Thirty-four years of plans to settle them in someone else’s countryThirty-four years of proposing a different country · 1949 to 1983
Resettlement
Thirty-four years of plans to settle them in someone else’s country
Fifteen months after the people left, the proposals start, and for thirty-four years they are all the same proposal: that the refugees should be permanently housed, fed and employed in Jordan, or Iraq, or Syria, or Libya — anywhere except the towns they came from. Return is not among the options discussed.
It runs for thirty-four years in these clippings, from a British cheque to a committee buying advertisements in the New York Times, and the thing being proposed never changes. Only the country named as the destination does.
“Britain Gives $2,000,000 To Resettle Arab Refugees.”
The Evening Star, Washington. Half a million pounds to Jordan “to help the Arab kingdom resettle Palestine Arab refugees on its territory.” The earliest of these, and the frame is already complete: somebody else’s territory, paid for by a third party.
CP-1949-003“Urge $800,000 UN Project To Resettle Arab Refugees.”
The Afro-American, Baltimore. Nineteen American public figures propose $800 million to settle them “in the Arab states,” of which $500 million is to develop those states’ natural resources so they can absorb the people. Absorption, as a budget line.
CP-1952-001“830,000 unhappy, dislocated people chased out of what now is Israel.”
Press & Sun-Bulletin, Binghamton, in a news-agency story about the resettlement program. The sentence that explains why the program exists, printed in an ordinary American daily in 1952, in the same paragraph as the proposal to make the situation permanent.
CP-1952-002“Israel Drafts Plan to Absorb Arab Refugees.”
The Daily Journal, running United Press International. “About 700,000 Palestinians who fled from what is now Israel fell under Israeli control again in this month’s war.” The number and the word Palestinians, in a news-agency dispatch, nineteen years after.
CP-1967-010“Jordan no Palestine state, Hussein says.”
The Plain Dealer, Cleveland. The king rejects the proposition that “Jordan was once Palestine, making Jordan the proper Palestinian homeland.” By now the destination has a name and the argument has to be had with the country being volunteered.
CP-1982-004“Is Jordan really Palestine? Well . . .”
Houston Chronicle, Sidney Zion. “Ariel Sharon says yes. King Hussein says no. The State Department agrees with Hussein. It provides no evidence to support the king. But neither does the king.” The question asked as a question, and answered both ways on the same page.
CP-1982-020“Two million Palestinians already have a homeland in Palestine” — so says a group called the Jordan Is Palestine Committee, in ads in The New York Times.
The Morning Union, Springfield, Massachusetts, quoting the advertisement in order to answer it: “Palestinians don’t regard themselves as Jordanians… They want the opportunity to go back to Palestine, preferably to an independent Palestinian state.” A named organization, buying space in the paper of record.
CP-1983-001“Jordan is indeed Palestine.”
Chicago Tribune, Charles Chi Halevi, two months later, making the case in full: “Jordan occupied almost 77 percent of Britain’s original Palestine Mandate.” The advertisement has become a column in a major American paper.
CP-1983-002What the sequence shows is not that the proposal was unreasonable. It is that across these ten clippings, spanning thirty-four years, where Palestinians should live is treated as a question with an answer — and in none of the ten is the answer the place they had left. The 1952 news-agency story is the sharpest instance: it prints the resettlement plan and the phrase chased out of what now is Israel in the same breath, and treats only the first as news.
See these ten in the archive →
Ten clippings, 1949 to 1983, found by searching for resettlement and absorption language rather than for any event. The Library of Congress puts the same vocabulary in the same papers from October 1948.