THE MIDDLE EAST The Homeless For nearly a decade, the most sensitive political ganglion in the strife-racked body of the Middle East has been the problem of the Arab refugees from Palestine. In tents and makeshift camps around Israel's borders from Gaza to Aleppo, they have lived—nearly 1,000,000 of them—in squalor and bitterness. Israel stubbornly refuses to take them back. The Arab countries just as stubbornly refuse to resettle them, on the grounds that this would be accepting defeat at the hands of Israel.
Thus rejected by friend and foe alike, suspicious of any talk of compromising their rights to return to their homes in Israel, the refugees are ready emotional tinder for the incendiary troublemaking of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser.
For five years Nasser has made the most of them. He appointed himself their champion, and his picture was in every refugee tent and barracks. His Voice of the Arabs blared from loudspeakers in every camp. Greatest potentiality for trouble was in Jordan, where more than 500,000 refugees, together with 500,000 Palestinian Arabs living in the area of Palestine that Jordan had annexed after the 1948 war, outnumbered the original Bedouins of King Hussein two to one. When Nasser called to them, they erupted into the streets, hurling stones at U.S. consulates, attacking U.N. warehouses, battling police. Last year Nasser-incited riots forced Hussein to dismiss Britain's Glubb Pasha, and at the sprawling refugee camp at Aqabat Jabr (pop. 32,000), some 100 were killed.
Last week the Middle East's biggest news was negative: for two weeks Nasser had shrieked his loudest to incite the refugees to riot against Jordan's King Hussein, and for two weeks the refugees had ignored him. In Aqabat Jabr the camp was quiet as a mosque at noon. The police force on duty (one sergeant, three enlisted men) snoozed peacefully in the sun. Here and fhere, children played. No one was listening to Gamal Nasser.
The Disenchantment. What had happened? Many Middle East specialists thought that refugee disenchantment with Nasser began with the Israeli attack into the Sinai. There, before the eyes of 220,000 refugees in the Gaza Strip, their posturing champion, who was to lead the refugees back to their homeland, went down to abject defeat before the Israeli army. To every refugee came the sobering realization that no Arab leader was going to force Israel into the sea and restore them to their lands.
Beyond this explanation (but inextricably linked to it) is the fact that ten years of bitter sanctuary have wrought many changes in Palestine refugees. For eight years the refugees have been fed and cared for almost entirely by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Many had been farmers; some, in camps near Bethlehem and Tulkarm, had spent the years watching longingly from distances of a few hundred yards while the despised Israelis plowed land that once was theirs. At first the Arabs lived with the spittle of hate always moist on their lips. But as tireless UNRWA workers organized schools, hospitals, kitchens, maternity centers, libraries and sports fields, Palestine's inchoate mass of refugees slowly became a society.