Arabs and Jews
Sir: may I once again urge Air Vice-Marshal R. I. Jones (June 17) to read and judge for himself the primary evidence about the Palestine refugees and not to take on trust material supplied to him for the purposes of propaganda? His latest letter makes it all too clear that he is relying on such sources as a pamphlet entitled ' How the Arab Leaders created the Middle East Refugees ' issued by the Labour Friends of Israel and an extremely crude propaganda document entitled ' Gamal over Gaza' issued by the Information Division of Israel's Ministry for Foreign Affairs. If Air Vice-Marshall Jones wishes to engage in a serious and well-intentioned discussion of this tragic human problem, he really ought to make a. greater effort to get at the facts.
He quotes two statements which support the Israeli allegation that the refugees fled at the bidding of their leaders. I can supply him with three more in the same vein (one dating from long after the event). That is, I believe, the sum total of the evidence for the allegation. Against it there are innumerable monitored broadcasts from Arab stations urging the Palestinians to stay put; there is evidence from Israeli sources of deliberate expulsion and terrorisation of the Arab inhabitants by the Palmach and Irgun; there were broadcasts by the Haganah radio in Arabic threatening the Palestinians with 'a bloodbath '; and there is the hideous evidence of the massacres of unarmed Arab civilians at Deir Yassin and elsewhere. Finally there is the contemporary statement by Count Bernadotte that the exodus was due to panic, rumours, acts of terrorism real or alleged and expulsion.
Against this weight of evidence Air Vice-Marshal Jones says that his two quotations "sum up the essence of the case, which is that the refugees were largely the victims of Arab propaganda." That may be so. But summing up the essence of a case is not quite the same thing as establishing the truth.
As for the refugees in Gaza surely Air Vice-Marshal Jones can appreciate that a report dating from May, 1950 (within two years of the exodus) does not prove anything regarding the subsequent
conduct of the Egyptian authorities towards the refugees?
He chooses to place reliance on the testimony of Miss Martha Gellhorn. That lady spent two or three weeks visiting the refugee camps eleven years ago and afterwards wrote a highly opinionative account of what she had seen. Some apparently well-heeled individuals or organisations in the United States found her article so much to their taste that they arranged for free copies to be widely distributed to prominent people in political and academic circles throughout that country.
For myself I would give greater weight to the impartial evidence of the UNRWA CommissionerGeneral. In 1967 he said that the record of the Egyptian and other Arab host governments in helping the refugees was " notably humane and helpful" (para 53 of UN Document A/6713). Specifically on the economic condition of the refugees in Gaza prior to the June war he reported that "improvement was discernable in recent years, including even a positive shortage of unskilled labour at certain seasons of the year" and added that a "more solid element of improvement in the condition of the refugees in Gaza was the placement, with the active cooperation of the Gaza (i.e. Egyptian) authorities, of some thousands of young refugees in employment in the United Arab Republic and elsewhere" (para 55 ibid). The picture which Air ViceMarshal Jones has received of oppressive treatment of the refugees in Gaza by the Egyptian government is a grotesque travesty of the truth. He should stop reproducing it. Air Vice-Marshal Jones's final comment is that the Arab governments have chosen to remain in a state of war with Israel for twenty-four years and that it is this which has held up a solution of the refugee problem. Again he has got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It is Israel's refusal to allow the refugees to return to their homes (in defiance of repeated UN resolutions and in breach of an undertaking Israel gave as a condition of her admission to UN membership) which has prevented a solution of the problem and which has been the root cause of continuing Arab enmity towards Israel.
S. J. Sarkiss 148 Guildford Avenue, Feltham, Middlesex
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