenders To Invading Israeli Forces / VOTES 64-5 FOR END OF HOSTILITIES IN EGYPT
The masthead reads: “Daily American Republic. VOL. XLVII—No. 240. POPLAR BLUFF, MISSOURI, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1956. PRICE FIVE CENTS.” The banner: “U.N. DEMANDS IMMEDIATE CEASE FIRE.” Beneath it: “Israel Claims Smashing Victory In Ground Action.” The headings across the page read “EGYPTIAN AIR FORCE PUT OUT OF CONDITION,” “Gaza City Surrenders To Invading Israeli Forces” (By Robert Tuckman), “EDEN HUNTS FACE SAVING WAY OUT OF PREDICAMENT” and “VOTES 64-5 FOR END OF HOSTILITIES IN EGYPT.”
“DULLES HEARS BRITISH SIDE OF EGYPTIAN STORY—Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, right, and U. N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., listen on floor of the United Nations General Assembly last night as British Delegate Sir Pierson Dixon explains his nation’s actions in the crisis. Dulles arrived late when his plane from Washington was delayed by bad weather. Others in picture not identified.” (AP Wirephoto)
Invading Israeli Forces, in a front-page headline, in 1956. The date is printed on the masthead.
By Serge Fliegers, International News Service, Gaza Strip
“GAZA STRIP (INS) — Israeli troops supported by tanks and planes today smashed Egyptian positions and conquered the 125-square-mile Gaza Strip territory along the Mediterranean coast. The Israeli troops struck the Egyptians from the rear, or southern end, of the strip and raced through the area within three hours. At the moment of this dispatch, 5:30 a. m. (10:30 p. m. EST Thursday) I am watching Israeli guns reduce the Egyptian positions in the town of Gaza, which is near the northern end of the area that Egyptian troops seized in 1948 before the U. N. effected an armistice. Israeli artillery has just hit the main Egyptian gasoline depot northeast of Gaza. A big black cloud of smoke marks the destruction of the depot. The pre-dawn attack began after Israeli planes opened a heavy air bombardment during the night. Artillerymen laid down a barrage and then tanks and armored cars moved into the area quickly and advanced on Khan Yunis, which is near the southern end of the territory and on the ancient road between Palistine and Egypt. A fierce battle developed at Khan Yunis, but the Israelis positions there and moved on to Gaza.”
A correspondent watching the guns as he files, at half past five in the morning. Conquered is the verb in the first sentence, and the quarter of a million people living in the 125 square miles are not mentioned. “Palistine” is the paper’s.
Israeli Seizure of Gaza Equals Bitter World War II Battles
‘Now We Can Work Fields in Peace’
Serge Fliegers, International News Service, inside the Gaza Strip
“INSIDE THE GAZA STRIP, Nov. 2 (INS)—I rode into the battle of Gaza in an ancient New York City taxi. I watched Israeli soldiers wrest the town of Gaza and the whole refugee-jammed Gaza Strip from Egyptian troops and fadayeen suicide commandos. The whole 135-square mile area fell to the Israelis after a furious artillery and air bombardment and a lightning blitzkrieg sweep from south to north. Positions Softened Up. Throughout the night and early morning, I waited as the Israeli artillery and bombers softened up the Egyptian positions… rounded up and marched—hands [up]… and the local population reportedly stayed in the Gaza Strip when the Israelis launched their drive against Egypt last Monday. Thus, in a few fateful hours, Israel increased its population by 20 per cent and presented itself with a major problem. The actual battle for Gaza was too swift to allow a mass exodus from the strip. The first Israeli troops crossed into the strip at 6 a.m. (11 p.m. EST Thursday) and the town was in Israeli hands before noon. The fighting equalled in bitterness anything seen in World War II. The scene might have been a small French or Italian town during the war, except for the flowing white costumes of the Arabs. The victory at Gaza has real importance for the Israelis. Murderous Raids. As we returned from the city across the smoking fields, teenaged girls and boys with guns slung over their shoulders were coming into the neighboring Arab settlements. The latter had for four years been subjected to murderous raids by the Gaza-based fedayeen. Sixteen-year-old Diana, a girl from Nahal Oz, gazed in wonderment at the adobe houses, now spattered with bullet holes. ‘So this is where they came from at night,’ she said. ‘Now the nightmare is ended. We can work our fields in peace.’”
Written from inside the advance, and it says plainly what happened to the people: they stayed, because the battle was too fast for them to leave. The correspondent does the arithmetic on the spot — Israel 20% larger in a few hours, and “a major problem.” The page’s kicker is a quotation from an Israeli teenager.
Correction: {'pub': 'The Morning Call', 'date': '1956-11-03', 'note': 'masthead reads Morning Call, Allentown PA, Nov 3 1956; slide caption pairing swapped with Birmingham Post 1967'}
“UNITED NATIONS, N. Y., Dec. 1 (AP).—Israel announced today it will pull back more than 30 miles from the Suez Canal by Monday to let the United Nations Emergency Force move in. It also announced it has withdrawn another brigade, possibly 3,000 men, from Egypt to make its total withdrawals about 9,000. These moves still left Israeli troops in occupation of the Gaza Strip and much of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula despite U. N. resolutions demanding they all withdraw into Israel. Israeli Delegate Abba Eban gave notice of the withdrawal and the pullback in a letter to U. N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold… ‘As a result of the progressive withdrawal of our forces,’ he wrote, ‘there will be no Israeli forces anywhere within a wide belt of territory (about 50 kilometers) in proximity to the Suez Canal along its entire length by the morning of December 3.’… An Israeli delegation spokesman told a reporter this and the two previous brigades had not been withdrawn as units but had been thinned out through demobilization of individual soldiers.”
In occupation of the Gaza Strip, in the paper’s own third paragraph, in December 1956 — a decade before the vocabulary is usually dated to. Nothing is in quotation marks and nobody is being quoted.
Stalled Invaders Agree To Leave Without Delay; Israel Told to Quit Gaza
British and French Bow to UN Orders, Leave Canal Issue Undecided Despite Attack
Associated Press, London
“London, Dec. 3 (AP)—Britain and France bowed today to the will of the United Nations and agreed to pull their troops out of the Suez Canal Zone without delay. Further, the British told Israel it should get out of the captured Gaza Strip as well as Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and permit the strip to be made a responsibility of the UN. In New York, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold expressed hope the British and French forces will be out and the emergency UN police force will have taken command in Port Said by mid-December. Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd notified the House of Commons that Gen. Sir Charles Keightley, commander of the British-French invasion forces, has been instructed to meet with UN officials to work out a timetable for the withdrawal. ‘Given good faith on all sides, it can be carried out in a short time,’ Lloyd said… Lloyd’s announcement made clear that the invasion failed to achieve what many members of Britain’s ruling Conservative party had considered a prime objective: To restore the Suez Canal to international control.”
The word in the paper’s own headline is invaders, and it means Britain and France. Israel is told to quit Gaza in the same line. Printed above a man killed on an icy road in Huntington and a man shot on a deer hunt in Barre.
“LIFE—AND BUSINESS—continue as usual in age-old fashion in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip city wrested from Egypt by Israel in recent hostilities. Here, Arab date vender plies his street trade, apparently unruffled by present tensions in the Middle East.”—(AP Wire Photofax)
A man selling dates on a scale, photographed in Khan Yunis in December 1956, six weeks after the killings there. The caption says life and business continue as usual and that he appears unruffled. The verb for what happened to the city is wrested, and the city is wrested from Egypt, not from anyone who lives in it.
“JERUSALEM, Israeli Sector (AP)—Israeli authorities disclosed today the killing of a number of Arabs by Israeli frontier police in a curfew incident 45 days ago at Kfar Kassem, a village near the Jordan border. Men, women and children were slain. The exact number was not disclosed. Premier David Ben-Gurion said it was a ‘terrible occurrence,’ and the police responsible will be tried. The government has decided to pay $560 to every Arab family affected. All deputies in the Israeli Parliament stood in silence in memory of the victims. Joseph Sprinzak, the speaker, read a statement expressing shock and bewilderment at the shooting. Ben-Gurion appointed an inquiry committee to establish the circumstances and the degree of responsibility of the patrol. The committee reported Nov. 6 and, in accordance with its conclusions, the commander and several of his men who ‘carried out an illegal order’ will be placed on trial.”
The day the killings at Kafr Qasim were disclosed, in a Syracuse paper, under a standing label that reads ATROCITY. The first paragraph says forty-five days ago and the fourth says the exact number was not disclosed. The compensation figure is given before the number of the dead is.
Israeli Authorities To Punish Police For Kfar Kassem Deaths
Associated Press, Jerusalem, Israeli Sector
“JERUSALEM, Israeli Sector (AP)—Israeli authorities disclosed today the killing of a number of Arabs by Israeli frontier police in a curfew incident 45 days ago at Kfar Kassem, a village near the Jordan border. Men, women and children were slain. The exact number was not disclosed. Premier David Ben-Gurion said it was a ‘terrible occurrence,’ and the police responsible will be tried. The government has decided to pay $560 to every Arab family affected. All deputies in the Israeli Parliament stood in silence in memory of the victims. Joseph Sprinzak, the speaker, read a statement expressing shock and bewilderment at the shooting. Ben-Gurion appointed an inquiry committee to ‘establish the circumstances and the degree of responsibility’ of the patrol. The committee reported Nov. 6 and, in accordance with its conclusions, the commander and several of his men who ‘carried out an illegal order’ will be placed on trial.”
The same Associated Press disclosure the Syracuse paper ran the day before, in a Vermont daily, under a headline about punishing the police rather than about an atrocity.
· San Francisco Chronicle · San Francisco · page 1
Arabs Accuse Israel, Ask U.N. Probe
New York Herald Tribune Service
“UNITED NATIONS, N. Y., Dec. 14—Representatives of 11 Arab nations asked Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold today to investigate the recent slaying of Arab inhabitants of Israel, an alleged Israeli ‘scorched-earth’ policy in Sinai, and other charges against the government of Israel. According to Mohammed F. Jamali of Iraq, the Arab bloc delegation called the U. N. chief’s attention to ‘the crime of Genocide’ October 29, when Israeli border policemen killed 48 Arabs in the village of Kafr Kassem. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced Wednesday that the police commander and others were facing trial as a result of the incident. The Arab bloc told the Secretary General that ‘roads, railroads, communication lines, villages, bridges, water tanks and wells are being completely demolished’ by Israelis in the Sinai area.”
Forty-six days after the killings. It reaches American readers because Arab states raised it at the United Nations, not because a correspondent found it. The Israeli answer — that the police commander is facing trial — is the paragraph underneath.
“Jerusalem, Wednesday. MR. DAVID BEN-GURION, Israel’s Premier, declared to-day that ‘under no circumstances’ would Israel agree to allow the ‘Egyptian invader’ to return to the Gaza strip. He made the statement in the Knesset (Parliament) in reply to a Labour question about a speech in which the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Dr. Eban, was reported to have said in New Orleans that Israel had never claimed the Gaza strip. Mr. Ben-Gurion stated that the Israeli Foreign Office had asked Dr. Eban to comment on the remarks attributed to him. A police spokesman to-day reported an exchange of fire between Israeli occupation police and Arab infiltrators in the Gaza strip. He said an Israeli police patrol encountered two Fedayeen (commandos) last night in a village near Khan Yunis, at the southern end of the strip. The intruders escaped, and no casualties were reported. The acting Secretary-General of the Arab League, Raif Ballama, to-day accused Israel of ‘murdering 2,150 Arabs in Israeli-occupied Egyptian territory.’ He said, ‘The Israelis killed 1,400 Arabs at Khan Yunis and another 750 at Rafah, both in the Sinai Desert.’ He said the United Nations had been informed of the ‘massacres’ and the Arab countries would be asked to support the formation of the international investigation committee to inquire into the ‘atrocities.’—Reuter and Associated Press. FOOTNOTE: The Gaza strip, a narrow strip of territory to the south-west of Israel, was formerly part of the British-mandated territory of Palestine. It was occupied by the Egyptians when the British withdrew from Palestine, and in the recent fighting it was reoccupied by the Israelis.”
A British paper, so the spellings are its own. Two thousand one hundred and fifty, named as a number, inside a quotation from the Arab League, with the paper’s own footnote underneath explaining to readers what the Gaza strip is.
“The acts of genocide and brutality which are being perpetrated by the Israelis against some 300,000 Arabs in the Gaza Strip... will go down in history as the darkest stain on the record of not only the Israelis, but also of those politicians and powers who have permitted such a state of affairs to go unquestioned.” And later: “Whereas cries of ‘murder’ and ‘salvation’ in the case of the events taking place in certain parts of Europe are read in every newspaper in the western world... the miseries and sufferings of the 300,000 Arabs living in the Gaza Strip pass unnoticed and without even a word of condemnation or compassion.”
“Sami Hadawi”
The earliest headline in this collection to carry the word, unquoted, about Palestinians. Twelve days earlier the San Francisco Chronicle had printed the Arab bloc using it at the United Nations, inside the story. This is Arab-American community press rather than a daily: the advertisements on the page are for a Norwalk oudist and a New London dress shop. That is why it sits in a different column of the count from the mainstream papers.
“UNITED NATIONS, N. Y., Dec. 28 (AP)—Egypt charged today that Israelis killed about 2,150 Arabs in and around the Gaza Strip after Israel invaded Egypt Oct. 29. Israel denied the charge. The announcement—issued by the Egyptian Mission to the U. N.—quoted Egypt’s director general of information, Abdel Kader Hatem, as saying the Israelis put 750 persons to death at Rafa in the northeast corner of the Sinai Peninsula just below the Gaza Strip. He also charged that ‘Zionists’ gathered 1,400 persons in the Gaza area and executed them without trial. Israeli Delegate Mordecai R. Kidron branded the Egyptian charges ‘flat lies.’ Kidron declared the U. N. had full information on conditions in the Gaza Strip. An investigation in the area was made recently under U. N. auspices. A spokesman at Egypt’s U. N. Mission said the information had come from Arab refugees who fled Israeli authority in the Gaza Strip and reached Egypt. He said there was no definite information as to when the alleged executions occurred.”
The charge, the denial and the sourcing, in nine sentences. The number matches the one the Bolton News printed ten days earlier from the Arab League. The archive holds both, and neither resolves the other.
“INSIDE THE GAZA STRIP — (INS) — Israeli troops supported by tanks and planes today smashed Egyptian positions and conquered the 125-square-mile Gaza Strip territory along the Mediterranean coast. The Israeli troops struck the Egyptians from the rear, or southern end, of the strip and raced through the area within hours… I heard the orders go out to the troops to smash the remaining Egyptian troops in Gaza, but strive at all costs not to hit civilian sectors of the town… NO ACCURATE estimate of casualties on either side was available at this time.”
An eyewitness report from inside the strip, printed above an advertisement for a lecture series in psychology and religion. The scan is 322 pixels wide across three columns, so the middle of the story could not be re-read word by word.
“UNITED NATIONS, N.Y. (UP)—Israel stood fast in the Gaza Strip and along Egypt’s Gulf of Aqaba coast today, defying the U.N. Assembly’s sixth resolution calling on her to withdraw her troops behind the 1949 armistice line. The Israeli Cabinet in Jerusalem announced it would still keep occupation forces for the time being in the Gaza Strip and in the Sharm el Sheikh area on the Red Sea Gulf of Aqaba. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said, ‘No guarantees have been obtained yet for definite stoppage of Egypt’s belligerence and sea blockade of Israel.’… Israel had been seeking guarantees against renewal of Arab commando raids from the Gaza Strip and resumption of Egypt’s artillery blockade of Israel-bound shipping through the Gulf of Aqaba… The strip, haven for some 200,000 Palestine Arab refugees, is former Palestine territory that Egypt administered provisionally before Israel began its invasion Oct. 29.”
Two hundred thousand refugees, in a subordinate clause explaining where the territory came from.
By Crosby S. Noyes, Star Staff Correspondent, United Nations, N. Y.
“UNITED NATIONS, N. Y., Feb. 16.—Responsible United Nations officials, recently returned from the Middle East, believe a sudden withdrawal of Israeli military forces from the Gaza Strip would result in ‘terrible disorders’ among the 200,000 Arab refugees there. The officials, who declined to be quoted by name, have reported to top U. N. and American officials that unless sufficient forces are on hand to take over immediately from the Israeli Army, the probability of rioting and mob reprisal actions is acute… As for political administration, there is no agency within the U. N. capable of taking over immediately the job of administering the Gaza Strip. Present U. N. responsibilities in the area are confined to food distribution, medical care and education for about two-thirds of the entire population… Experience during the first change of management in the strip in November lends force to these warnings. The days following the Israeli takeover were marked by disruption of normal services and food distributions. Riots followed in which food depots were destroyed and some $275,000 of supplies and equipment lost as the result of looting, burning and military action. Two serious clashes between refugees and Israeli forces at Khan Yunis and Rafah resulted in 386 civilian dead, according to U. N. figures. Another 66 refugees and local residents of the strip were killed in scattered incidents. The results of a changeover without adequate security forces on hand, it is felt, could be even more serious. The mood of the local refugee population is described as ‘disturbed,’ despite strenuous efforts of the Israeli regime to restore order. The implication seems to be that anyone who holds the Gaza strip today, has a tiger by the tail, and that more than normal caution is needed to let go.”
Three hundred and eighty-six civilian dead at Khan Yunis and Rafah, with United Nations figures attached, printed in Washington in February 1957. The subheadings are “No Suitable Agency” and “Would Need Big Force.” The story calls the Gaza Strip the disputed territory and calls the Israeli administration a regime, and it runs beside an advertisement for sixteen dance lessons for nine dollars.
“CAIRO, Egypt, Feb. 26 (AP)—At least five persons were killed today when about 500 Palestinian Arab soldiers clamoring for arms attacked an Egyptian police station in the suburb of Maadi. Police immediately clamped a tight lid of secrecy on the incident, and refused even to admit any trouble had occurred. Eyewitnesses said, however, that at least five were killed, several wounded and more than 20 arrested when the Palestinians attempted to storm the police station from two directions to get arms and ammunition. Reliable sources said the attackers came from an Egyptian army tent camp in the desert near the suburb.”
Palestinians in the headline in 1957, in a story about them fighting the Egyptian police.
Israel Has Failed in Crucial Test; Her Policies Have Alienated Arabs
Dorothy Thompson, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM — The so-called Gaza Strip is, and always has been, an integral part of Palestine. Egypt’s occupation and administration of it was a result of the Palestinian war and the cease-fire that found her troops there, as it found Israeli troops in many sections of Palestine that had never been granted to Israel by the 1947 U. N. partition plan. The inhabitants of Gaza territory are 100 per cent Palestinian Arabs, either native—whose ancestors were settled there for millennia—or fugitives from Israel. The latter constitute around three-fourths of the Gaza population. None is Egyptian, and Egypt has not annexed the territory but administered it. The original partition scheme envisaged a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine. Although the Palestinian Arabs were twice as numerous as the Jews and owned all except 7 per cent of the land, Israel was awarded more than half of it, but on condition that no Arabs should be displaced and that the two states be economically integrated. Actually, four-fifths were displaced, their land and properties taken over by Israel, which has happened also in the territories annexed but never assigned to Israel. No compensation has been paid them. Unlimited Jewish immigration has, meanwhile, more than replaced the original inhabitants—who could not possibly maintain themselves in the area in Palestine left to the Arabs, even if they could call upon foreign funds to the same extent as the Israeli… Israel wants the territory but not the Arab population of Gaza or anywhere else. In the face of world opinion, she could hardly repeat the performance of driving them out… The late Judah Magnes, an American Jew, and rector of the University of Jerusalem, remembering the days when Arabs and Jews together, in the time of the dissolution of the Roman Empire, reached the highest point of Semitic achievement, worked for a new Palestine for the Palestinians, Jew and Arab. But he died broken-hearted.”
A nationally syndicated columnist in 1957 with the numbers and the verbs: twice as numerous, all but 7% of the land, four-fifths displaced, no compensation paid, and Israel could hardly repeat the performance of driving them out. The same column is contemptuous about communism and about the Arab masses, and finishes on Samson pulling the temple down.
“Working Against Time.” An editorial cartoon. Golda Meir and John Foster Dulles face each other across a table, both labeled by name. Between them a box of dynamite marked TICK TICK TICK sits on a crate marked GAZA, with Dulles holding the fuse.
Signed Gib Crockett, Washington Star.
A drawing, not a report: Gaza as a crate of explosive between two negotiators. Nobody who lives there appears in it. The description here is of what the cartoon shows; the only words printed on it are the title and the labels.
“Who Owns the Gaza Strip? Nobody… The Gaza strip would have been part of a new Arab Palestine state under the plan… Actual ownership will not be decided until a peace treaty is signed, if ever… Before the 1949 armistice, the native Arab population of 80,000 to 90,000 barely kept itself alive through agriculture, with its chief markets Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. These markets were cut off… some 175,000 Arab residents of Palestine migrated to the Gaza strip during the Arab-Israel war…”
A general-interest explainer that answers its own question. Set it beside the Flint Journal’s 1985 box, SOURCE OF FRICTION IN AN ANCIENT LAND: two attempts to explain the same region to the same kind of reader, twenty-eight years apart, one of which answers the question and one of which answers a different one.
This Arab mother, a displaced Palestinian, spoons food for her child in hospital at the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza
“This Arab mother, a displaced Palestinian, spoons food for her child in hospital at the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. Food was from supplies provided by United Nations officials. U.N. troops guard the border with Israel, which has been the scene of many Egyptian-Israeli fights.” (AP Wirephoto)
Take a typical day in one of the eight refugee camps set up and operated by UNRWA in the strip
The Jabalia camp, in the northern portion of the strip, has about 20,000 inhabitants living in a total of some 5,000 rooms. In addition, 2,000 refugees living just outside the camp fall under its jurisdiction.
Correction: {'note': 'uncaptioned; 1957-60 era by content'}
Arab Refugee Families from Palestine Stranded in Gaza Camp
GAZA PROBLEM CHILDREN: Arab children marching from school at Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza are displaced Palestinians caught in bitter controversy between Israel and Egypt
Two AP Wirephotos. “IN THE MIDDLE. This is Main Street in Jabalia refugee camp operated by U.N. for 20,000 displaced Palestinian Arabs who live in about 5,000 rooms in the Gaza camp located in disputed strip between Israel and Egypt. Note little girl in center taking nap in sun.” And: “GAZA PROBLEM CHILDREN. Arab children marching from school at Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza are displaced Palestinians caught in bitter controversy between Israel and Egypt.”
Same AP wirephoto as image161, different paper, different caption
“LUNCH ON THE U. N. — This Arab mother, a displaced Palestinian, spoons food for her child in hospital at the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. Food was from supplies provided by the United Nations officials… Picture by AP Photographer Raoul Fornezza.” (AP Wirephoto)
The Indianapolis Star ran this same Wirephoto four days earlier with the same caption and nothing in front of it (CP-1957-003). This paper added three words above it. Nothing in the caption body changed: a photograph of a woman feeding a sick child in a refugee camp hospital, slugged with a joke about who is paying for the meal. This printing also credits the photographer, which the other does not.
This is Main Street in the Jabalia refugee camp for Arabs in Gaza, as it now looks. Jabalia is in the disputed strip between Israel on the north and Egypt on the south. In Jabalia 20,000 displaced Palestinians live in about 5,000 rooms. The camp is operated by the United Nations. Note the little girl in the center taking a nap in the sun.
“The conflict that arose recently between Joseph Alsop, Herald Tribune columnist, writing from Gaza, and the United Nations, which has questioned his accuracy, does not seem to involve much of factual substance… And it is not only necessary to protect Israel from Arab raiders but to protect the border Arab communities from Israelis, who in the raids and counter-raids of the last eight years have killed far more Arabs than Arabs have killed Israelis. This a matter of record. The U. N. (publicly confirmed by the Israeli delegate, Abba Eban) has reported that raids into Israel during the whole period since the 1949 armistice have resulted in 443 Israeli deaths. On Arab casualties no figures are available for the whole period. But precise U. N. figures are obtainable from January 1, 1955, through September 30, 1956. During this critical 21 months, prior to the attack on Sinai and Gaza, 496 Arabs, military and civilians, were killed, compared with 121 Israelis, the number of Arab deaths in less than two years thus exceeding by 53 the sum total of Israeli deaths in the whole period since the armistice. There is also available a special report by the director of the UNRWA in the Near East, covering November 1, 1956 to mid-December, the first 45 days of Israeli occupation of Gaza, during which 452 Arabs are known by ‘trustworthy sources’ to have been killed. These were not casualties of fighting between Israeli and Egyptian troops, which lasted only a few hours. The report is specific and detailed as to places and persons. The UNRWA director (Mr. Labouisse) in his past year’s report estimates that five Arabs have been killed for every Israeli in the frontier clashes. So if the U. N. has failed to protect Israelis under past arrangements, it has failed to an even greater extent to protect Arabs. As far as Gaza is concerned, protection for both is its mission.”
A syndicated columnist doing the arithmetic in 1957, with United Nations figures and the Israeli delegate’s confirmation attached to them: four hundred and ninety-six Arabs against a hundred and twenty-one Israelis in twenty-one months, and four hundred and fifty-two Arabs killed in the first forty-five days of what she calls the Israeli occupation of Gaza. The subheadings are “Israel Rejects Patrols” and “Israelis Inflict Most Deaths.”
H. Y. Orgel, Information Attache, Embassy of Israel
“In his column ‘New Serajevo in Jordan crisis?’, published on April 25, your columnist, Constantine Brown is completely wrong when he writes that ‘hundreds of thousands of Arabs were forced out of the country (Israel). All the refugees moved across the border into the little kingdom which in the past was barely capable of supporting its own small population of nomads.’ The unfortunate human beings who are today known as the ‘Arab refugees’ were not ‘forced out’ but left at the behest of their own Arab leaders. The Jewish agency for Palestine, which was preparing itself to become the ‘provisional government of Palestine’ was at that time making its plans on the understanding that the Arab inhabitants of the area to become Israel would remain as full citizens of the State of Israel. Indeed, Israel’s Declaration of Independence contains an appeal to the Arabs of Israel and the neighboring countries to co-operate in living in peace with the new state for the well-being and development of the whole Middle East area. Furthermore, the refugees did not go into a ‘little Kingdom.’ Those who moved eastwards into the area controlled by the King of Transjordan went into a country which was at that time in the process of swallowing up the larger part of an area originally intended to be an independent Arab state, linked economically not with Transjordan but with the newly-established Jewish state.”
The claim in its finished form, in 1957, in a letter from the Israeli Embassy correcting the paper’s own columnist for having written that the Arabs were forced out. Nine years after the fact and two months after the same paper printed Dorothy Thompson saying the opposite.
Study of Arab Propaganda Here Lists Role of Anti-Zionist Jews
Milton Friedman, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Washington
“WASHINGTON—An evaluation of the Arab propaganda campaign in the United States published in Beirut gives anti-Zionist Jews more credit for effective anti-Israel pressure than it allocates to Americans of Arab descent.”
The cartoon above the story shows a figure labeled BRITISH OIL CO. standing over a sack marked ISRAEL, captioned “NO MENTION OF HIS LITTLE GREMLIN.”
Fifteen years on, Jewish anti-Zionism is no longer an argument among Jews. It is filed under foreign propaganda. The scan held here is 276 pixels wide, so only the opening sentence has been re-read word by word.
“The second great awakening came when Palestinian refugees, fleeing from what is now Israel, fanned out through the Arab world. While the lot of the refugees, in many cases, has been hard, their political influence has been tremendous. They have been the single greatest factor in the Arab awakening since the end of Turkish rule… Every Arab delegation to the United Nations in New York has one or more Palestinian refugees serving as adviser… Wealthy refugees, of course, are in a great minority. The vast majority of refugees are peasants still living in camps… The refugees would never stand for it. They want to remain in their camps, even in poverty, as a symbol of bitterness against Israel, a symbol of determination to go back to Israel. No matter what their poverty, no matter how long they have to wait, they prefer to sit in filth and bitterness till the day comes when they can return.”
Drew Pearson’s syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round, datelined Amman, with Palestinian Refugees in the headline in 1957. Copyright 1957 by the Bell Syndicate, Inc.
Communists Clash With Police In Demonstration On Kfar Kassem
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Tel Aviv
“TEL AVIV (JTA) — Communist efforts to exploit the first anniversary of the slaying of 49 Arabs in Kfar Kassem village led to a police crackdown in which many Communists were arrested following a clash with police in the streets of Nazareth. The clash was the second Communist-inspired effort to gain political capital from the Kfar Kassem slayings. The first was an attempt by Tewfik Toubi, Communist Arab member of the Knesset, to break into the Arab village despite a police cordon. The Kfar Kassem disaster, which occurred on the eve of the Sinai operation, remains a source of bitterness and tension despite Premier Ben Gurion’s expressions of regret and the compensation paid to the families of the victims. The fact that the military tribunal has not completed court martial hearings in the case has increased the bitterness of the region, which the Communists are trying to exploit.”
Forty-nine people killed at Kfar Qasim, reported a year later as a problem of Communist exploitation. The killings are named in the first sentence and never described. The Arab member of the Knesset who tried to reach the village is named.
“The two officers and seven enlisted men are accused of shooting the Arabs at the village of Kfar Kassem when the villagers—men, women and children—were found outside their homes in violation of an all-night curfew. The incident occurred immediately after Israeli launched its Sinai campaign but was not disclosed officially until Dec. 12. Officials condemned the action in parliament.”
The suppression stated plainly in the paper’s own words: the killings happened as the Sinai campaign began and were not disclosed officially until 12 December. “Israeli” for “Israel” is the paper’s.
Israel to Pay Compensation to Heirs of Arabs Killed in Kfar Kassem
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM (JTA)—A special commission investigating the murder of 48 Arabs at Kfar Kassem an Arab village in Israel, has recommended that the Israel Government pay 5,000 pounds compensation to the heirs of every man and woman killed in the affair, plus certain other sums to dependents of the dead and to persons wounded in the shootings. Premier David Ben Gurion has pledged to honor the committee’s recommendations. The Arabs were returning from the fields the evening of the day the Israeli Army opened the Sinai drive. Unaware of a curfew imposed on the area in their absence, they panicked when suddenly faced by an Israeli military partol which ordered them to halt. They turned and ran and the soldier, under orders of a lieutenant, opened fire. The officer and several enlisted men are awaiting trial on charges of unjustified firing on the Arab population.”
The word in the first line is murder, and the number is 48. Printed in a Jewish community weekly in Buffalo. “partol” is the paper’s.
“PEACEMAKING FEAST IN KAFR KASIM—Israeli Jews and Arabs join in a feast at Kafr Kasim, Israel, on the Arab Jordan border, symbolizing forgiveness and atonement for the slaughter in the village last year. An Israeli border police patrol killed 49 Israeli Arabs and wounded 14 on October 29 last year for breaking a suddenly imposed curfew. The feast, known as Soulha or peacemaking, symbolized acceptance by Israeli Arab villagers of government compensation for their killed and wounded.”—AP Wirephoto.
A year after the killings, the photograph of the sulha: the two sides at one long table, and a caption that uses the word slaughter and gives the number as forty-nine. The last sentence explains what the meal was for.
“‘Palestinian’ Patriots. KIRYAT AMAL, Israel — Passing through Ness Ziona, a settlement of private orange growers, to the south of Tel Aviv, I noticed an odd looking structure set amongst the buildings of the village. It looked like a mosque, but was very primitive, as though made of mud. ‘What is that building?’ I asked someone in the bus. ‘That’s the mosque belonging to the community of Arabs from Egypt which used to live here. They came to work in the orange groves of Ness Ziona, and fled during the War of Liberation.’ It suddenly occurred to me: Are these ex-Egyptians from Ness Ziona among the Arab refugees who are sitting in the Gaza strip, and elsewhere, demanding to be repatriated to Palestine? And what about the laborers from the Hauran, who created a shanty town suburb on the outskirts of Jaffa, on either side of the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway? For a few pitstres these ‘Palestinian’ patriots were always ready to create a disturbance. Armed with stones and cudgels, they started the murderous assault on traffic which began the riots of 1936. Are these patriots and their offspring also among the Arab refugees demanding to be returned to Palestine, at Jewish expense? And what about all the other Arabs who began pouring into Palestine from Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan and Egypt, from 1920 onwards? It was a natural drift from countries of depressed standards to the one country in the Middle East where there was steady work, rising wages, and decreased death rate for their children. No Accurate Estimate Available. The Palestine Royal Commission Report of 1937 (known as the Peel Report) admits that no accurate estimate can be made of the number of Arabs who have come into Palestine from neighboring Arab lands and settled there. This incidentally, reveals an astonishing carelessness to Arab immigration as opposed to the pained anxiety with which the Palestine Administration counted every Jewish immigrant to Palestine. As many a bereaved family remembers, the Authorities even sent refugees back to gas chambers, rather than admit one more than the ‘legal’ limit. Whatever the number of Arab immigrants into Palestine, the Peel Report records that during the first 17 years of the Jewish National Home, the Arab population in Palestine increased over 50%! ‘These are remarkable figures,’ the report admits, ‘especially in view of the general belief that the population of Palestine under the Ottoman regime was more or less stationary.’ And so if the truth were known — which appears to be the last thing that the governments concerned seem to want known — most of the so-called Palestinian Arab refugees are probably not Palestinian at all. These miserable people who have been kept in stagnation and decay which is even a greater disgrace to the Western Powers, for it is they who have implanted the Arab governments to make political pawns of human being — at Western expense — these people would not so easily have fled if they had real roots in Palestine. Some Arabs Remained. All around Kiryat Amal, where I live, and throughout the Galilee, there are Arab farmers, going their own way, as they have always done. There are Arab farmers all over Israel. They also must have heard the Arab leaders’ order to the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes ‘so as to clear the way for the victorious Arab armies.’ Not only were their own leaders inciting them to leave, but no less an authority than Great Britain’s Near East Arab Broadcasting Station. Here is a quotation from a recent and shocking article on this station’s activities, as revealed by Ray Alan in American published ‘The Reporter’: ‘By playing up anti-Jewish atrocity stories and the Arab leaders’ order to the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes . . . the station . . . gave strong encouragement to the exodus that created the Arab refugee problem.’ What a slimy tissue of lies has been cast over this whole business of Arab refugees. Each Power has been so busy trying to truss up Israel and throw us to the wolves, they don’t see that they’ve got themselves hog tied, and the only country left with any freedom of action in the Middle East is Russia.”
The argument that the refugees were not really Palestinian, made in 1958 with the word in scare quotes in the headline. It is one of the clearest statements in the archive of the claim the collection is assembled against, and it is printed here in full.
“Cairo, March 11 (AP)—Egyptian authorities are to announce Saturday a new organic law for the Gaza Strip giving Palestinians greater participation in the government. But the Egyptian military government will retain supreme powers. As published in the Gaza Official Gazette, the law gives Palestinians a big majority over Egyptians in the 30-man Legislative Council… This will be the first time Gaza Palestinians have had a hand in governing the strip as a whole… Nasser Motives Eyed. Palestinians living in the area have elected their own municipal councils but had no participation in the over-all government… An all-Palestine government was formed in 1948 with its capital in Gaza and still exists in theory. This government never took over administrative functions in Gaza, however, and its ministers spent most of their time in Cairo. The new Legislative Council will include 23 Palestinians and 7 Egyptians.”
One dispatch, two papers, two headlines. This one leads with the people.
“CAIRO, March 12 (AP)—Egyptian authorities are to announce Saturday a new organic law for the Gaza Strip giving Palestinians greater participation in the government. But the Egyptian military government will retain supreme powers. As published in the Gaza Official Gazette, the law gives Palestinians a big majority over Egyptians in the 30-man legislative council. But the Egyptian governor general will have veto power over all legislation and Egyptians will dominate the nine-man executive council. This will be the first time Gaza Palestinians have had a hand in governing the strip as a whole. The strip has been governed by Egyptian military authorities since the 1948 Palestine war.”
The same Associated Press copy as the Evening Sun the day before, trimmed and re-headlined.
Needs of Palestinian Arab Refugees Are Ignored by the UN and the World
Dorothy Thompson
“Needs of Palestinian Arab Refugees Are Ignored by the UN and the World. (Opinions herein expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily coincide with the views of the Citizen Patriot.) It is deeply regrettable that Henry R. Labouisse has resigned as director of the United Nations relief and works administration (UNRWA) — although nobody can blame him. The former State department official who originally took the job for a year stayed four, far from his home and family. Mr. Labouisse has worked with unflagging vigor but with continual discouragement. The plain fact is that with all the talk about the importance of the Middle East nobody wants to do much, if anything, about the Palestinian refugees, whose plight is, nevertheless, one of the scandals and these times and a chief impediment to stable conditions in the Middle East. Meager Funds. Mr. Labouisse did all he could with the meager funds allotted by the UN for their relief, but even getting the pledged money was a continual struggle. What was pledged was wholly insufficient to do a job of rehabilitation, which was Mr. Labouisse’s ardent aim. Recently he had been trying to increase $33,000,000 to $40,000,000 annually—which had been budgeted but was not forthcoming, and which in view of the magnitude of the problem is a pittance anyhow. The refugees number nearly a million. Their physical conditions have improved since I first visited their camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan seven years ago. Most of them now have something more substantial over their heads than a leaking tent, or the roof of a cave, or an old Roman viaduct. They are no longer living in Damascus mosques, big families separated from each other only by burlap curtains and with sanitary facilities unspeakable. People also now know that they exist, these victims of the partition of Palestine, forced out of the land of their ancestors to make room for a new immigration from elsewhere. For a long time there was a veritable conspiracy of silence about the expropriation of their lands and property, and the circumstances under which they fled or were forced out. Now people know. But to do anything for Arabs is an unpopular cause. When Jews lost their homes first in Germany and then in Europe and were threatened with extinction, hundreds of millions of dollars were voluntarily raised for their aid, and tens of thousands of visas made available, in America and elsewhere. There was an immediate response from the West to aid the victims of the Hungarian uprising a year and a half ago. But there are no visas, no chance for a new life for Arab victims. Christians. The Palestinians, originally the Canaanites, are one of the most intelligent of the Arab groups. Most of them were agriculturalists, farmers or farm workers, craftsmen and businessmen, though among them were doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. A large proportion of them are Christian. There are few American citizens of Arab extraction, but they are exceptionally peaceable, law-abiding, thrifty and self-supporting. You seldom find an Arab name among criminals, adult or juvenile. But the Arabs, from wherever they come, continue to be treated as Ishmael and Esau, done out of their inheritance by younger brothers.”
A nationally syndicated American columnist in 1958 calling the refugees “forced out of the land of their ancestors” and naming the silence about it. It runs above an advice column and beside a note about statues of American presidents in London.
“BEIRUT, (AP)—A little card worth $1.50 a month stands between the Palestine Arab refugee and despair these days. Once the barometer of Middle Eastern politics, the refugee feels left out of things in these days of feuds between pro-Nasser and anti-Nasser factions in the Arab world. The United Nations talks more about Lebanon and Iraq than about Palestine. But so long as the refugee hangs on to his UN ration card, he has hope. Economically, the card means he can eat. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine distributes rations to more than 830,000 refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. These are the people, or children of people, who fled their homes in Palestine 10 years ago and have lived off UN rations ever since. What He Gets. The monthly ration gives the refugee something like six pounds of flour, a pound and a half of beans, an equal amount of sugar and rice and a little more than a pound of fat or oil. On local markets, the value of these rations runs to little more than $1.50. To the refugee, the ration card also represents a political claim. Issued by the UN, it implicitly recognizes that he has been dispossessed and that has a claim to something back in Palestine. To an outsider, it is almost impossible to believe that these refugees still are convinced they will go back to homes inside what now is Israel. Israel has celebrated its 10th anniversary, but the Arab refugees has not begun to accept Israel as permanent. They insist the Arabs one day will conquer Israel and restore the refugees. Resist Resettlement. This atttitude—unchanged in 10 years—partly explains the refugees’ resistance to resettlement and their determination to cling to that ration card. There are more refugees on rations now than five years ago. UNRWA is on a treadmill in its efforts to solve the refugee problem. When an Arab dies in a refugee camp, his family may bury him secretly and continue to draw his rations. When a son goes to Kuwait or Iraq and finds a job, the family stays behind in a refugee camp in Jordan or Gaza and holds on to the son’s ration card. The son later returns to live in the camp; he doesn’t go to Kuwait to stay. The refugees don’t want to exchange that ration card for a job. It would look too much like giving up their ‘ticket back to Palestine.’ This straw of hope may be taken from the refugees when UNRWA’s mandate expires in 1960. UN member states are tired of contributing to a program that gets nowhere. In 1953, UNRWA was feeding 806,620 refugees. Five years later, UNRWA is feeding 836,777. The increase is due largely to birth rate. The number who become self-supporting, who emigrate, or who are reported dead is negligible… The refugees also are in danger of losing their political position in the Arab world. Arab leaders are forgetting to list Palestine first among their grievances. They are fighting over other things… ‘Did you hear that speech?’ a worried Palestinian asked. ‘He didn’t say much about Palestine, did he?’ In spite of these omens, the refugees still place blind hope in what the ration card represents.”
A wire correspondent explaining, in 1958, why the ration card was refused as a trade for a job: it was the receipt for a claim. “Atttitude” is the paper’s.
Henry N. Taylor, Scripps-Howard Staff Writer, Jericho, Jordan
“JERICHO, Jordan, Aug. 5—Here 1200 sweltering feet below sea level, where the River Jordan stagnates into the Dead Sea, sit 90,000 of the world’s angriest and—right now—most frightened people. They are Palestinian refugees who used to live in what 10 years ago became Israel. They still want to go home… SECRETS. ‘I will show you two secrets,’ said a man with flashing black eyes outside a refugee hut near the walls of ancient Jericho. Inside the mud brick hut he untangled a muddle of old clothes and shook two objects out on the matted floor. One was a key to his abandoned house in Jaffa, Israel. The other was a photo of Abdel Nasser… CAME IN ’48. Most came here to Jericho in the winter of 1948 after midnight departures with little more possessions than the family and maybe a mule could carry. The refugees claim they were driven out at Israeli bayonet point. The Israelis say they fled with no urging… along the rows of possessionless huts in a camp which houses 27,000 with only eight known beds—you hear one clear word out of every mumble of Arabic. The word is ‘Nasser.’”
The key is kept in a bundle of old clothes, and the two explanations of 1948 are printed four paragraphs apart in the same column.
“GAZA, Dec. 26 (AP).—United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold today ended his three-day visit to the Gaza Strip by calling at two refugee camps. He was greeted by shouts of ‘We want to return to our homes.’ Thousands of Arab refugees from Israeli Palestine lined his route to the camps carrying banners reading ‘Welcome to Palestine, Hammarskjold. We demand immediate repatriation.’ About one million Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Many of them live in this strip now administered by Israel and guarded by a U. N. emergency force. One refugee student complained to Mr. Hammarskjold that students who graduate from secondary schools cannot find work and that UNRWA (United Nations Work and Relief Agency) is doing nothing to help them. The student complained that the U. N. alloted more money to the UNEF than to UNRWA. Mr. Hammarskjold answered that he and his assistants were working within the limits of money given by U. N. members. Mr. Hammarskjold also visited Dier Elbalah camp where 3,000 refugees are living. He arrived Tuesday to spend Christmas with UNEF contingents patrolling the demarcation line separating Israel and Gaza.”
The verb is driven, and the noun is Palestinians, in Associated Press copy in 1958. Ten years of wire stories had said fled, left, evacuated and reached. The people shouting at the Secretary-General are quoted in the second sentence, and what they shout is that they want to go home.
“IN JORDAN one soon gets an impression that Palestinian refugees are about its only inhabitants. Actually Jordan has only 567,369 registered refugees, 36 per cent of its total population, but there are thousands of others who never registered as refugees, and they seem to be running the country. On the way from the airport, north of Jerusalem, to the new Ambassador hotel, the taxi driver points west toward Israel’s part of the Holy City, across a narrow strip of no man’s land. ‘I had a big automobile service station right over there,’ he says. Hussein Affifi, receptionist at the hotel, which is on Mount Scopus, takes this reporter out in front, where there is a fine view of the whole city. He points to a three story, 12 room house a few hundred yards away and says he lost it to the Jews when they occupied most of the city outside its ancient walls in 1948. The barman, Said Ahmad, an engaging young man, tells about the massacre at Deir Yassin, a village northwest of Jerusalem, where his father had a small farm. ‘I was 14,’ he says. ‘The Jews mowed down men, women, and children with machine guns. My father was blinded in a grenade explosion. I have supported my father, mother, and two sisters since then. In 1951 I applied for UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works agency] rations but was told it was too late.’ It is a cliche that Palestinian refugees greatly exaggerate Jewish atrocities. However, the Deir Yassin massacre is described by Jon Kimche, editor of an English Zionist organ, in his ‘Seven Fallen Pillars’ as ‘the darkest stain on the Jewish record.’ Menachem Begin, former commander of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, Jewish terrorist organization, and now a member of Israel’s knesset [parliament], denies that his men massacred the villagers but does not minimize the effect of Deir Yassin on the Arabs of Palestine. In ‘The Revolt: Story of the Irgun,’ Begin writes: ‘Arabs thruout the country, induced to believe the wild tales of “Irgun butchery,” were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede.’… Five Persons to a Room 10 Feet Square. Four of Jordan’s largest UNRWA camps, with a total population of about 85,000, are in the Jericho area of the Jordan valley… Aqabat Jaber, largest of all UNRWA camps with more than 40,000 residents, is about one mile south of Jericho and three miles west of ancient Gilgal, where the Israelites pitched their first camp after crossing the Jordan river into the Promised Land… There are two and three family units at Aqabat Jaber, and the average occupancy is five persons to a room 3 meters [about 10 feet] square… Since UNRWA’s budget allowance for basic rations in Jordan is only $15 a year [$1.25 a month] per person, one may wonder where the refugees get the money for such commercial activity. Ibrahim Aburish, the camp director, who is a refugee from Israel’s part of Jerusalem, explains that most of the men find work of some kind for a few weeks or a few months each year… Insist Palestine Must Be Arab Nation. ‘Palestine must be an Arab country,’ said Mohammed Ali Kawamleh, the camp director, a refugee from Zakaria village, near Hebron. ‘There is no other solution. The hopes of the refugees now are higher than ever. All the Arab countries soon will be united, and Israel cannot resist such a force. Without western backing, Israel is nothing. When the Arabs are united the western countries will realize that it is against their interest to back Israel. Then Israel will be finished.’ A bearded mukhtar, wearing a turban, said the director had expressed the unanimous sentiment of Kalandia’s refugees. ‘Even young children who were born here say the same,’ the mukhtar declared. ‘If Israel wants peace, the Jews will have to live in an Arab country. If not, we are ready to take our homes and our lands by force. There is no alternative.’ He said he lost 45 dunums [11.25 acres] of orange trees and a fine house, worth together about 55,000 dinars [$154,000], near Jaffa, and now is living with his wife, four sons, and three daughters in the refugee camp. Before the Palestine war in 1948, most of Kalandia’s 3,000 refugees were small farmers, with 60 or 70 dunums of land, but some owned as much as 1,000 dunums, the camp director said.”
“Map locates points mentioned in articles on this page.”
A Chicago reporter in 1959 writing down what refugees told him, with their names, their trades and what they had owned. He also checks the Deir Yassin account against a Zionist editor and against Begin’s own book, and quotes both.
CARE Seeks To Help Hungry Arab Refugees From Palestine
Dr. George S. Benson, “Looking Ahead”
“The shocking plight of these Arab refugees has not been adequately reported in America… The Texan is A. K. Baracat, Amarillo merchant. Born in Jerusalem, he came to Texas more than 50 years ago… He wrote his Congressman and Senator Lyndon Johnson. He wrote Vice President Richard Nixon, and President Eisenhower… Mr. Baracat kept after them… It gives us a dramatic answer to the question: ‘But, what can an ordinary citizen do?’”
A Palestinian American who is neither a victim nor, in the papers’ word, a propagandist: a merchant in Amarillo who spent years writing to a president, a vice president and a future president until an aid agency moved. Told he was beating his head against a wall, and held up by a syndicated columnist as the answer to what an ordinary citizen can do.
“The Arabs, on the other hand, claim the Israelis are discriminating against the 213,000 Arabs who remained in Israel after the 1948 fighting. Cairo, Amman and other Arab capitals repeatedly claim the Arabs in Israel are treated as ‘second-class citizens’ subject to special restrictions and deprived of equal educational and religious opportunities. A few months ago, the Israeli government eased special restrictions on the movement of Israeli Arabs, allowing them to travel freely—during the day—to most major communities. Previously all Arab citizens of Israel, confined to three large military government areas, were required to obtain special permits from the military governor before they could journey from their homes to any other part of the country. The military governors still retain authority to place an Israeli Arab under ‘preventive arrest’ if his activities arouse suspicion. The governors also are empowered to order an Israeli Arab moved from one district to another. These special regulations are not applied to Jewish citizens of Israel.”
The permit regime, explained to American readers in 1959, under a subheading that reports it as an easing. Two hundred and thirteen thousand Arab citizens, three military government areas, travel permitted during the day, preventive arrest retained, forced transfer between districts retained. The last sentence is the paper’s own and it is one line long.
“The Arabs have lost, by the emergence of the state of Israel, their homes, fields and country which, as history has shown, can be regained. But the Jews are in mortal danger of losing their souls and status as a people of justice and mercy which was their most precious possession for centuries… The Jews themselves… refused in 1906 to accept a generous offer by the British government to settle them in Uganda… Why should they expect that the Arab refugees, who had lived in Palestine all their lives… will give up their claims to their homes…? … Is all this not too great a price to pay for a state?”
The pivot of the Jewish-dissent thread in this collection. The earlier nodes — 1898, 1907, 1919, 1922, 1947 — argue about loyalty and how Zionism makes American Jews appear. Zukerman argues about consequence, in a general-audience American newspaper, eleven years after the state, and names four Jewish figures who had said it before him: Rabbi R. Benjamin, Moshe Smilansky, I. Nachman Steinberg and Judah L. Magnes.
“CHRISTMAS IN THE GAZA STRIP—These two Palestinian refugee girls are Christian Arabs, spending this Christmas in a camp for the 10,000 displaced persons living in the Gaza Strip. They are Mary Aubersi (left) and Nora Nakhle, whose father fled Palestine in 1948. Nora has never seen a Christmas tree.”—AP Wirephoto.
Two Palestinian girls, named, in a Christmas wire photograph in 1959. The caption says Palestinian refugee girls, says Christian Arabs, and ends on a detail nobody needed to include.
Dr. Izzat Tannous, Director of the Palestine Arab Refugee Office, before the Special Political Committee of the United Nations, 30 November 1959 · Part IV
“I happen to be a Christian Arab of Christian parents born in Nablus in Palestine. My home is in Jerusalem where I lived all my life. I am not permitted to go back to my home by the Israelis… for the simple reason that I was not born a Jew… my home is only 300 yards away from the armistice line… I see them both in front of me and I see people in them going in and out, but I cannot move one inch forward… Give me the desert on Earth, Give me back my home.”
A Palestinian speaking at length, in the first person, in an American newspaper, in 1959. The same man had been quoted by the Associated Press in a Virginia daily five years earlier. The page around him carries a concert notice at Our Lady of Lebanon Church Hall and news of who is visiting whose family.
Part of Covering Palestine, an archive of 1262 newspaper clippings about Palestinians printed in 512 papers between 1799 and 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles. Nothing here was printed after 6 October 2023.