Beirut, April 20
Mr Joseph Johnson, special representative of the United Nations Palestine Conciliation Commission, who arrived here yesterday from Israel, left Beirut this evening to continue his tour of Middle Eastern capitals.
Mr Johnson’s mission is to discuss with the Governments concerned the problems of the Palestine refugees who were evicted from their homeland during the fighting which accompanied the birth of the State of Israel in 1948 and who have lived - and multiplied - as refugees in the neighbouring Arab States ever since. About half of them live in Jordan and the remainder are distributed between the Gaza Strip, Syria, and the Lebanon.
A small number have managed to find employment, especially in the oil states of the Persian Gulf, but the bulk of the refugees are still supported 14 years after the Palestine tragedy by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which feeds and clothes them, provides medical attention and (where possible within its very limited means) attempts to give them the technical training without which it is almost impossible for them to find jobs inside the Arab world.
The Arabs’ stand
UNRWA’s mandate has been several times prolonged by the decisions of the UN but it is now due to expire next year, and this fact lends urgency to Mr Johnson’s task. He has already made one visit to the Middle East after which he submitted a report to the UN, and his findings after the current visit will be considered by the General Assembly when it debates the Palestine refugee problem again this autumn. Presumably if this long-standing problem still resists solution the General Assembly will feel bound to renew UNRWA’s mandate once more.
Unhappily there seems to be no likelihood that Mr Johnson or anyone else can find a solution which is acceptable to both parties. The Arabs take their stand on Resolution No. 194 passed by the Security Council in 1948 which lays down that the refugees should be given the choice between repatriation to Palestine and compensation for their loss of land and property. They resist emphatically what they take to be concerted efforts of the rest of the world to persuade them to accept the solution of “integration” by which they would receive financial assistance in return for their agreement to assimilate the refugees into their own population.
It is as part of these efforts that the Arabs see the Johnson visit, and there is no sign that any Arab Government is willing to modify its stand in the matter. Indeed - and this has always been true but is truer than ever today - there is no Arab Government which feels sure enough of its position to propose any such modification which would run counter to all that Arab propagandists have said ever since 1948. The declared intentions of the Israeli Government to divert part of the waters of the River Jordan with the aim of irrigating the southern desert of Negev so that it will accommodate large numbers of fresh immigrants only strengthens the determination of the Arabs to do nothing which would encourage the Israelis to further expansion.
The Beirut daily “L’Orient” postulates the prerequisite without which it says the Arabs will never be persuaded that the injustice done to them in 1948 is not being perpetuated by “international complicity.” They demand:
- The internationalisation of the City of Jerusalem (which the Israelis made their capital in defiance of a ruling by the United Nations),
- The acknowledgment of the rights of refugees to choose between repatriation and compensation, and
- The release by the Israelis of the revenues from Arab properties placed under taxation by them since 1948.
Mr Johnson can expect no weakening on these points either in Beirut or in Damascus, in Amman or in Cairo. Divided in most other things the Arabs cling to Palestine as the one concrete symbol of their frustrated longing for unity.
