The main problems confronting the United Nations Conciliation Commission on Palestine, which yesterday resumed peace talks with Israeli and Arab delegations at Lausanne after a two-week recess, remain unchanged, the Manchester Guardian said today in an editorial.
Commenting on the renewal of these peace efforts, the newspaper said the Arabs still remain unwilling to discuss territorial settlement before disposing of the Arab refugee question while the Israelis are willing to make territorial concessions only as part of a general peace settlement. The editorial, however, stresses the importance of the Israeli offer to reunite broken Arab families by permitting Arab refugees from Israel to rejoin their families there. This would affect 12,000 families.
More important, the newspaper adds, is the fact that the Commission’s technical committee is now in the Middle East investigating alternatives to the repatriation of the refugees. Although the results of this survey will not be ready in time to determine the trend of the Lausanne talks, it states, “the fact that the investigation is going on concurrently may help to thaw the hitherto frozen attitudes of the negotiators.”
(The New York Herald-Tribune today reported from Tel Aviv that Israeli Premier David Ben Gurion favors the appointment of a single United Nations conciliator responsible to no one nation as the best solution for the deadlock in the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations at Lausanne.)
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
