Mrs. Golda Meir, Israel’s Foreign Minister, said today that Israel “would be committing suicide” if it accepted a large number of the Arab refugees.
This explanation of Israel’s stand on the issue of repatriation of the Arab refugees en masse appeared in the Times of London, whose correspondent was one of a group of overseas newsmen now in the Middle East. The correspondents met with Mrs. Meir during a visit to Israel as part of their mission to investigate the problems of the Arab refugees.
Mrs. Meir said Israel had clearly stated its determination not to permit the return of large numbers of the refugees and its objection to the proposed revival of the Palestine Conciliation Commission. She said a revived PCC, as called for in a resolution on extension of the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency passed today by the UN Special Political Committee, might presage some renewed pressure to give Arab refugees the option of returning to their homes if they so desired.
As part of an overall Israel-Arab settlement, some refugees “might be allowed in under a plan for reunion of families but this is all,” she said. She added that Israel was ready “to pay compensation.” Stressing that those who were children among the refugees 11 years ago had in the intervening years been indoctrinated in their schools through specially-prepared textbooks to hate Israel and to aim at its destruction, she said that if Israel accepted these now grown people, Israel “would be committing suicide.”
She told the correspondents that Israel had done and was still doing its share of solving refugee problems by having in the past 11 years taken in nearly 1,000,000 refugee Jews. The Arab countries had space to spare and could without much difficulty absorb Arab refugees who had a common language, religion and background with the peoples of those countries, she added.
Peace between Israel and the Arabs will come, she said, “not when Arab rulers begin to love Israel, but when the heads of the Arab states begin to love their own people and when they are concerned more with the lives of Arab children than with the deaths of Israel children.”
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