No Talk, No Peace

For seven weeks, a U.N. Palestine Conciliation Commission had sat in Lausanne, Switzerland, trying to hammer out a final peace settlement between Israel and the Arabs. It had been a strange sort of conference, in which none of the disputants on one side would speak to anyone on the other. Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the conference had made little or no progress.

Last week in Washington, Louisville Publisher Mark F. Ethridge, U.S. delegate to the commission, submitted his report to President Truman. The core of the Arab-Israeli deadlock, Ethridge told the President, is the problem of Arab refugees, who have been scrabbling out piecemeal existences in the impoverished Arab states around Israel ever since the British mandate ended 13 months ago. At Lausanne, representatives from four Arab states (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt) steadfastly refused to discuss a final peace settlement until Israel agreed to accept a large proportion of the Arab refugees. The Israelis resisted all attempts to get them to take back the refugees, finally offered a compromise under which they would accept 230,000 of them provided Egypt would cede the narrow 25-mile-long coastal area around Gaza. (Nobody has even got around to making a close estimate of how many refugees are involved; guesses vary from 475,000 to 800,000.)

Jewish refugees from Europe were still pouring in and settling on land formerly occupied by Arabs (see cut).

The Israelis argue that the Arab refugees would create a potential fifth column in their young state. They point with alarm to thinly veiled references in Arab newspapers to the "coming second round" (i.e., of the Palestine war). The Israeli offer to admit some of the refugees provided they can get the Gaza strip from Egypt is generally regarded as an evasion, because no one seriously expects Egypt to cede the Gaza strip unless Israel, in return, gives up part of the Negeb area. This possibility is considered even more fantastic because the Negeb, Israel's southern desert, has become a burning symbol of Israeli nationalism. Said a Lausanne observer last week: "Three Jews in Tel Aviv can't get together for a drink without singing the Song of the Negeb"

At week's end, Israeli representatives in Washington emerged sweating from a two-hour conference in the air-conditioned offices of Acting Secretary of State James E. Webb. The Israelis were smarting from a U.S. rebuke for their stand on the refugee question, but they were still adamant. Next day the Israeli embassy sharply announced that Ethridge had "misrepresented" Israel's stand on the Arab refugee question. Final peace in Palestine, it seemed, would have to wait until the neighbors were on speaking terms again.

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