· Courier-Journal · Louisville · page 1
Plea For Forgotten People
Mother With Sick Child, Camp Jabalia, Gaza
· Evening Express · Portland · page 1
Nations Absorb Arab Refugees, Moslem Charges
United Press International, Atlantic City
“ATLANTIC CITY N. J. (UPI)—Seif Eddine Zu’pi, mayor of Nazareth, Israel, charged Wednesday night that more than one half of Arab refugees supposedly in camps in nations near Israel have been absorbed into the population of those countries but propagandists have been ‘secretive’ about it. Zu’pi, a Moslem, said Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon now hold some 300,000 in the camps but have not told the story of the absorption of the majority of the refugees from Israel. He said the Arabs would not return to Israel ‘even if they were offered the opportunity.’ Zu’pi is in the United States to attend the International Mayor’s Conference in Washington. The 150,000 Arabs who live in Israel today, Zu’pi said, have full citizenship rights and are ‘loyal citizens.’”
A Palestinian mayor of Nazareth, touring the United States, arguing the opposite of what most Palestinian voices in this archive argue. The paper prints him without a reply.
· THE CARAVAN · Brooklyn
Arab Refugees Get $5,000 From Jewish Charity Fund
“Nothing I have ever seen in Hong Kong, India or elsewhere compares to the frightful conditions of Camp Wavell and Gouraud, near Baalbeck in Lebanon… No one can tell me that the Arabs want to remain in this type of camp. I don’t believe it… Americans do not know the truth about the Arab refugee situation.”
An Arab-American weekly reporting a gift from the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. Henry S. Moyer, the fund’s president, had been to the camps. The loans bought sewing machines, carpenter tools, fruit and grocery stands and cobblers’ equipment — the same object the Mennonites brought to Surif in 1970 and the same one the Surif Women’s Cooperative was still working with in 2023.
· Jackson Advocate · page 1
Get ‘Food for Peace’
“The U.S. Food for Peace program will provide 95,000 tons of floor to help feed 1 million Palestine refugees in Jordan, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria. The program will be administered by the United Nations Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA). Use of surplus products, under the Food for Peace program, has enabled the United States to reduce its cash contribution to the UNRWA.”
Four sentences in a Black Mississippi weekly in 1962. A million Palestine refugees, counted, in a note about American surplus grain — and the last sentence is about what the arrangement saves the United States. “floor” is the paper’s.
· The Patriot Ledger
Palestinian Arab Refugee Problem Unsolved
· The Plain Dealer · Cleveland · page 1
Rabbi ‘Warns’ U.S. Jews About Fund
ANTI-ZIONIST SPEAKS
“Rabbi Elmer Berger, a leading anti-Zionist spokesman executive vice president of the American Council For Judaism, yesterday urged givers to the United Jewish Appeal to understand what they are involved in when they contribute to it. ‘No U.S. citizen should be asked or pressured into giving money to a fund which is partially in the interest of a foreign state,’ he said, at a press conference in Hotel Sheraton-Cleveland. He urged newspaper, television and radio representatives to help American Jews understand what is involved in their support of Zionism, which he described as ‘an extremely sophisticated movement.’ RABBI BERGER asserted that efforts to get a thorough accounting of the final allocation of all money raised by the United Jewish Appeal have not been successful. ‘We have to deal with this problem rationally and responsibly,’ he explained. ‘We understand the emotional support for Israel and Zionism, especially since Hitler.’ Rabbi Berger said he was not sure that in 50 years any of the small states in the Middle East, including Israel, would be in existence. HE SAID THAT the American Council For Judaism has its own philanthropic fund. He said his organization’s membership was not growing rapidly but asserted its influence was expanding. The council is a national organization of anti-Zionist Americans of Jewish faith.”
Jewish anti-Zionism in a mainstream metropolitan daily in 1963, with a press conference, a local chapter and forty people at a reception in Shaker Heights.
· Valley News · Van Nuys · page 1
Palestinian Artists Depict Tragedy of Great Exodus
Worth a Thousand Words
“Two Palestinian artists, the husband and wife team of Ismail and Tamam Shammout, today are looking back to the experience of their recent exhibition, warmed by the reception of Valley viewers and still carrying the memory of faces, both old and young, as they first looked upon the canvases. The exhibit, called the Arab Art Show and held at UCLA International Center, depicted the story, through pigment and brush, of the artists’ own personal tragedy, lived with almost a million other Palestinians… A native of Lydda, Ismail was only 17 when he trekked out of his home town in 1948 with his family and 80,000 other refugees. A frail, 3-year-old brother died of thirst and exhaustion on the 24-hour exodus under a searing sun to the nearest Arab town. Here, for the first few years of refugee life, Ismail earned an existence selling bread and fruits. It was not until four years later that he could even afford paper and pencil. After teaching for a short time at a Quaker refugee school in Gaza, where the classroom was a tent and the students sat on the floor, Ismail went to Cairo where he finally managed to join the School of Fine Arts. Here the boy worked daily until midnight to earn his scant living. But with all the hardships and privations, there was one consolation: There was Tamam. Tamam was another Palestinian refugee with an almost identical background, from Jaffa. She and Ismail were bound closer together when they discovered that each sought the same goal — to put on canvas, the plight of their countrymen… Both now have built themselves a name of international honor, with their lives still devoted to the original goal of recording for all time, in the blood-reds, the deep blacks, the grays and the earth-browns of their palettes, the tragedy of Palestine.”
The archive had nothing from 1964 before this. A suburban California paper, nineteen years before the word Nakba reaches American print, describing the expulsion from Lydda, eighty thousand people on the road and a three-year-old dead of thirst on the way — in the arts pages, under a standing head that reads Worth a Thousand Words. The dead child is the only person in the story who is not named.
· Toronto Star · Toronto · page 1
A Solution for Palestinians?
Martin Goldfarb, The Southern Israelite
· Courier-Journal · page 1
Refugee Crisis Forming On Jordan’s West Bank
Flight From Israelis
From L.A. Times-Washington Post Service and NYT Dispatches
“A new refugee problem of tragic proportions is shaping up as a result of the Middle East war and Israeli occupation of Jordan’s West Bank area. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) issued an urgent appeal yesterday to the world for money and medical supplies to cope with a flood of new refugees into Jordan—a flood now estimated to have reached the 100,000 mark. UNRWA officials in Beirut said 80 per cent of the new refugees were people already on their rolls, which number 1.3 million Arabs who fled Palestine in 1948, plus their descendants born to the refugee life. Meanwhile, the United States was reported by Johnson administration officials yesterday to have cautioned Israel against any forceful eviction of Palestinian refugees and Jordanian citizens from the territory it has occupied in Jordan. In reply, the Israeli government was said to have given general assurances of humanitarian treatment for any refugees and Jordanian citizens remaining. Within State Department circles, however, there is some question whether the Israeli government may be encouraging some of the Arab residents to leave strategic areas near the Israeli border. The new refugees fled across the Jordan River to the east during last week’s warfare despite appeals by Jordan’s King Hussein to stay where they were. It was a similar exodus in 1948 — that time at the urging of some Arab leaders who wanted to clear civilians out of the area so Arab armies would not harm them — that led to the refugee problem itself. Despite Hussein’s pleas, the new refugees are reported still clogging the roads leading to the Jordan River. Although most appeared to come from camps on the West Bank, many villages—”
Four days after the war ended, one column carries both accounts of why people leave: the State Department wondering whether Israel is encouraging it, and 1948 explained as the urging of Arab leaders. The subheading between them is a question the paper asks itself — “Encouragement From Israel?” The standing head is “Flight From Israelis,” the word occupation is in the first sentence, and the item beside it on the page is about rioting in the Negro section of Cincinnati.
· Calgary Herald · Calgary · page 1
The Endlessly Embattled Land Of Palestine
The bloody story of Palestine does not go back 10, 20, or even 100 years. It reaches over nineteen centuries of fact and legend, exile and homecoming, death and destruction. But the events of our time have their cause mainly in the past 50 years, a period which must be understood if the present is to make any sense.
ELEVEN YEARS AGO, left homeless in 1956 after the Suez war drove them from their home in Israel, these Arab children queued for food in a Jordan refugee camp. Accepting barbed wire enclosures as normal barriers to the outside world, many of them grew up to join the Palestine Liberation Force which, just last week, once again found itself on the losing side in a Middle East conflagration. Today, after the Israeli armies swept once again across Arabian territory, many more such refugees face the prospect of life in camps, perhaps dreaming of the day they will take up arms in the unending Middle East conflict.
A 1967 paper stating this project's thesis, and predicting the cycle's continuation
· The Anniston Star · page 1
Imminent Tragedy Of The Refugees Constitutes Grim Legacy Of Fight
Arabs Flee Jordan’s West Bank
By Joe A. Morris, Jr., The Los Angeles Times, Beirut
“BEIRUT — A new refugee problem of tragic proportions is shaping up as a result of the Middle East war and Israeli occupation of Jordan’s west bank area. The United Nations relief and works agency (UNRWA) Monday issued an urgent appeal to the world for money and medical supplies to cope with a flood of new refugees into Jordan, now estimated to have reached the 100,000 mark. UNRWA officials here said that 80 per cent of the new refugees were people already on their rolls, which number 1.3 million Arabs who fled Palestine in 1948 plus their descendants born to the refugee life. The new refugees fled across the Jordan River during last week’s warfare despite appeals by Jordan’s King Hussein to stay where they were. It was a similar exodus in 1948 — that time at the urging of some Arab leaders who wanted to clear civilians out of the area so Arab armies would not harm them — which led to the refugee problem itself. Despite Hussein’s pleas, the new refugees are reported still clogging the roads leading to the Jordan River. Although most appeared to come from camps on the west bank, many villages there are also reported deserted or semideserted… Perhaps 400,000 refugees remain in Israeli-occupied territory on the west bank. Officials here had little information about conditions in the occupied area, but UNRWA Commissioner General Laurence Michelmore has authorized the continuation of services there on humanitarian grounds. This may be difficult since the Israeli army did not spare UNRWA when it seized every vehicle it could get moving during the takeover… UNRWA carefully sidestepped any question of implicit political recognition of the Israeli territorial acquistions by emphasizing that continued services behind the lines were being carreid out on humanitarian grounds… More than half the refugees on its rolls appear at present to be technically ineligible for aid.”
The same sentence as the Courier-Journal ran the day before, from the same Los Angeles Times copy: the 1948 exodus explained as the urging of Arab leaders who wanted to clear civilians out so Arab armies would not harm them. Beside it, a Crawford cartoon of Uncle Sam holding a UN bag, captioned “All Dressed Up And No Place To Go,” with notes at his feet reading GET LOST! — SYRIA, NO THANKS! — CAIRO and DON’T SHOW YOUR FACE AROUND HERE! — ISRAEL. “acquistions” and “carreid” are the paper’s.
· The Idaho Daily Statesman · page 1
Victory Brings Israel Peacetime Problem of Occupying New Territory
By Lawrence Malkin, Associated Press, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM (AP) — For the Jews of Israel, victory has brought peace but more peacetime problems. The exhilaration of swift triumph over the Arabs in the six-day war is beginning to fade away. Now the Israelis face tasks of reoganization not even imagined before the war erupted on June 5. Israel, a nation of 2.6 million, has swallowed, at least temporarily, about a million Arabs in the Gaza Strip and on the west bank of the Jordan River. Toward the Jews of Israel, they have only implacable hatred. It is believed now that rather than cutting down on military expenses after victory, Israel will be obliged to increase its army to man occupation forces. House-to-house searches for arms have been ordered. Retreating Jordanians left weapons in the hands of people thirsting for vengeance… One Israeli bank official has estimated that the annual cost of maintaining captured areas would be about $50 million. ‘We can handle that, if we have to,’ he said. ‘I am confident we can stay in the territories for a long time if the Arabs refuse to talk. If this goes on long enough, perhaps we shall develop the occupied areas ourselves.’ As of now, the chief value of the occupied areas appears to be as bargaining pawns, if and when the Arabs decide to talk. As Israel takes stock of the results of the brief war, it can consider that the battle was not without its spoils… The Israeli harvest of captured military equipment was enormous. On the drive through Jordan, for example, Israeli forces captured scores of trucks in new condition, all bearing the clasped-hands insignia of the U.S. Agency for International Development program… If the Israelis keep the west bank of the Jordan, they will have land rich in phosphates and with plenty of surplus space to make the desert bloom with fruits and vegetables for export to Europe.”
Eleven days after the war, occupying is in the headline and occupied is in the copy three times, none of it in quotation marks. A million Arabs are swallowed in the fourth sentence, the occupied areas are bargaining pawns in the eighth, and the last column is about phosphates and export markets. “reoganization” is the paper’s.
· The Morning Call · page 1
Crossing the Jordan
“CROSSING THE JORDAN — Arab refugees from the Israeli-occupied west bank of the Jordan River cross the damaged Allenby bridge to the east bank in the vicinity of Jericho.” (AP)
A wire photograph of people walking out across a wrecked bridge, twelve days after the war. The caption says Israeli-occupied in its first line, plainly, with nothing attributed.
· Newsday · page 1
Jordan Refugees Put at 200,000
United Press International, Allenby Bridge, Jordan
“Allenby Bridge, Jordan (UPI)—The number of Palestinian refugees who have fled from Israeli-captured western Jordan since last week’s fighting is now believed to be about 200,000, preliminary results of the first head count showed yesterday. The final figure was to be announced today. It is substantially higher than the 150,000 estimate issued earlier by the Jordanian government and the 100,000 estimate compiled by UN Relief and Works Agency. The count began early yesterday as dozens of teams organized by the government and UNRWA moved into towns, villages and refugee camps eastward from the Jordan River which now forms the Jordan-Israel truce line… In this neighboring Arab nation, new refugees were seen crossing the Jordan River by the hundreds yesterday at the wrecked Allenby Bridge, made passable with wooden boards across the collapsed center part. Men and women carrying babies, small children and bundles of clothing and blankets scrambled down the steep concrete bed of the shattered bridge. They were met by crowds of anxious relatives. Israeli soldiers on the west bank made no attempt to halt fleeing refugees, but watched carefully to stop any trying to come in their direction. Israeli authorities were making it easy for refugees to leave by busing them to the bridge. The first attempt to bring injured Jordanian prisoners of war from the Israeli-captured west bank failed yesterday. Israel cancelled the plan without explanation.”
“JORDAN CROSSING. Young and old Arab refugees from the Israeli occupation of the Jordan River’s west bank are helped across the Allenby Bridge at Jericho yesterday by Israeli troops. A little Arab girl, left, is carried across the Jordan by a soldier, while other soldiers guide an aged man, right, along the damaged bridge toward unoccupied territory.” AP Wirephotos.
Two hundred thousand, counted, twelve days after the war. The mechanism is in one sentence: the soldiers made no attempt to halt the refugees leaving, watched carefully to stop anyone coming the other way, and the authorities were busing people to the bridge. The photographs are captioned as help, and the caption uses the words Israeli occupation and unoccupied territory.
· Santa Barbara News-Press · Santa Barbara · page 1
The Palestinian Refugees…
Our Readers’ Views
Sheldon T. Mills, a former United States ambassador to Jordan
“Editor, News-Press: I wish to thank the News-Press for its kindness in inviting me on June 5 to express my views on the Middle East crisis. When speaking with your reporter I did not know that armed conflict had broken out. Had I known, I still would have confined my remarks largely to the main reason, as I see it, for continued turmoil in the area, namely the presence in countries surrounding Israel of Palestinian refugees from their homes, farms, business establishments, and other livelihoods in Israel. It is in response to numerous requests for more information on this subject, received from a large number of total strangers, that I am writing this letter. It appears this problem is growing worse instead of better. News dispatches report that some 100,000 Palestinians, some of them the refugees of 1948, have crossed the Jordan River from the West Bank. That is the part of Jordan which includes the old city of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus, Tulkarm and Jericho, now occupied by Israeli forces. Is Israel intent on having these people leave their homes or their temporary homes, so it can use their farms, houses, business establishments and other fixed properties for its own purposes? The situation of the refugees is not really understood by many Americans who have not traveled in the countries which have extended them temporary homes. Looking at the map, one sees vast areas in the Arab countries and quite naturally asks why the refugees are not settled on these territories. There are valid reasons. Most of the Arab Middle East is without sufficient water to sustain agriculture. There are light rains on the deserts and a brief crop of grass. Very limited numbers of nomads, by going from oasis to oasis can sustain themselves as herdsmen. Few of the refugees, however are nomads. They are either city and town people or farmers from the villages of Palestine. They could no more sustain life in the desert than you or I. Those who can be absorbed have been absorbed, at least in Jordan. None wish to live on the 10 cents per day UN ration in refugee camps. Refugees have provided a considerable proportion of the professional people and government officials of Jordan — doctors, dentists, pharmicists, businessmen, bankers, architects, builders, etc. The 80 per cent in refugee camps are those who were farmers or laborers. There is no land with water for the former. There are few industries to provide work for the latter, who also must compete with the unskilled labor force of the East Bank. Many traditional Arab farmers of Palestine were forced to leave the land even before Israel came into being. They were tenant farmers of absentee landlords who sold their land to Jewish organizations who wanted it not for its yield, but for Jewish immigrants. Mobile Americans, particularly Californians, find it difficult to understand attach…”
A former American ambassador to Jordan writing to his local California paper to answer strangers who had asked him why the refugees were not simply settled elsewhere. He answers with water, soil and the tenant-farming system. The story continues on A-15.
· The Arizona Republic · Phoenix · page 1
The Arabs' View of the conflict's history (Toynbee)
Prof. Arnold J. Toynbee, written for UPI
The last line of the Israelis’ view, as Toynbee sets it out: “…time by a Western people, the Germans, in Europe. We are not going to let the Arabs commit the same crime of genocide against us here, in our own land of Israel.” Then: “THE ARABS’ VIEW of the conflict’s history: In 1918, 90 per cent of the population of Palestine was Arab, and Palestine had been ours since we wrested it from the Romans in the Seventh Century A.D. Since 1918, a militant and aggressive foreign body has been thrust into the heart of our Arab world. This has been done, against our protests, by force of arms — British force until, under the protection of British bayonets, the Zionist Jewish intruders had built up sufficient force of their own to be more than a match for our Arab strength. Then the British scuttled, and left us to our fate. Our fate has been that 900,000 Palestinian Arabs (there are more than a million of these now) have been forcibly deprived of their homes and property and have been turned into refugees, living on a dole. Any Palestinian Arab refugee who tries to return home and resume possession of his property is shot by the Israelis, who have robbed us of our country and our property. The Palestinian Arabs who have not lost their homes are being treated by the Israelis, under whose rule they have fallen, as penalized second-class citizens. The Arab territory that the Israelis have seized by force stretches from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea at Elath. This foreign-occupied territory cuts the Arab world in two.”
A second clipping from the same Arizona Republic page as the Toynbee feature. The word genocide appears in the Israeli case, set out immediately above the Arab case, and the Arab case is printed at the same length.
· The Arizona Republic · Phoenix
'U.S. Has Made Arabs Pay for Germany's Crime Against Jews'
· The Arizona Republic · Phoenix · page 1
A Distinguished Historian Views the Mideast Crisis
The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Its History and Its Prospects, by Prof. Arnold J. Toynbee. 'U.S. Has Made Arabs Pay for Germany's Crime Against Jews' / The Arabs Must Recognize That Israel Is a Fact
Prof. Arnold J. Toynbee, written for UPI
“I will try to put, first, the Israelis’ view of this as I see it, then the Arabs’ view, and thirdly my own view. I am neither an Arab nor an Israeli. I am British, so I feel deeply my country’s share in the responsibility for this tragic conflict between two other peoples. Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917; Britain was in power in Palestine for 30 years ending in 1948. Britain’s precipitate abdication in Palestine after the second World War left the way open in 1948 for the first of the three Arab-Israeli wars.”
“EXODUS FROM ISRAEL—Arab refugees from the west bank of the Jordan River trudge toward Amman, capital of Jordan, on road halfway between the river and the city.” AP Wirephoto.
A full page given to a historian who sets out the Israeli case, then the Arab case, then his own. The two subheadings on the page are “U.S. Has Made Arabs Pay for Germany’s Crime Against Jews” and “The Arabs Must Recognize That Israel Is a Fact.”
· The Flint Journal · Flint
Key to Solution in Mideast Rests on Fate of Refugees
· The Herald Sun · Durham · page 1
Under Merciless Sun, River Of Sorrow
Thousands Flee Israelis Into Jordan
Associated Press, Jericho
“JERICHO (AP) — All day long under the merciless sun, war’s tragic river of sorrow flowed down toward the—… Israel’s two decades old refugee problem has almost dissolved into King Hussein’s refugee problem… crouched behind a .30 caliber machine gun looking out across the shallow, gurgling river…”
A strip cut from the top of a page: the headline, the line beneath it and the first lines of three columns, each broken off.
· The Herald Sun · Durham · page 1
Arabs Crossing River
“Arabs Crossing River. An Arab couple with their child make their way across the bombed-out Allenby Bridge over the Jordan River at Jericho to the east bank of the river. They were among Arab refugees heading into Jordan away from the Israeli occupation on the west bank of the river.” (AP Wirephoto)
The photograph that ran with the Jericho dispatch on the same page.
· Edwardsville Intelligencer · page 1
Jews Most Trouble For Occupation Chief
On West Bank
By James Feron, (c) 1967 New York Times, Jerusalem
“‘We’re in King Hussein’s office,’ the Israeli military governor said. ‘Just six days ago the King was sitting in it. It’s hard to believe.’ Brig. Gen. Chaim Herzog, military governor of the West Bank, or occupied Jordan, is a 48-year-old rabbi’s son with a touch of brogue and a sense of humor. His job is to direct, from an office in former Jordanian Jerusalem, the restoration of order in the occupied area. ‘But do you know what my biggest problem is?’ he asks. ‘It’s the Jews. They want to go to the Wailing Wall and they want to see their old homes and they want this back and that back. It’s very difficult.’ From his window on one of the main streets he can see Israeli soldiers checking passes as Arabs and Israelis arrive with a spectrum of problems. The Arab shops across the street remain tightly shuttered… Herzog said that his advice to Israeli governors in Arab towns, now that the fighting is over, is ‘use plenty of common sense and plenty of Arab labor. We don’t want separate Israeli administrations.’ ‘The Jordanians have been amazed at our approach. The former governor, Anwar El Katib, told me he was flabbergasted. They expected the conquest to be something quite different.’ The result, he said, is that while many Jordanians fled, many have also returned. The flight across the Jordan River continues, he said, but the majority have remained and ‘we hope they will soon open their shops’… ‘In any case, we don’t want the United Nations in here,’ he said. ‘My view is that the U.N. has been a divisive force, not a unifying one. They’ve become a vested interest here. I’d like to work without them.’ He said Israeli instructions were broadcast on expanded Arab transmissions, were contained in bill posters and were announced over megaphones after curfew, which begins at 3 p.m. in cities and 6 p.m. in the country… Israeli soldiers remain on duty throughout Jersualem and other cities… Sunday was the last day to turn in weapons. ‘Then we will have to find them house to house,’ he said. Jerusalem continues to shake with the rumble of unexploded shells being touched off by demolition experts… Bulldozers have cleared a huge plaza in front of the Wailing Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, and tomorrow tens of thousands of Israelis made their first pilgrimage there this week.”
The military governor of the West Bank interviewed in King Hussein’s office sixteen days after the war, in a small Illinois daily. He calls the territory occupied Jordan, calls the war the conquest, says the Jews are his biggest problem, and describes the curfew, the house-to-house weapons search and the bulldozers clearing the plaza at the Wailing Wall. The Arab quarter cleared for that plaza is not mentioned. “Jersualem” is the paper’s.
· The Daily Journal · page 1
Israel Drafts Plan to Absorb Arab Refugees
Eliav Simon, United Press International, Jerusalem
“JERUSALEM, Israel (UPI)– Informed sources today said Israel has drawn up plans to resettle Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Middle East war. About 700,000 Palestinians who fled from what is now Israel fell under Israeli control again in this month’s war. They live in vast, futureless camps in the Gaza Strip and in western Jordan. The presence of the Palestinians, idle for two decades in their camps, has long been a bar to peace in the Middle East… The sources said plans for the refugees are being drawn up regardless of whatever territorial adjustments are made as a result of Israeli conquest of Arab lands.”
Seven hundred thousand, and the word Palestinians, in a 1967 wire story. The sources are Israeli, the money is to come from world Jewry, international organizations and the Arab states, and no Palestinian is quoted.
· Wisconsin State Journal · page 1
Israel to Settle Refugees in Gaza, West Bank Area
Associated Press, Tel Aviv, Israel
“TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel plans to settle tens of thousands of Arab refugees in the Gaza Strip and on the west bank of the Jordan River, an authoritative economics writer said Thursday. Quoting official sources, David Krivine wrote in the Jerusalem Post that the resettlement plans would be made on economic grounds without regard for whatever territorial adjustments eventually may be made between Israel and Arab states. A refugee rehabilitation and settlement authority would be set up, ‘terminating two decades of confinement and idleness within the refugee camps,’ Krivine wrote. Some refugees have been in camps since they were displaced in the 1948 Palestine war. The program would be financed by Israel, but world Jewry, international bodies, and the Arabs themselves would be asked to contribute. ‘Much depends on the cooperation of local Arab authorities,’ Krivine wrote. ‘The first step is to get economic activity restored to its former levels.’”
Eighteen days after the war, a plan to settle the refugees where they are, sourced to an Israeli newspaper quoting official sources. The word for what happened to them in 1948 is displaced, and the two decades in the camps are described as confinement and idleness.
· The Messenger · page 1
Refugees Charge Deportation By Israelis
By Elias N. Antar, Associated Press, Amman, Jordan
“AMMAN, Jordan AP — Palestinian refugees charged today that Israeli troops occupying the Jordan River’s west bank are systematically deporting inhabitants of villages along the 1949 armistice line between Jordan and Israel. Refugees, interviewed in their temporary quarters in an Amman school building, claimed villagers are being removed by force, intimidation and trickery. Several refugees said they were threatened with death if they tried to return to their homes. They said at least two villages on the western edge of the Israeli-occupied west bank region have been leveled by Israeli demolition crews and bulldozers. Other villages were partly destroyed and some of their young men taken away by the Israeli troops, the refugees said. They said the Israelis used ‘terror tactics’ to frighten the villagers, then forced them to leave in buses and on foot for the River Jordan marking the truce line. Thousands of these refugees have crossed into east Jordan since the cease-fire. The villages affected are in an area from which the Israelis claimed Arab guerrillas staged raids into Israel before the six-day war. The two villages which the refugees said had been razed were Qalqilye, an agricultural community of 12,000 about 30 miles northwest of Jerusalem, and Imwas, a village of 3,000 12 miles west of Jerusalem… An Israeli spokesman in Tel Aviv has denied charges that Israeli forces had evacuated Qalqilye and demolished the town. He admitted the town was badly damaged, but said this resulted from the fighting. The spokesman also denied that Palestinian refugees were being herded across the Jordan River by Israeli soldiers. The refugees who were interviewed said they came from Qalqilye and Imwas and from the small village of Kafr Jammal north of Qalqilye. Others said they came from Tulkarm, a town of 25,000 inhabitants 10 miles north of Qalqilye. A 75-year-old farmer and landowner from Imwas said the Israelis tricked him and his family into leaving the village by saying they were being taken to the nearby town of Rammalah for two hours.”
The verb is deporting, in the headline and in the first sentence, attributed to the people it happened to. The method is force, intimidation and trickery. Four villages are named with their populations. The Israeli denial runs to two paragraphs and is printed in full, and the last paragraph is a seventy-five-year-old man explaining how he was got out of his house.
· West Central Tribune · page 1
Exodus From Jordan River’s West Bank
Associated Press, Washington and Amman
“WASHINGTON (AP) — The American Red Cross is shipping $350,000 worth of drugs and medicines donated by 10 U.S. pharmaceutical firms to aid thousands of refugees displaced by the Israeli-Arab war. AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — Palestinian refugees charged that Israeli troops occupying the Jordan River’s west bank are systematically deporting inhabitants of villages along the 1949 armistice line between Jordan and Israel. Refugees, interviewed in their temporary quarters in an Amman school building, claimed villagers are being removed by force, intimidation and trickery. Several refugees said they were threatened with death if they tried to return to their homes. They said at least two villages on the western edge of the Israeli-occupied west bank region have been leveled by Israeli demolition crews and bulldozers.”
The same dispatch, cut to five paragraphs and stacked under a Washington item about donated medicine, with the headline changed from deportation to exodus. The Israeli denial is not in this version.
· St. Joseph Gazette · page 1
Israelis Allowing Arabs Into West Bank Sector
Associated Press, Allenby Bridge, Jordan
“ALLENBY BRIDGE, Jordan (AP) — Israelis let Arab refugees return to their homes in the Israeli-occupied sector of Jordan on Sunday, apparently in a reversal of a previous policy. But the stream of refugees into eastern Jordan from the Israeli sector continued. Israeli guards on Allenby Bridge were allowing Arabs who had fled the Israeli occupation earlier to return to their homes on the west bank of the Jordan River. Arabs seeking to return last week were turned back. The day’s exodus from the Israeli sector ran smoothly in contrast to previous days and no shooting was heard from the western end of this damaged bridge across the river. Several groups of women and children were allowed back, even being helped by Israeli soldiers. Fathers seeking contact with families on the west bank also were able to get over. According to unofficial estimates, between 4,000 and 5,000 people crossed eastward and more than 100 went westward by midday Sunday either to return home or to bring out members of their families. The refugees moved eastward into Transjordan at a rate of 600 an hour at the peak period. There was no panic and little hysteria, in marked contrast to the rush days of the exodus in the middle of last week. The refugees appeared to be better organized. They were able to bring with them more of their household possessions. Sewing machines, tape recorders, tables, chairs, beds and bulky mattresses were carried across the rickety improvised footbridge placed on the broken steel girders.”
Four to five thousand going east and a hundred going west, in one day, three weeks after the war. Six hundred an hour at the peak. The paper counts the furniture they carried over the broken girders. Printed beside an advertisement headed “Facts You Should Know About Car Insurance.”
· Corpus Christi Caller Times · Corpus Christi · page 1
Dayan Says Gaza Strip Will Be Part of Israel
Comment Angrily Attacked
Dayan said in Gaza: “The Gaza Strip is Israel, and I think it should become an integral part of the country.” The head of Jordan’s U.N. delegation, Ambassador Muhammad H. el Farra, told a newsman: “This is part and parcel of the expansionist designs of Zionism.” He added that the “dreams of Zionism” for acquiring more lands and displacing more people will not be fulfilled.
· Guam Daily News · Agāña · page 1
Israel Reveals Plan To Annex Gaza
Arabs Balk At Zionist Expansion
· Daily World · New York · page 1
Stop the arrests and the police terror! Release the political prisoners
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Israel
“The Central Committee protests strongly against the arrest of persons opposed to the war, against the arrest of leaders and members of the Communist Party of Israel and others. Immediately with the opening of the war, many administrative arrests were made according to the British Mandatory oppressive emergency rules from the year 1945. The following comrades were arrested: Zahy KARKABY, member of the Secretariat of the C.C.; the C.C.-members: Mun’em JARJURAH and Othman ABU-RASS; Tawfiq ZAYYAD, Councillor of Nazareth; the members of the editorial board of the organ of the Communist Party (Arabic), AL-ITTIHAD: Ali ASHOUR, Mohammad KHAS, Samih EL-KASSEM and Mahmoud DARWISH; the members of the C.C. of the Young Communist League of Israel, Salem JUBRAN and George GHREIB; Abdul-Hamid ABU-ITA, member of the C.P. district committee of the Triangle and Councillor of Taibeh; Assad MAKI, member of the district committee in Tel-Aviv-Jaffa, secretaries of local branches of the Party and other activists. Some of the arrested were released after 14 days. The arrests of others was prolonged and more were arrested. Lately arrested were: the member of the C.C. and the head of the Communist group in the town council of Nazareth, comrade Fuad KHOURY; the member of the C.C. and councillor of Acre, Ramsi KHOURY; the lawyer Abdul-Hafiz DARAWSHEH, councillor of Nazareth; Youssif SH’HADEH, deputy mayor of Kufr-Yassif; Nassri EL-MOOR, councillor of Ibbeleen, and others. All these comrades are still imprisoned, without guilt and without trial. Other Arab citizens, who are known to be against the war, were arrested too… In the Arab districts of Israel, heaviest restrictions of the freedom of movement were introduced. The Arab people living in those areas were ordered to remain at their homes for several days, without any possibility to go to work and earn a living. In some places, like Taibeh and Kufr-Yassif, police-terror reigned. People were brought to the police-stations and beaten up most brutally ‘to teach them a lesson.’ While doing this, the policemen called: ‘The time has come to settle accounts’ — ‘Democracy has come to an end’ — etc.… The aim of the terror is to quiet the voice of the other Israel, the one which is against war, against aggression and conquests, against hostilities aimed at the Arab people, the voice which fights for a just peace between Israel and the Arab states.”
Fourteen Palestinians named in one column, six weeks after the June war. Two of them are among the best known poets their people have produced: Mahmoud Darwish, who is in this archive again in 1994 and lying in a Houston hospital in 2008, and Samih al-Qasim. A third, Tawfiq Zayyad, turns up nine years later reciting a poem to an American convention. The arrests are made under emergency regulations the British wrote in 1945, and the statement says so in its third sentence. The capitals are the paper’s own.
· The Evening Gazette · page 1
Myths About Palestine Widespread
Arab image suffers
Antoine B. Zahlan, Beirut, Lebanon
“The writer is chairman of the Department of Physics at American University of Beirut. The Observer’s Forum column of July 18 carried a letter from Rabbi Israel J. Gerber under the headline, ‘What About Aggressor Who Loses?’ Visiting your pleasant city, I noticed this letter and as a Palestinian Arab, now a citizen of the Republic of Lebanon, I feel I should try to clarify some points made or assumed in Rabbi Gerber’s comments on the Middle East. Rabbi Gerber begins by stating ‘Except for Russia and the Arab blocs, most governments, news correspondents, analysts and editorial writers agree that the Arab states were the aggressors ...’ It may have been stupid for the Arabs to have had all their planes on the ground when the Israelis attacked in June, but that type of unpreparedness is no characteristic of an aggressor. On the CBS news special July 13, the statements by Israeli military leaders and the comments of General Marshall (USA, Ret.) made it clear that Israel attacked first and at an hour when United Nations delegates would be asleep in New York. I should like to refute some of the many other myths about Palestine to which Americans are so often exposed. 1. The assertion that Palestine has been the property of the Jewish people ‘since the days of King David’ is a myth. For some 2,500 years prior to 1948, there was no political entity called Israel and Palestine was inhabited by Semitic peoples, Aramaic-speaking before the seventh century and mainly Arabic-speaking since. It is untrue that Palestine was an empty land when Zionist colonization began; Arab men, women and children were living there as they always had. 2. The refrain constantly echoed by Zionists that Palestinian Arabs left Palestine of their own accord or at the command of aggressive Arab governments is false. The truth — that Arabs fled from terrorism perpetrated against defenseless people such as those of Deir Yassin, a village near Jerusalem — is contained in the statement of a British Middle East authority: ‘The massacre of Deir Yassin, the latest link in a chain of terror, had struck fear into the hearts of these civilians whose homes lay in the path of Zionist forces. Just as, in 1940, Frenchmen in their thousands fled the advancing Nazis, so, in 1948, before the Zionists, thousands of Arabs did the same and for the same reason.’ (Stewart Perowne, ‘Levant Diary: the Refugee Situation,’ Middle East in Transition, ed. by Walter Z. Laqueur, p. 222) 3. The charge that Arabs are anti-Semitic and persecute Jews is a ludicrous libel. Arabs are Semites themselves. Jewish citizens traditionally played important roles in Arab society and cultural life; the Arab relationship with their Jewish ‘cousins’ was generally happy until the Zionist colonization of Palestine, a project with the declared aim of expelling the Arab population and establishing a Jewish nation-state, began in modern times. Arabs do not hate Jews; Arabs are hostile only to Zionism, a movement dedicated to the expropriation of land on which they had their homes and on which their forefathers had lived for centuries… 5. The assertion that refugees are deliberately confined to camps and kept in penury by Arab governments is untrue. An analogy will illustrate the magnitude of the refugee problem. In Lebanon, the 1948 war brought an influx of some 150,000 refugees into a population numbering 1.5 million. To Lebanon, this was like what bringing 18 million destitute persons into the United States within a few weeks would be to America. For Jordan the situation is worse; there are as many refugees as non-refugees. It should be remembered that some 92 per cent of all private property in Palestine was owned by Arabs before May 15, 1948 (see Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1967, XVII, 171) and that the owners of this land were not only expelled from their homes and the land they loved but were not compensated for even the material loss. My own family, for example, holds United Nations records of our property holdings in Haifa; but for 20 years we have been exiled from our home and for 20 years we have received no offer of compensation. 4. The statement often made that Arab states have received more financial assistance than Israel has is false… 8. Contrary to general opinion here, the Arabs are working hard to solve the refugee problem. Unfortunately, our economic and educational handicaps have prevented our healing the physical wounds (to say nothing of the psychological ones) inflicted upon us by superior power. Like many Southerners, we Arabs perhaps brood overmuch on our wrongs and relive too often our defeats. And because we have not mastered Western techniques of persuasion and public relations, we have failed to do justice to our own just cause.”
A cartoon runs in the same column, unrelated: two figures under an umbrella among a crowd, captioned “They say the earth will soon be overcrowded. How will we know?”
A Palestinian physicist at the American University of Beirut answering a rabbi’s letter point by point in an American forum column, seven weeks after the June war. He cites the Britannica and a British diarist by page number, and gives his own family’s United Nations property records in Haifa as evidence. The closing comparison is to Southerners brooding on their defeats.
· Austin American Statesman · Austin · page 1
The story of a 2,000-year crisis
Palestine saga of blood and sand
A bitter legacy of the war was the expulsion of several hundred thousand Palestine Arabs from their villages to slums on the outskirts of cities in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan and to the Gaza strip. Natural increase brought the refugee population to over 1,000,000—fertile soil for fanatical anti-Israel agitation by Arab nationalism.
A full-page history primer — Herzl, Balfour, Wingate, Irgun, Bernadotte’s assassination, Suez — run in a Texas daily in 1967. The word is expulsion.
· The Spokesman-Review · Spokane · page 1
Joblessness, Closed Banks Hurt Impoverished Arabs
Kicker over the headline: ISRAELI OCCUPATION
Ten weeks after the war, an American paper set the word occupation above the story as a standing label, the way a paper labels a running subject it expects to cover again.
· The Observer · page 1
PALESTINE and ISRAEL
Arab leaders have been meeting in Khartoum to discuss policy towards Israel after the Middle East war. Here ALBERT HOURANI, Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and author of books on Middle East and Arab history, describes the problem of Palestine and Israel as the Arabs see it.
“Palestinian Arabs fleeing along the road out of Bethlehem earlier this year. Picture by David Newell Smith.” The three maps beside it are captioned: “United Nations’ plan, rejected by Arabs, would have split Palestine into Jewish State, Arab State and International zone round Jerusalem, linked in economic union.” “First war left Israel with area twice that of Jewish State in UN plan, with rest of Palestine, including Jerusalem Old City, incorporated into Jordan, except Gaza Strip, under Egyptian rule.” “In latest war Israel occupied all former Palestine, Egyptian Sinai desert down to Suez Canal, and about 700 square miles of Syria. Israel is claiming permanent possession of Jerusalem Old City (UN still advocates internationalised Jerusalem) but is not yet decided about other claims.”
A page given to a historian to set out the Arab case, three months after the June war. The page is dated on the clipping: The Observer, 3 September 1967, page 7. A British paper, so the spellings in the map captions are its own.
· Corpus Christi Caller Times · Corpus Christi · page 1
Gaza Refugees Cross Border
Israeli Officials Remove Restrictions on Travel
· The Turlock Journal · Turlock · page 1
Apartheid - A Positive Appraisal
Wilhelm Ropke (Fragments)
The South African Negro is a man of an utterly different race and level of civilization than the white... Apartheid is such an attempt. It is a separation of the races in order to solve various ethnic problems... One of the most intelligent and just appreciations of apartheid is found in the works of a Zionist author, Paul Giniewski, who emphasizes that Zionism is basically an application of the same principle of pure ethnic separation, as regards the relationship between the Israelis and the Arabs. This, Israel has in common with South Africa: because of her policy, she, too, has to justify herself in the eyes of the world.
The Israel-apartheid comparison drawn in 1967 BY A DEFENDER OF APARTHEID, approvingly, citing a Zionist author making the same comparison. The single most striking document in the archive.
· The News · page 1
Eshkol Flies to U.S. With Arms Request
Seeks to Offset Soviet Supplies
Associated Press, Tel Aviv
“TEL AVIV (AP) — Israeli Premier Levi Eshkol left for the United States today to ask President Johnson for U.S. arms to offset the ‘tremendous Soviet arms supplies to countries in the region.’ Eshkol, accompanied by his wife, Miriam, and several aides, planned a two-week tour to United Nations headquarters in New York, the LBJ Ranch in Texas, Canada and London… In a brief airport statement Eshkol said after Israel’s victory over the Arabs in the six-day June war, ‘There has been opened before us the prospect of security and peace, but at the same time we are possibly faced by new dangers…’ In Beirut, meanwhile, the new head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yahya Hammouda, was quoted as saying there was nothing to prevent Arabs from sharing a common future with Jews ‘who have given up Zionism and racism.’”
The earliest pairing of those two words in this archive, and it is the last sentence of a story about an arms request. Seven years and ten months before the General Assembly voted. This printing stops there. The Telegram and Gazette, running the same dispatch the same day, carries the rest of the interview, in which Hammouda offers to share the country.
· Telegram & Gazette · page 1
Israel Premier Seeks U.S. Arms
Associated Press, Tel Aviv
“TEL AVIV (AP) — Israeli Premier Levi Eshkol left for the United States today to ask President Johnson for U.S. arms to offset the ‘tremendous Soviet arms supplies to countries in the region’… In Beirut, meanwhile, the new head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yahya Hammouda, was quoted as saying there was nothing to prevent Arabs from sharing a common future with Jews ‘who have given up Zionism and racism.’ ‘We must face facts and not ask for the impossible,’ Hammouda said in an interview with the newspaper Al Nahar. ‘It is stupid for us to ask the Israelis to return to their countries of origin.’ ‘We ask the Jews—all the Jews, even those who came to Palestine after 1948—do you really want peace and coexistence? Then git rid of zionism as a political and racist ideology and agree to live with the Arabs in an Arab-Jewish Palestinian state where each can have his share,’ Al Nahar quoted him as saying. It was the first time Hammouda had aired his views on the Arab-Israeli crisis since he replaced the firebrand Ahmed Shukairy as head of PLO last month. Hammouda was interviewed in Aamman, Jordan. If the Israelis refuse to give up Zionist principles, Hammouda said, then Palestinian Arabs should be allowed to return to parts of Palestine they inhabited before 1948, when Israel was created from that territory. ‘Otherwise it will be a constant struggle. The battle will be very harsh and long. We may lose it, but the Israelis will not win it.’”
The same wire story the News ran that morning, with five more paragraphs on the end. Here the phrase arrives attached to what it was attached to: an offer of one state shared by both peoples, an explicit refusal to demand that Israelis leave, and a warning. One American paper printed the accusation. This one printed the proposal. The paper’s own spellings, git and Aamman, and its lower-case zionism, are kept.
· Indianapolis Star · Indianapolis · page 1
Genocide For Some Isn't For Some Others
Jeff Endrst, United Nations, N.Y.
“United Nations, N.Y. The American Indian is getting genuine if lopsided support these days from some very unexpected quarters with definitely dubious motives. Old cowboys-and-Indians movies serve as evidence of America’s ‘genocide’ against the original inhabitants here. The argument is made that the racial situation in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Arkansas ‘is not dissimilar from that in southern Africa in regard to discrimination against blacks.’ All this is taking place in the U.N. Commission on Human Rights currently meeting here… The Convention on Genocide is a carefully worded legal document which defines genocide as a deliberate attempt to eliminate a nation, or a substantial part of it. In other words — a mass murder or devastation of a people, perhaps something on the scale Hitler did to the Jews, or the Chinese Communists are in the process of doing to the people of Tibet… Thus, Egypt said Australians committed genocide by driving the aboriginals out of their land. The U.S. did the same to Red Indians. The Israelis copied the Nazis in Palestine against the Arabs. Colonialism is ‘slow genocide,’ Nasser’s delegate stated… The U.S. delegate, Morris B. Abram, said these charges were ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’”
News copy, and the accusation is attributed rather than made, with the American answer printed in the last line. Notable because it places Palestine inside the anticolonial argument about the word, twenty years after the Convention.
· Miami News · Miami
‘Arabs Have Rights’
James Batal, Coral Gables
“It has long been the editorial policy of the Miami News to pour contempt on the human rights of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs of whom some 1,500,000 are refugees from a homeland seized by military force by Israelis… Americans are constantly brainwashed by the American press into believing that Arab arms lack the West’s anointing virtues.”
Printed directly beneath the signature, in bold, by the paper: “(Editor’s Note: As resident lecturer in Florida for the Arab Information Center in New York City, the author of this letter is a paid propagandist for the Arab government.)” The accusation in the letter is that the paper pours contempt on Palestinians; the paper’s answer, printed on the spot, is a line about the accuser. Fifteen years earlier the Southern Jewish Weekly had introduced a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the same way.
· Parade · page 24
The Arab refugees — irreconcilable, dreaming of only one thing: return to old homes
“I’ve since found out that this former home was 12 miles west of Jerusalem in the village of Sarees, what the Israelis now call Shoresh… He said he can still smell his land from here… What is wrong about people wanting to live on the land of their grandfathers? Why is it right for people to come from Germany and Poland and Morocco and take our land? You tell me that.”
A Sunday magazine insert carried in hundreds of American papers, in this case the Journal Star. It gives four people several hundred words each in the first person — Mohammad Abdul Mahfouz, 28, a clerk in Jerusalem; Munther Hammad Alsalhi, 23, a student in Cairo; Uriel Genossar, 25, of Kibbutz Hazorea; and a fourth. It is the largest uninterrupted grant of first-person space to Palestinians in this collection. The phrase the editors lifted out and set in display type was irreconcilable. Where Alsalhi says he admires Al Fatah, the magazine inserts a bracketed label inside his own paragraph.
· Worcester Telegram · Worcester · page 1
Another View On Justice, Truth
Patricia A. Campbell, age 13, 21 Prescott St., West Boylston
“This is in response to the Jan. 12, 1969, advertisement, ‘Justice and Truth Is the Issue.’ Yes, justice and truth is the issue, but from BOTH sides. Israel was NOT created by the free vote of the United Nations in 1948. There is evidence that President Truman pressured certain countries, such as Cuba and Panama, who were against Israel. Those countries, wanting certain favors of the United States at the time, yielded and abstained from voting. How can this be defined as ‘free’?… Many people do not realize that Palestine is also the traditional homeland of the Arab ancestors, not just the Jews. What right do the Jews have to deny them their homeland in Palestine? Genocide never was the intention of any Arab government, and there are official denials to prove it. It’s the fanatics who talk about ‘genocide’ and the ‘extermination’ of Israel. But the Arabs are not all fanatics. There are many more who are willing to sit down and talk it out. Yes, the Jews need a homeland and a place to live happily. But why at Arab expense and the price of Arab suffering? The Moslem Arab and the Christian Arab have deep religious memories as well as the Jews.”
A thirteen-year-old answering a paid advertisement that ran in the same paper on 12 January. Both of the loaded words are in quotation marks, and she gives her street address.
· The Jersey Journal · Jersey City · page 1
Zionist Genocide
Ibranim Ebeid, President, The Action Committee on American-Arabs Relations, Cliffside Park
“Zionist Genocide. Dear Editor: Charles Feuereisen in his recent letter has failed to realize that the so-called ‘terrorists’ are the victims of the Zionist genocide and its survivors. Zionist occupation, air attacks, napalms, brutalities and so on, were the motive behind the commandos and their movement to liberate their Palestine. To stop the suffering of Palestine people and to restore peace to the area, people of good will should: SUPPORT the plight of the Palestinian people in their struggle to restore peace in the area and to go back to their homes and property. THE WHOLE world should join hands to stop the Zionist nazism as they stopped the Hitlerite nazism once, before the whole world be afire. To save human lives in the Middle East, the U.S. government should stop the sale of the 50 Phantom jets to Israel and give anti-aircraft missiles to Jordan to protect its citizens. America should not become subjected to the pressure of any minority to the detriment of national interest. The Zionists have done more damage to American good will in the Middle East than millions of Communists could ever do. If Israel really wants peace the Zionist should negotiate face-to-face, not with Nasser or Hussein, but with the Palestine Liberation Movement, with Al-Fatah, which represents the people of Palestine, and with its spokesman Yaser Arafat, Abu Ammar.”
A letter using the word in its own headline in 1969, answering another reader by name. It runs directly beneath a letter about American Indians signed Johnny Mohawk.
· The Star Press · Muncie · page 1
Commandos Dedicated to Uniting Palestine Arabs
“There is more than an Israel headache in the dramatic Arab commando suicide attacks that explode in the news. The political purpose is powerful—and effective. The Arabs reason that their guerrilla warfare is the first and best step in forcing Israel to evacuate the Sinai Peninsula, the west bank of the Jordan River and the Golan Heights of Syria held since the six-day 1967 war. And our State Department considers the Arabs’ special facilities for this to be more widespread than we may suppose. The key comes in the failure to distinguish the Palestine Arabs from other Arabs in the Arab world. In the 1948 Palestine war Israel took about 3,000 square miles more territory than the United Nations resolution of November 29, 1947, gave her. About a million of today’s evicted Arab refugees date from that time—20 years ago. But this is only the better known part of the pressure. Contrary to our general misimpression of ancient mutual hatred, there is probably nowhere on earth that Jews have traditionally lived more peacefully and successfully than in the Arab world, and for centuries… It was the Arab peoples and the Moslem ‘church’ which gave shelter and asylum to Jews fleeing Christian Europe from the Spanish Inquisition and the persecution of tsarist Russia down to the ghastly exterminations which Hitler called ‘the final solution.’ As a booty of World War I, Britain seized Palestine under the Balfour Declaration, obtained a League of Nations mandate, and set up shop to enhance Britain’s commercial interests—and by so doing violated every pledge Britain had given the Arabs in order to gain their help against the Turks in World War I. It was then, not 1948, that the influx of European Jews and the eviction of the Palestine Arabs began. The 92 per cent Arab, 8 per cent Jewish population changed to 65 per cent Arab, 35 per cent Jewish by the time Britain surrendered the Palestine mandate to the United Nations after World War I… In this long process the Palestine Arab evictees total about 2½ million, many more than generally supposed, and they are scattered on a scale we seem to have missed entirely… Through all these years these fragmented people have had a political life. The Palestine commandos or fedayeen are mainly a political instrument dedicated to uniting the far-flung Palestine Arabs. Fiery-eyed Yaser Arafat, a Cairo-educated Palestine Arab, leads the main commando organization, Al Fateh. A second leader is former diplomat Ahmed Shukairy, who has represented Syria and Saudi Arabia. And a third, Georges Habeche, a Palestinian who became a doctor in Lebanon, is on record in summary of the objective: ‘The Palestine Arabs can be mobilized only around the issue of fighting.’ The State Department finds that such leaders as Aarafat, Shukairy and Habeche talk of ‘fighting for 20 or so years.’ They even have training camps for 12-year-old youths, an expanding cadre called Baby Tigers. In effect, the Palestine commandos are moving to take the destiny of the Palestine Arabs out of the hands of the Arab world leaders and into their own. The result is an important new force, and a very hard one for the United States to influence in that pressure-cooker part of the world.”
An American column in 1969 arguing that the eviction began under the mandate, not in 1948, and that Jews had lived more peacefully in the Arab world than in Christian Europe. It gives the population shift as a pair of percentages.
· The Grand Rapids Press · page 1
Mideast Debates Turn Into Brawls
In W. Germany
United Press International, Hamburg
“HAMBURG, Germany (UPI) — Arabs, Jews and West Germans fought with fists, clubs and other weapons in Frankfurt and Hamburg Universities Wednesday night… There also was loud applause as placards hoisted on the platform by leftists were torn from their bearers. The placards bore such slogans as ‘Zionism is racism,’ ‘for the victory of the Palestinian revolution,’ and ‘Zionism must go.’ Then there was a mad scramble to get to the microphone by members of leftist so-called ‘extra-parliamentary opposition’ and supporters of the El Fatah Palestinian freedom movement… Most kept quiet as the questions and answers flew but there still were shouts of ‘El Fatah.’ These were gradually drowned out however by applause for the ambassador. The meeting broke up with no more fighting.”
The second American printing of the Hamburg placards, the same day, under a headline that turns a riot into a debate. Both papers kept the slogans. It runs above a bank robbery in Venezuela and a ruling that kept Coleman Young off the ballot for mayor of Detroit.
· Florida Times Union · page 1
Jews, Arabs, Germans Riot
United Press International, Hamburg
“HAMBURG, West Germany (UPI) — Arabs, Jews and West Germans fought with fists, clubs and other weapons in Frankfurt and Hamburg universities Wednesday night. In Hamburg, Israeli ambassador Asher Ben Nathan was prevented from making a speech for the second time in three days by pro-Arab leftist students shouting ‘El Fatah . . . El Fatah.’… When the ambassador entered the discussion hall at Hamburg University he was greeted by a minutes-long chorus of whistles and shouts. The hall was packed with about 2,500 students and newsmen… There also was loud applause as placards hoisted on the platform by leftists were torn from their bearers. The placards bore such slogans as ‘Zionism is racism,’ ‘For the victory of the Palestinian revolution,’ and ‘Zionism must go.’ Then there was a mad scramble to get to the microphone… Some Arab students produced clubs and a UPI reporter saw at least one switch-blade knife appear in the hand of an Arab, before fellow Arabs took it away from him. For an hour, Ben Nathan tried to begin his speech. Eventually, he agreed to skip his speech and discuss the Mideast question with the leftists… The meeting broke up with no more fighting.”
The exact phrase, printed on a placard, six and a half years before the General Assembly voted. A wire reporter counted the signs in a lecture hall in Hamburg. Six years later the Boston Globe would photograph a demonstration in New York where a placard read anti-Zionism code word for anti-Semitism.
· The Times · page 1
(newspaper clipping, West Germany)
“Anti-Semitism would be only academic in Germany these days for there are only some 20,000 Jews in the country. There have been instances of Swastikas daubed on synagogues or Jewish gravestones but there always is a crackpot fringe and those caught receive stiff penalties. Most of the Jews are in Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich. They are thriving especially in Frankfurt where Germans go out of their way to accommodate them. There is little public criticism of Jews or Israel except by extreme leftwing students who adopt the pro-Arab Communist line that ‘Zionism is racism.’”
By August 1969 an American paper can set the phrase in quotation marks and give it a political address without explaining it to the reader. It is already a known slogan with a known owner. Six years before the General Assembly votes.
· Houston Chronicle · page 1
Nasser Asks Moslem Aid From Sickbed
New York Times News Service, Rabat
“Rabat — An absent President Nasser dominated the opening ceremony of the first Islamic Summit Conference with a message from his sickbed calling on all Moslem states to back the Arabs against ‘zionism and racism backed by imperialism.’ The message Monday was read to representatives of 25 Islamic states by Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader’s personal representative. Sadat said that the fire at the Al Aksa Mosque was premeditated and was one aspect of ‘the threat to all free peoples.’ News raced through the hall as the participants were gathering that Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and head of the Fatah commandos, had arrived… A member of Fatah said he had received a personal invitation from King Hassan after the PLO had intimated that it would publicize the fact that no representative of the Palestinian people had been invited… While Syria said it would not attend because it had no diplomatic relations with Morocco, Iraq at the last minute sent word it had sent no representative because the organizers could not guarantee to give the Palestine Liberation Organization an opportunity to present its fighting program. Alluding to the ‘catastrophy’ of the Al Aksa fire, King Hassan called on Moslems everywhere to ‘expunge this shame’ by unified action. No Moslem, he asserted, could forget ‘our brethren suffering in tents’ — the Palestinian refugees.”
A head of state pairs the two words at the first Islamic Summit, six years before the vote, and an American paper prints it with a lower-case z. The summit was called after the Al Aqsa fire of August 1969. Iraq stayed away because the organizers would not promise the PLO a hearing.
· The Sentinel · Chicago · page 1
Will We Tolerate Genocide in Israel?
Joseph Alsop, Washington
“But those who still oppose genocide — and more particularly the Jewish left-wing intellectuals — had better have another look at what is happening in the Middle East.” And at the close: “if we are not ready to tolerate genocide in Israel (pray God!), the United States may have to face another very grave Cold War problem in the Middle East.”
The control for this entire section. A nationally syndicated columnist, in a mainstream paper, using the word bare in the headline and twice in the copy. No quotation marks, no attribution, no hedge. The victims he has in mind are Israeli.
· The Lompoc Record · Lompoc · page 1
Jabalia is one of eight crowded Arab refugee camps in the Gaza Strip
“Jabalia is one of eight crowded Arab refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. Within its boundaries live 33,000 persons in a bleak, day-to-day existence aggravated by the tension and hostility of the country they now call home. What help these Arabs receive is generally given to them by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), whose work is limited by the succession of terror incidents and security measures in the region.”
“UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYES of an Israeli soldier, Arab women hurry by with bags of cotton on their heads. Terrorists continue to plague the area and relief services have been irregular because of various hostilities and demonstrations.” “CHILDREN PLAY in the shadow of a demolished Gaza Strip building. Schools were reopened recently after being shut down for two months following anti-Israeli demonstrations.” “GAZA STRIP is a tense, occupied land. Seated in their jeep, Israeli soldiers watch as inhabitants go about their daily existence.” “YOUNGSTER licks the spoon while eating his daily ration of beans and peas at a mess hall in the Jabalia refugee camp.” “HAPPY DAY arrives when Jabalia refugees collect monthly supplies from the United Nations distribution center.”
Five photographs and a standfirst. The same page calls the Gaza Strip “a tense, occupied land” and says terrorists continue to plague the area.