1954. Who's Entitled to the Holy Land?

Caught in the Center of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Israeli soldiers raise the handmade Ink Flag in during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (source)

Bill Downs

CBS Rome

May 14, 1954

In every arena of international conflict ranging from Geneva to Indo-China, the United States has tried to take a stand on the side of democracy, freedom, and justice. Whether our government has always succeeded is often open to debate.

However, there is one area of the world where America is squarely in the middle, facing a dilemma that is both dangerous and at times embarrassing.

This is the dilemma of the Middle East, where the Arabs and Jews claim with equal fervor that theirs is the cause of justice and demand that the United State use its influence to put down the other.

In fact, it is a double dilemma, if there is such a thing. The US policy is to provide security and strength to the area that is the hinge between Europe, Asia, and Africa. But for the past five years, Israel and the states of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt have been in various stages of warfare—thus there is no security. The area, particularly the Arab states, is woefully weak and divided, and would be easy prey for its giant neighbor to the north if the Soviet Union chose to activate her armies.

However, all efforts by America to strengthen the area immediately provoke a chain reaction of protest. For example, the recent decision to provide Iraq with arms aid immediately drew protests from Israel, as expected, but also from Egypt. The decision to grant Iraq's request for arms also provoked a bloody riot, reportedly Communist-led, at the American University of Beirut. The students demonstrated against an unconfirmed report that Iraq was preparing to enter the Turkey-Pakistan alliance.

The United States, only hoping to provide the Middle East with the means of self-protection against possible Communist aggression, thus found itself mixed up in a four-way family quarrel. And unless this quarrel is settled, the Middle East will remain a prize ripe for plucking and an ever-present threat to world peace.

We have just returned from a swing around the Middle East that took us to Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel. The atmosphere is charged with a billion volts of patriotism, nationalism, resentment, and suspicion. A reporter trying to do an objective job is squarely on the spot, and one gets the feeling that it would take ten years and scores of hours of radio time to tell both sides of the story.

However, in the dispute between the Arabs and the Jews, two facts emerge which demand immediate attention if there is to be peace in the Holy Land.

Fact number one is that the creation of the state of Israel resulted in the flight of some seven-to-eight hundred thousand Arabs to the neighboring states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.

Fact number two is Israeli military power, which as of this reading far out-strips the armed might of the weak and divided Arab states.

The difficulty in dealing with these facts are many. As a kind of conditioner, we have been reading the Koran. In it we discovered that the way the Muezzin determines when it is time to call the Moslem faithful to sunrise prayers—to mount the minaret and sing out the haunting, wavering praise of Allah—is at that moment when it is light enough to determine a white thread from a black thread.

In discussing the problems of the modern Middle East, the test of the Muezzin remains. Everything is black or it is white.

"Arab refugees from villages near Tulkarm," June 1948 (source)

It is perhaps over-simplification to say that the Israeli-Arab argument centers around "who was there first." The Zionists claim that Palestine is their ancient homeland dating from the pre-Christian days of the Old Testament. The Arabs claim that for the past 1800 years they have been the tenants of Palestine and it is their homeland.

The Jews maintain that, after centuries of persecution, climaxed in the spasm of inhumanity under Hitler, they have a right to a place of refuge and safety on this earth—that they are willing to work and fight for the ancient land and make it bloom again.

The Arabs counter that they have been living and working peacefully with the Jews for generations—that racial persecution is not solved if the Jews establish themselves in a separate state which the Arabs regard as illegal. And that, anyway, what benefits civilization if Jewish refugees establish themselves on Arab lands, which in turn creates an Arab refugee population of 800-thousand souls?

Thus do the arguments rage. And virtually every night on the silent hills of Palestine around the lonely borders of Israel, men are shot or killed, and daily the tension grows.

On both sides of the border, both Arabs and Jews bespeak of a yearning for peace and a settlement of the dispute. But national prides and ancient prejudices so cloud the arguments that the way to a settlement is obscured.

The Israeli people are intensely proud of their achievements since the establishment of their new state in 1948. She has more than doubled her population during the last five years. New towns have been created, industries established, and land cleared for cultivation. She prides herself in bringing the 20th century to that ancient area and stands as an example of a modern democracy among nations where the rule of the monarch, the dictator, or the sheik is the dominating method of government. Israeli leaders, after explaining that they did not start the war, insist that the nation is there to stay, and that the Arabs have no choice but to recognize this fact and make peace.

The Arab position is more complex. A Western diplomat and an old hand explained it this way. He said that back in 1947 and '48, the Arabs never really believed that the United Nations or the United States would allow their country to be taken over by the Zionists. They maintained, and still maintain, it was in violation of the United Nations charter guaranteeing national and ethnological sovereignty. The Arabs constantly point out that, in what is now Israel, the Moslem population outnumbered the Jewish by three to one.

This diplomat says one of the major problems of bringing the Arabs to settlement is the psychological question of pride or "face." He said the Arabs are now in a position somewhat like that of a father whose daughter has been violated by a foreign young man. The despoiled daughter returns in disgrace to her father's home. Then a few months later, friends of the young man come to father and say: "Let's sit down and talk this thing over. How much do you want?"

The position of the defeated Arab is that he simply is not ready to sit down and talk about settling such things. And this diplomat thinks it will be a long time before any serious talking will be done.

So is there a formula which can bring about a solution to the Israeli-Arab dispute? Another diplomat says it is possible, and again we come back to the two prime factors.

A solution must be found for the 800-thousand refugee Arabs, who for the past five years have been stagnating in their camps without permanent homes, work, and living on UN rations. Israel is willing to participate in an international resettlement and restitution program which would repay the Arabs for lost property. However Israel rejects mass repatriation of the Arabs to their former lands as threatening to the security of the new state. Israel also has offered to adjust her borders where the line separates families from their farm lands or dangerously bisects villages. All of these matters, however, would come within the framework of a peace treaty. And the Arabs simply are not ready to talk peace.

On the question of Israeli strength—which is the main diplomatic weapon of the Zionists—the Arabs fear that the Israeli army is preparing to explode over her borders and again precipitate large-scale fighting. The reasoning goes like this. The increasing tension on the borders and the resultant incidents undercut the position of the moderate Israeli leaders such as the present Prime Minister Moshe Sharett. Eventually, the extremists will take over and the Israeli army will march.

But still, the Arab leaders refuse to negotiate.

Meanwhile, the United States seeks a way to strengthen the area against Communist aggression. But it is impossible without offending either the Jews or the Arabs.

As we said, America is in the middle.

This is Bill Downs in Rome. I return you now to CBS Radio in New York.

1955. The Cyprus Question

Tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean

"An EOKA parade in Nicosia in 1962" (source)

Bill Downs

CBS Rome

October 1, 1955

An experienced diplomat once told me that, after many years traveling around the world in the pay of the United States government on official missions to assure, regain, establish, or bring about "peace," he finally got so discouraged that he had to look up the word in the dictionary.

In these days of tension and confusion, the dictionary is not much help. Peace, the book says, is freedom from war or conflict or hostility.

Right now, it so happens that there is no war—for which we can be thankful. But it takes no diplomat to know that there is plenty of conflict and hostility, and probably there will always be. So it would appear that it is the mission of governments of good will in this second half of the 20th century to keep conflict and hostility from breaking into the ultimate destroyer of peace—the process of war.

All of which would seem to indicate that, when we talk of peace, it does not mean that unattainable nirvana where all hostility and conflict will be settled—but rather a state of "no war" and a continuing attempt to solve and find answers to the multifarious pressures, pushes, and pulls which tug at our modern world.

It is within this definition of peace that has produced the welcome Big Power breathing spell following the four-nation Summit Conference in Geneva.

But no sooner had the world taken a few relieved gasps of hopeful air that there began a seething in the Eastern Mediterranean involving ancient hostilities combined with modern conflicts of interest—and the international frictions so produced are generating such heat that the explosion called war threatens anew.

The technical state of war between Israel, Egypt, and the Arab states has been going on for some eight years. In fact, there appears to be a tendency for much of the world to take it for granted.

The other day on the Turkish-Syrian border, frontier troops exchanged rifle fire in a forgotten struggle emanating from resentment over a border line established only in 1939.

Dynamite was exploded late last August in the Greek city of Salonika, and on September 6th, hundreds of thousands of Turks in Istanbul and Izmir rioted, doing millions of dollars worth of damage to stores and businesses operated by Greeks and Turkish citizens of Greek origin.

In Cyprus, Greek patriots are demanding union with Athens and opposing British colonial rule.

And behind all these dangerous conflicts are ancient hostilities which Americans find hard to understand.

I have just returned from a swing around the hot spots of the Eastern Mediterranean and was surprised, not so much by what I was able to find out, but with the number of things I did not know or comprehend. It would take a score of experts on sociological history to define and explain the old and sometimes traditional hates which tear at the people of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Sometimes the basis of this hostility lies in religion, sometimes in race, sometimes in history, and sometimes in ambition. Often it is a combination of all of these things.

We can only indicate the existence of these factors, but they will play a part in whatever news to come from the Eastern Mediterranean in the next critical months—good or bad.

In Greece as well as the Middle East, one finds the people suffering a kind of cultural and historical hang-over from the six centuries of life under the Ottoman Empire. In many places the people speak deprecatingly of the Turks, and even among many intellectuals, the anti-Turkish feeling is unhidden. When you ask why, you only receive a shrug and a statement that "Americans wouldn't understand."

In Turkey, the source of the anti-Greek feeling is similarly obscure, but it was real enough during the tragic September 6th rioting. I asked a number of Greek residents of Istanbul about this—they blamed this antipathy on a number of factors, cultural and economic. Some Greek families have lived in Turkey for over 100 years, they said, but religious differences have prevented assimilation and social integration. Greek Christians and Turkish Moslems seldom meet except on a business level. In the face of this apartness, the Greek minority has maintained its language ties, and Greek experience and astuteness have made them highly successful, for the most part, in business. Some Greeks say openly that, in event of crisis, they and most of their friends feel greater loyalty to Greece than to Turkey—although most are Turkish citizens.

On the other hand, Greek government officials in Athens say that the Turkish population in Thrace—where the Turks have an ethnic majority—that these people are counted generally as good Greek citizens.

As of this moment, the two hottest spots in the Eastern Mediterranean are the Israeli-Egyptian border and the island of Cyprus.

The announcement by the Egyptian government that it plans to purchase Czechoslovak arms with Nile cotton and grain has greatly upset our State Department and the British Foreign Office. Anglo-American policy over the past several years has been to try to maintain a balance of power between Israel and the Arab countries. In fact, two years ago it was figured that the Jewish military machine was so powerful that arms were granted to Egypt to pull the situation into balance.

But Egyptian Premier Nasser, a military man, thinks that he has many armaments gaps to fill in his army—that the Western Powers are being dilatory in allowing him requested materiel—and he is going shopping for it on the world market. He says it makes no difference to him who sells the arms, and that the Czechs seem willing.

However, fearful Western diplomats see another threat in the situation—the possibility of Communist infiltration into the Middle East and the increase of Moscow influence on Arab nations. It is perhaps significant that Premier Nasser has been invited to pay a state visit to the Russian capital—and that Soviet Premier Bulganin probably will visit Cairo when he returns from a scheduled trip to India this fall.

Incidentally, the measure of hatred between Israel and Egypt and her allies is growing every day—particularly among the 870,000 refugees festering in camps along Israel's borders. The latest expression of this feeling is the organization of the Fedayeen corps—Fedayeen literally means sacrificial death or suicide—and the squads are beginning to infiltrate Israel's borders in a campaign of terror against civilians.

On Cyprus, the problem is more complex. The island has been a British colony since 1914, having been annexed from Turkey. Since then the Greek population on Cyprus has grown to an 80 percent majority. However, demands for separation from British rule have been current for the past 25 years, and in 1931 Cypriot patriots burned down the residence of the British governor.

Since the end of World War II, the Cyprus question has become red hot again, this time a burning political issue in Greece as well as Turkey. The island is 500 miles from Athens but only 50 miles off the Turkish coast. The Turks see it as an anchored aircraft carrier strategic to their security.

The Greeks point to the United Nations charter and their 80 percent ethnic majority on the island and demand self-determination, which would mean enosis—political and economic union with Greece.

The British, sweating under the current sentiment against colonial rule, need the Cyprus bases for their troops displaced by the agreement to withdraw from Suez. The British justify their position by saying only that they can provide the stabilizing force to prevent trouble between the Western Allies and Greece and Turkey. They point to the great advances in education, economic developments, and standards of living that the Cypriot people have gained under years of British administration. And in addition, says Britain, the Western Allies need a strong military base in Cyprus to protect the Suez and the Middle East generally. The British say that the Cypriots now enjoy more freedom and prosperity than they could get under either Greek or Turkish rule—that the island within the sterling bloc has a visible economy which it would not have within the troubled economies of Greece or Turkey.

However, the Cyprus question has gotten beyond sober reason—it now has become an emotional issue again stirring up old hostilities.

The Turks say frankly that, if Cyprus becomes Greek, Turkish troops will be sent to capture the island.

Further complicating the issue is the Greek Orthodox Church and a 42-year-old American educated Archbishop named Makarios.

Archbishop Makarios is the vociferous and vigorous leader of the enosis movement. I talked with him the other day in Nicosia. I said that Americans did not understand the position of the Orthodox Church—that we believed in the separation of church and state. Makarios replied that his interpretation of the struggle for Cypriot freedom was not a political one, but a moral one. He pointed out that one of the heroes of the Greek struggle for freedom from Turkish rule was the Archbishop of Athens, who was executed for his agitation.

Makarios said that, since the United Nations refused to take up the Cyprus question in its current session, his followers would force self-determination upon the British by what he called "intensified passive resistance." The Archbishop said he was opposed to violence, but since then the "passive resistance" campaign has produced numerous incidents of beatings, stonings, and property destruction.

Archbishop Makarios indicated that he would attempt to stop all Cypriots from working for the British, which could mean a breakdown in all public services—electricity, transportation, water supply, and the rest. He said that no Greek Cypriot would be used as a tool of the British. The question now is, can he pull it off?

No Easy Solutions

Such is the dilemma plaguing the Eastern Mediterranean. The Greek government has withdrawn its troops from this fall's NATO maneuvers following the Istanbul rioting and the attacks on Greek NATO officers stationed in Turkish Izmir.

The Greek-Yugoslav-Turkish mutual aid agreement has all but been destroyed by the Cyprus crisis.

The situation threatens to wreck the Western security program in this part of the world—a problem which directly affects the security of the United States.

In my travels through the Eastern Mediterranean, I found no person who had any hard and fast solutions to either the Arab-Israeli dispute or the Cyprus problem.

Ancient hostilities are abetting new nationalisms. Modern power balances have run head-on into conflicts as old as the Bible and the Koran.

And in the background of it all is the 20th century struggle between two modern ideologies and two great power blocs.

How the Cyprus question and the Israeli-Arab conflict are resolved will decide in a large measure which of the power blocs will receive the support of the nations of the Eastern Mediterranean.

This part of the world forms the bridge between Europe and Asia—it also is the bridge between Europe, Asia, and the continent of Africa.

Put into perspective, the struggle in Cyprus and the Holy Land are much, much more than local conflicts to be unilaterally solved. They involve us all—and the outcome is going to affect the stability of the world for many years to come.

Also, solutions cannot be found in fairness and justice merely by saying that, if we do not discuss Cyprus of the Israeli-Arab problem, these problems will somehow go away.

The long and bitter history of the Easter Mediterranean proves that they will not.

There has been recrimination among the British themselves that their handling of the Cyprus problem has been bungling and undiplomatic, and that America's policy in the Middle East has been timid and awkward.

These things may be true, but they offer no solutions to the present dilemma.

In the long run, the United States and her allies must find a way to preserve the ideals of democracy and freedom in this part of the world and put these ideals into competition with the old hates and hostilities.

The Eastern Mediterranean area has long been dormant as a force in the modern world, but it is now coming to life again. The peoples of the area are looking for political goals and shopping for modern ideas.

How the Cyprus problem is handled, and how the Arab-Israeli conflict is resolved, will determine whether these people look to the east or to the west for their future.

This is Bill Downs. Now back to CBS News in New York.

1940. Edward R. Murrow on the London Blitz

The London Blitz

Edward R. Murrow

CBS London

August 24, 1940

This is Trafalgar Square. The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid sirens. I'm standing here just on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields. A searchlight just burst into action off in the distance—one single beam sweeping the sky above me now. People are walking along quite quietly. We're just at the entrance of an air raid shelter here and I must move this cable over just a bit so people can walk in.

I can see just straight away in front of me Lord Nelson on top of that big column. There's another searchlight just square behind Nelson's statue. I'll just let you listen to the traffic and the sound of the siren for a moment. Just a few people here walking rather hurriedly toward the air raid shelters—some of them casually—a man stops in front of me to light a cigarette.

Here comes one of those big red buses around the corner—double deckers they are, just a few lights on the top deck. In this blackness it looks very much like a ship that's passing in the night, and you just see the portholes. There goes another bus. More searchlights coming to action. You see them reach straight up into the sky, and occasionally they catch a cloud and seem to splash on the bottom of it. The little traffic lights here, just a small cross on the normal globe, are now red. The cars pull up and stop.

I'll just ooze down in the darkness here along these steps and see if I can pick up the sound of peoples' feet as they walk along. One of the strangest sounds one can hear in London these days—or rather these dark nights—just the sound of footsteps walking along the streets, like ghosts shod with steel shoes. A taxi draws up just in front and stops, just waiting for that red light to change to green while the siren howls. There it goes, and the cars move off. More searchlights are in action.

We've not yet seen any burst of anti-aircraft fire overhead. An air raid warden walks out of this shelter—the shelter here, you know, is the crypt underneath this famous old church just on the edge of Trafalgar Square. The crypt where in days of peace homeless men and women were able to find a night's lodging.

1943. Life Under Siege in Leningrad

Life in Leningrad

"Leningradians cleaning a street after the first winter in the besieged city" (RIA Novosti/Vsevolod Tarasevich – source)

The parentheses indicate text that did not pass Soviet censors for military security or propaganda reasons.

(For more, see the complete 1943 Moscow reports.)

Bill Downs

CBS Moscow

January 22, 1943

No one knows what Leningrad is suffering tonight. It is not likely that the German command is letting Russia's greatest seaport city sleep while the Red Army continues its dirty job of throwing German soldiers out of pillbox after pillbox. (The defenders and workers of Leningrad have been shelled and bombed so often that they probably are getting their night's sleep anyway. That is, those workers who are not spotting planes or fire-watching or working in the basement shelters or doing the million other things that must be done if a city under siege is to survive.)

(The Red Army's break through the southeastern arc of the German defenses has signaled only that Leningrad has been broken. The battle of Leningrad now begins.)

Tonight I talked to a Leningrad high school teacher. His name is Oleg Konstantinov and he teaches economic geography. He and his wife and two children lived through the hunger and cold of Leningrad's terrible winter last year. He doesn't like to talk about it.

(Mr. Konstantinov has kept in close touch with Leningrad ever since the government last spring ordered him to accompany his classes when they were evacuated from the city.)

He said that the outskirts of the city—located only a few miles from the German lines—have been bombed and shelled flat. (These suburbs were mostly the homes of factory workers—brand new developments were the pride of the government's re-housing plan. The center of Leningrad, he said, is not so badly damaged—although the German bombers did not spare the business district.)

(At first the German bombers and their long-range guns tried to do to Leningrad what they did to Coventry. After many months of dropping and firing tons of explosive into the city, the process got too expensive. The Germans weren't getting anywhere anyway.)

(During this time everyone got the same rations. One hundred and twenty-five grams of bread—which is about two slices—was the universal ration most of last winter. People got slimmer and thinner. All persons within the city have to work a certain number of hours each day. These hours were registered on each individual ration card. If the work wasn't done, then it was "no work—no eat.")

Mr. Konstantinov said his high school students did everything from airplane spotting to digging tank traps and building defenses. Even his two children, the oldest of whom is seven, pitched in and did the dishes, while Mrs. Konstantinov did her work for the city by shoveling snow off the sidewalks. He said the children's experience in Leningrad has truly given them a war psychology.

"It was share and share alike in Leningrad," the school teacher explained. "Now when we serve dinner, the children examine all the plates very carefully. If one of us gets a larger portion of food than the other, they take pains to point it out."

"Also the children are still nervous about bombings. The youngest is still afraid to be in a room alone—but they will outgrow that."

Mr. Konstantinov said that all during these hardships there was not a person who did not believe that Leningrad would be rescued—even during the worst periods of starvation and cold and when everything seemed hopeless.

I asked him why this was so. He turned and looked at me with surprise. Then he paused and thought about it for awhile. Finally he answered: "Why, everyone knows that Leningrad simply can not be taken." And that's the reason Leningrad held out.