Nouvel Observateur, a leftist French weekly which has been consistently pro-Arab on Mideast issues, took the position for the first time today that a solution for the problem of the Palestinian refugees could be found through payment of financial compensation rather than forced repatriation. The weekly declared that such a solution was both adequate and feasible. The publication cited Jewish Agency calculations of the cost for settling a Jewish family in Israel as around $10,000, declared that $2.5 billion would cover the costs of resettling 260,000 refugee families in the Arab countries. The publication did not cite the basis for its estimate of the number of such families. The publication said the $2.5 billion could be obtained “when one remembers that Israel and the Arab countries spend more than a billion dollars a year on defense and that the value of Arab property abandoned in Israel is believed to be over $400 million.”
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.
