The plan offering Palestine Arab refugees a choice of repatriation to Israel or resettlement in other lands with compensation by Israel–admitted to the United Nations sometime ago by Dr. Joseph Johnson of the Carnegie Endorsement for International Peace, after making a study of the Arab refugee problem–is not necessary permanently dead and could be revived, Assistant Secretary of State Philip Talbot has Informe Congress.
The plan had been rejected before it was even presented for discussion at the United Nations. However, in testimony given to the House Appropriations Committee and made public new, Mr. Talbot is quoted at declaring: “I personally do not believe that just because the Joseph Johnson plan was not acceptable to the parties when he offered it, it is necessarily permanently dead. I personally believe that some day the Joseph Johnson plan could become a yardstick as indeed the Eric Johnson plan for the Jordan waters has become a yardstick.”
He defined the Joseph Johnson plan as providion the Arab refugees “a clear opportunity to make a dualistic choice” between repatriation and resettlement. He said that initiative to push the plan in the immediate future “would seem particularly difficult because of the current high level of tension in the area generally, arising out of the water question and other questions.”
In testimony which sought to advance both the Johnson and Johnston plans, in a sense linking them as a constructive plan for the future–Mr. Talbot said if regional country “all followed the Johnston plan the waters of the Jordan Valley would be used most efficiently and equitably as compared to any other plan we have seen. We have been urging strongly on the Lebanese that they not take those (diversion) actions which would upset the 1955 Johnston plan. We regard that plan as the best and, indeed, the only framework for equitable division of the waters of the Jordan Valley in the absence of any other framework or any agreed at all.”
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