j - JL J" JL

Tragedy's Finale?

FOUR MONTHS AGO, partition was hailed
as the only possible answer to the Pal-
estine problem. Last week without an oppor-
tunity for proving itself, it was scuttled to
prevent "chaos." The excuse is utter non-
sense, if not a barefaced lie.
Warren Austin, the American delegate to
the Security Council, understood to be
speaking under the orders of President Tru-
man, urged trusteeship to replace partition.
But the outlook for restoring peace in the
Holy Land seems in no way improved. As a
matter of fact, prospects are worse because
the Jewish Agency is preparing to proclaim
an independent state and maintain its bor-
ders. Since Austin's statement, the Arabs
have also continued fighting. The UN is now
faced with two hostile forces in place of
one.
'It is interesting to note that last year the
UN's special Palestine committee predicted
this. The majority saw partition as the only
way to give at least partial solution to the
claims of the disputants-the need for
Jewish immigration and the sovereign ambi-
tions of both. A minority favored a bi-.
national state giving equal rights to both.
J. Lorimer Isely, Canadian member of UN-
SCOP said at the time, "Federation might
be the ultimate solution, but agreement
between Arabs and Jews is necessary first."
Editorials published in The Michigan Daily
are written by members of The Daily staff
and represent the views of the writers only.
NIGHT EDITOR: ROBERT WHITE

Isely's statement is an obvious truism,
There can be no immigration with Arab
opposition and neither group will be sat-
isfied with anything less than autonomy.
Since partition and federation were of-
fered last year as the only possibilities for
solution, it is apparent that trusteeship will
eventually lead to either one or the other.
But federation offers the same difficulties
presented above and a new partition plan
can only mean a reduced Jewish state.
Certainly last Friday's proposals were not
the result of Jewish opposition, but the
direct result of force by the Arabs to change
the plan.
The use of force is, therefore, outright
blackmail to alter the mature considerations
of men representing all nations to achieve
justice and peace. American capitulation to
this blackmail, constitutes an invitation to
all people who wish to oppose the decisions
of the UN. With a precedent set, there is
no reason to believe that the UN can act
vigorously on future occasions.
It must be remembered further that the
Jews have reached the end of the com-
promise rope. The Jewish state envisioned
last year is about one twelfth of the size
of the state originally promised after World
War 1.
Small wonder then that last Sunday,
the New York Times said, "At week's end
the outlook for Palestine was tragic-more
tragic, perhaps, than at any time since the
Holy Land became an international prob-
lem twenty-five years ago."
-Jake Hurwitz.


Baekyard Troubles

DURING THE PAST DECADE and a half,
the United States has been carrying on
vast programs to improve the existing social
and economic conditions in the country.
New agencies were created to carry out these
programs to such an extent that many ob-
servers hastened to scream that the gov-
ernment was flagrantly violating the limita-
tions placed upon it by the Constitution.
Today, in the midst of multibillion dol-
lar spending campaigns, the United States
Congress is neglecting a duty which was
given it almost two hundred years ago by
the framers of the Constitution. That duty
is to handle Indian affairs.
The Indians have always been America's
step-children. Indeed, not until a Congres-
sional act of 1924 was passed were the
Indian tribes removed from their status
as "wards" of the nation and given full
citizenship rights. But this conferring of
citizenship did not remove them from the
abject poverty in which most of them are
forced to live.
The Navajos, in particular, are living pau-
perized lives beyond the belief of the average
American. They have been forced to live on
ill-provisioned reservations and have been
deliverately enslaved by their own protector,
the government's Indian Affairs Bureau.

They are living in squalid and crowded con-
ditions; hunger and tuberculosis face them
constantly. Most of the children are with-
out any schooling at all, while the small per-
centage who do attend, are enrolled in so-
called schools that no white person would
tolerate for his own children. The jails
and orphanages of Dickens' day could be
considered swank by comparison.
The Navajos are pleading desperately for
the one thing they know to be their only
hope of salvation-education. Then why are
they denied this education and other atten-
tions which they justly deserve?
The Indian Office claims there is a lack
of funds. About two years ago $900,000 was
appropriated by Congress to promote Nava-
jo education but these funds are still "tied
up" in Washington.
Perhaps the United States Congress
should wake up the Indian Office which
has been sleeping securely for too long.
The treatment of Indians in this country
is a disgrace to the nation and has been
in the background much too long.
While we're "dishing out" to insure the
right to democracy in European coun-
tries, why not glance over our shoulders
and see if we've forgotten to include the
Indians in this plan of sowing security.
-Lewis Coplan.

19D RATHER BE RIGHT:
Blurring Panic
By SAMUEL GRAFTON
T HE CONTORTIONS of our foreign policy
have passed the point where political
comment can take care of them. They be-
long now to the psychological novelist, qual-
ified to write a story on the tragedy of
fear. In our panicky reversal on the par-
tition of Palestine, our fear has reached a
new height, immense and agonized. And
it was not, in this case, fear that Russia
would oppose us; it was the perhaps even
more dreadful fear that she would co-
operate with us, that she would stand with
us, perish forbid, in the same room.
When fear grows as big as this, every-
thing blurs; it is no longer a question of
whether there is opposition or co-operation;
the harried nerves respond in the same way.
whatever the occasion or the stimulus, and
so we have checked out on partition, we
have cut and run.
They will say it was for oil, the prac-
tical lads, speaking to each other about it
knowingly, as man to man. But it was not
for oil, not to please the Arabs so that we
might have their oil, for there is not enough
oil in the world to drown our fears. If the
Great Lakes were full of oil. I believe we
would have acted in the same way.
The oil of the Near East is merely a
concretization, reassuringly solid and
therefore seemingly respectable, of our
fears, but the same emotion that the oil
stirs in us can be started by the frowning
face of an Arab chieftain, or a Greek mon-
archist, or a Chinese war-lord, or some-
times, one is almost compelled to think,
by the popping of a paper bag.
For see what fear has made us do, in so
many ways, in so many matters, besides
making us give up the partition of Pales-
tine, and the hope of the Jews! Do we take
the position that we are against Russia be-
cause she has stretched an iron curtain
across Europe, stopping the free movement
of travel and inquiry? But a middle-aged
French woman scientist, a Nobel Prize
winner, turns up at La Guardia airfield, and
we hold her in Ellis Island overnight, reason
unstated and unknown, except that it is
said her husband is a Communist. The
whole, vast apparatus of our government
reacts in fear against this small human ob-
ject, with as little dignity as it has reacted
in the case of Palestine, and this time not
for oil.
DO WE SAY that we are against Russia
because she harasses private persons
on the score of their political beliefs? But
our fear has come to occupy the place of a
state belief here, almost as Communism does,
in Russia, and it has been a thin year for
those, from Hollywood writers to govern-
ment employees, who have not sufficiently
reverenced the fear.
And do we say that Russia vetoes the
actions of the United Nations? So she does,
but our bizarre cure is to give a veto against
partition to a few armed bands of Arabs
and to turn, without dignity, against a pol-
icy which has been formally accepted by the
General Assembly. "Go back to the law!" we
say to the world, "yield to the voice of th,
United Nations!"-and then we give it up,
at the first raising of a violent hand.
There is a peculiar softness then, inside
our new "toughness"; a graceless yielding
behind the outlines of our newly pro-
claimed stubbornness for the right; a
dreary submissiveness mingled with the
hard perspectives of the stand we have
taken for justice.
As against this undignified and nco-
nerent muddle, the man who stands up to-
day and demands that we propose peace,
that we make the peace, that we badger
and propel and pull Russia into a conference
for a peace that would really allow us to
solve our problems, takes a position firmer

than that of all the tough ones put together.
For to yield to our own panic fears, in a
manner that strips us of our address and
style, is a kind of appeasement, too, and no
better than any other.
(Copyrigb L1948 New York Post. Corpora tio)
Active Printciple
ACCORDING to a Monday night newscast,
in Boston recently a group of veterans
saw a ship bound for Russia being loaded
with heavy machinery. The veterans got to-
gether and decided to picket the ship as an
indication of their disgust. The Longshore-
men halted the loading of the ship out of
respect for the picket line. Thus the vet-
erans had effectively stopped the loading.
After an hour or so the Longshoremen
saw that they'd lose a day's pay. They in-
formed the pickets. The picketing stopped.
'Nuff said.
-Don Dorrance,
It

WASHINGTON WIRE:
The Uninvited

By IRVING JAFFE
WASHINGTON, March 15-A reporter
covering the State Department can take
the most diligent notes at every news con-
ference and sit up all night reading press
releases and thousand-page documents, and
still be inadequately equipped to do a good
job.
In the delicate realm of foreign policy,
official statements tell only the barest out-
line of the story and sometimes give no more
than oblique hints. The reporter needs a lot
FT SO
HAPPENS
9 Faint Buzzing
Gezundhit!
A PROFESSOR OF OURS quoted one of
his sources in class the other day, but
the students couldn't quite catch the name.
Obligingly, he wrote the name on the board,
admitting it was "rather fantastic"-S-C-
H-A-T-S-C-H-N-E-I-D-E-R--it was. "But,"
the professor continued, "his books are
nothing to be--ah-sneezed at."
Murder Reported
MAYBE WE OUGHT to tell you about
something that befell a friend of ours
just about this time last term. His story be-
gins on a Tuesday, when he cut zoology. The
next day he bumped into a classmate and
asked him whether the instructor had made
any assignment for Thursday.
The classmate answered with a blithe
"No," so our friend went lightheartedly to
class Thursday-and walked, stone cold,
into a midsemester.
** *
13 -,--I l -

more information than is available in the
day-to-day official handouts in order to
get something approaching a clear insight
into foreign relations.
Occasionally, the State Department holds
so-called "background" news conferences. At
these conferences, some of the gaps left by
official statements are filled, some of the
thinking behind policy is revealed. Although
a good deal of the information at these
conferences is off the record and cannot
be printed; a correspondent can acquire
from tihem a broader knowledge of the whole
foreign policy picture -at least the picture
th ledepartimnit "Iishes to Pit
But officials have been reluctant to
let everyone in on even these meager and
carefully selected morsels of more or less
inside information. As a matter of long-
standing practice, the foreign press has
been excluded from background confer-
ences.
Recently the exclusion policy began to
spread beyond the limits of the foreign-
press. At first just one or two American
correspondents were excluded-they just
weren't notified about scheduled background
conferences. When they complained after-
wards, they were given such handy excuses
as, "We couldn't reach you in time."
The practice of exclusion has grown now
to the point where it seems aimed at a size-
able number of reporters whose publica-
tions are known to disagree sharply with
State Department policy-such as PM, the
New Republic and the Nation.
A few of the background conferences were
called by invitation of the State Depart-
ment Correspondents' Association, instead
of by the department itself. In those in-
stances department officials could dispose
of the complaints of the uninvited simply by
saying they hadn't done the inviting. The
complainants would then turn to the Asso-
ciation leaders, and the flood of protests
hasehonm enogreat that now the rrP_

Looking Back

From the pages of The Daily
50 YEARS AGO TODAY:
The anti-Saloon League announced that
nearly 600 students on campus were included
in its membership. The rumor that a mem-
ber of this organization had been caught
taking photographs of the interior of a
saloon and its occupants was called "fic-
tion."
on vc.tn .rn rr- snv