Ambassador Jacob Doron of Israel charged yesterday that the special political committee dealing with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Arab refugees (UNRWA) was being bombarded with a steady “agglomeration of distortions and outright lies.” The Israeli envoy spoke in reply to Abdullah Yaccoub Bishara, the Kuwaiti representative, and Issa Nakhleh, representative of a Palestinian Arab delegation which the committee agreed to hear during its deliberations on UNRWA.
The two Arabs accused Israel of war crimes, dispossessing Arabs and confining refugees to “concentration camps.” Nakhleh bitterly attacked President Nixon for giving military and economic aid to the “illegal racist Jewish colonial regime” and alleged that the US government had not paid the $4.7 million UNRWA budget deficit to enable refugee children to attend schools and provide medical care for the sick. The Kuwaiti representative said Israel lied when it claimed that the Arab exodus from Palestine in 1948 was at the urging of Arab leaders.
Doron said that, on the contrary, the movement of Arab refugees in 1948 was caused by the Arab aggression against Israel accompanied by exhortations by the Arab leaders to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their homes for a short time so as not to stand in the way of the Arab armies.
NOT DISPLACED, LEFT OF OWN VOLITION
No Arabs were displaced by Israel after the 1967 war as alleged by the Arab spokesman, Doron declared. Those who left did so in an orderly manner and of their own volition, he said. He said there had been a great juggling of figures with respect to the number of Arab refugees and that he considered shameless the allegations that Israel confined refugees in concentration camps. He said the majority of Bedouins have been living in tents which had always been their custom.
Nakhleh claimed that in the last five years more than 750,000 Palestinians had been expelled and displaced and their homes demolished. He said that during 1972, more than 3500 Moslem and Christian Palestinians were expelled from Jerusalem alone and their homes destroyed and property confiscated in order to build homes for Soviet and American Jews “imported into Jerusalem.”
The Palestinian accused the US and other Western powers of blocking all efforts to obtain Justice for the Palestinian people from the UN. He quoted what he said were UNRWA statistics to show that only about 55 percent of the Palestinians received rations from the UN agency. He said the UN budget deficit had become a chronic problem because the Big Four powers responsible for the tragedy of the refugees did not accept their moral duty to contribute more funds.
Nakhleh deplored Secretary General Kurt Waldheim’s report on displaced Palestinians for failing to mention alleged Jewish defiance of UN resolutions pertaining to the refugees. He said if Waldheim could send two messages to Premier Golda Meir about the Munich tragedy, the Arabs “expected him to condemn the sending of war planes to bomb Arab women and children.”
JAPAN RAPS ISRAEL, DEFENDS PALESTINIANS
Tamio Amau of Japan said the continued occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and other areas had frustrated the hope that even a minimal agreement for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East would be forthcoming in the foreseeable future. The political climate emanating from the perpetuation of the status quo had brought to the Palestine refugees frustration and disillusionment, he said. This, in turn, had fomented a vicious cycle of violence and reprisal, a major source of the tension prevailing in the area.
His government hoped, he said, that measures would be taken as soon as possible, in accordance with Security Council Resolution 242, to meet the legitimate aspirations and interests of all concerned, including the Palestinian people. Last year, Japan voted for all the resolutions concerning UNRWA, including the one by which the General Assembly recognized “that the people of Palestine are entitled to equal rights and self-determination,” he said. Amau added that his delegation wanted to reaffirm that the exercise of these rights “should in no way be interpreted to justify international terrorism or any other form of violence.”
Israel’s 10th cholera case, a 70-year-old man from a village near Jerusalem, was reported today.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
