New York Press Unanimously Endorses U.N. Commission’s Request for Palestine Force

Unanimity over the U.N. Palestine Commission’s Request for the sending of an international armed force to Palestine to enforce the United Nations Palestine partition, decision was expressed in editorials today in New York City’s leading newspapers.

The New York Times said: “There is no time to be lost in answering these questions. There should be no disinclination to answer them merely because new and fore extreme threats of violence are coming from Arab sources. When the Secretary-General of the Arab League declares, as he did yesterday, that his countrymen will ‘fight’ any U.N. police force sent to Palestine, he must be told that he is challenging the authority, prestige and very right to existence of the United Nations.”

The Herald-Tribune editorial stated: “The Commission’s report is as convincing as it is grim. Without a powerful force at its command, the Commission will be unable to perform its task of putting the partition settlement into effects.It is futile to rely singly upon the arming of the Palestinian Jews; even if the British would agree to mate it possible, that easy expedient would not serve for establishing the International control of Jerusalem or even delimiting the borders of the proposed states, It would leave the Commission itself powerless and tend only to invite that period of ‘uncontrolled, widespread strife and bloodshed’ which the Commission foresees as imminent upon Britain’s surrender of the Mandate on May 15. If the General Assembly’s authority is not to be successfully defied, if the already weakened prestige of the United Nations is not to be destroyed, if the Holy Land is not to be turned finally into an appalling nightmare of civil war the Commission must have ‘adequate’ force at its own disposal.”

The World-Telegram urged that the U.N. force “be an international constabulary of volunteers, preferably limited to citizens of small nations.” The paper warned, however, that sending “American troops to Palestine would create even more anti-Semitism in the United States than the death of British soldiers in Palestine has caused in England.”

The N.Y. Daily News declared: “An international police force for the Holy land lock like the only answer, if partition is to take place in reasonable peace and quiet.” The N.Y. Post and the newspaper PM have similarly published numerous editorials during the past few days supporting the dispatch of a U.N. force to Palestine.”

In the nation’s capital, the influential Washington Post, in an editorial published today, said: “It would be the last word in irony if the Mufti were allowed to humiliate the United Nations. The raising of an international police force is the only thing now that has a chance of pacifying the troubled situation in Palestine and of recapturing the warning prestige of the United Nations. The chance to repair the damage is on the American doorstep.”