The Refugees

For the first time in 19 years, Jerusalem was a single city. Acting with undisguised pleasure, the Israeli parliament rushed through the legislative formalities to reunify the Jordanian half with the Jerusalem of the Jews. Within hours, all the barricades began to come down. The barbed wire was stripped away from the rubble-strewn stretch that once had been no man's land.

Across the demolished barriers and through the Mandelbaum Gate streamed thousands of Arabs and Jews. Old enemies were unexpectedly anxious to fraternize; long-divided friends were reunited. Flowing Arab kaffiyehs appeared in kosher cafes, and Hebrew was heard in the ancient bookstores near the Damascus Gate. Cars bearing Jordanian and Israeli license plates honked happily in monumental traffic jams. Israeli and Jordanian police, working side by side, had all they could do to keep the surging throngs of pedestrians safely on the sidewalks, and their job was made no easier by emotional Arabs who insisted on embracing each other and everyone else within reach--including Jewish police. "This is the most beautiful day of my life," announced Youssef Hannah, an aging Palestinian writer who has attacked Israel for years. "Jews and Arabs, we are brothers again."

Over the Bridge. Unfortunately, such postwar amity was chiefly confined to Jerusalem. Long streams of Arab refugees who felt anything but brotherhood for the Jews were still scrambling over the wreckage of the Allenby Bridge into what remained of Jordan. Nearly 200,000 Arabs have fled from the west bank of the Jordan since its capture by Israel four weeks ago, and the flow shows no signs of stopping.

The exodus is hardly pleasing to either side. Jordan is simply not equipped to take care of so many hungry, homeless people. Israel, which at first was delighted by the mass departure, was growing increasingly embarrassed by it all. Last week the government ruled that no Arab could cross into Jordan with out a signed statement from the mayor of his town testifying that he was not leaving because of Israeli coercion. Pictures of Arabs fleeing from Jewish oppression, real or imagined, were hardly what Israel needed to convince the world that its objectives were not conquest but peace.

Atrocity Charges. But no Israel effort could stop the refugees from bringing with them loud and bitter charges of atrocities. Jewish troops were raping Arab women, they said. Arab property was being usurped; innocent men, women and children were being killed. No reliable proof was offered for any of the charges, and no Arab went out of his way to report that when houses or cars had been temporarily taken over by the Israeli army, the owners were given receipts. In most cases, the property has already been returned.

The Arabs made much of the destruction of the town of Qalqilya, located in the hills, only 14 miles northeast of Tel Aviv. There was no question that the Israelis had forced Qalqilya's entire civilian population of 12,000 to evacuate the town--which was all but razed in heavy fighting. But now that the shooting was over and 2,000 of Qalqilya's citizens were settled in a tent camp outside the town, the Israelis offered them food, shelter and assistance.

Work for Mukhtars. Despite all the tensions, throughout most of the Israeli-occupied areas of Jordan life was returning to normal. The governor of what had once been Jordanian Jerusalem was out of a job, and the mayor of Jericho had fled to Amman; the mayors and mukhtars of more than 50 other towns were back at their desks, and Arab police were back on their beats.

But the refugee problem, which for the past 19 years has probably been the greatest single source of enmity between Israel and the Arab states, has been made vastly more complex by the war. Tens of thousands of new refu gees have left their homes in Israeli-held portions of Jordan and Syria. About 600,000 old refugees, most of them in the festering, hate-ridden camps of the Gaza Strip, have come under Israeli control. For Israel, it is vital that the refugees be taken out of the camps and resettled where they can lead productive lives. To most Arab leaders, however, the plight of the refugees is such a valuable political weapon against the Israelis that they will do nothing to help break up the camps.

Peace Somehow. In the wake of the war, some Israeli leaders--most notably ex-Premier David Ben-Gurion--have proposed that the west bank of the Jordan be turned into a semiautonomous Palestinian Arab state where all refugees could be settled. But without Arab cooperation, Israel could hardly expect to set up an Arab Palestine as a satellite state.

Somehow, says Foreign Minister Abba Eban, the Arabs will have to meet Israel at the conference table to negotiate a formal peace. "Peace itself contains the solution of other issues," says Eban. "If there is peace, then we shall all strive to ensure that those who are now refugees become the productive citizens of sovereign states."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.