THREAD: @jsternweiner has dug up this excerpt from the memoirs of Lt Gen E.L.M. Burns. Burns (1897-1985) was a Canadian military officer who served in both world wars, and was in 1954 appointed Chief of Staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), the UN peacekeeping mission established to maintain the 1949 Arab-Israeli armistice agreements. In 1956, in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, Burns was transferred from UNTSO and appointed Force Commander of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), the world body's first peacekeeping force that was stationed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip until 1967. Burns, who remained with UNEF until 1959, published his memoir, Between Arab and Israeli, in 1962. Burn's description and choice of words is particularly relevant given that he served in Europe in World War, and also because these were written half a decade before the second Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip that commenced in 1967 and continues to this day:
"There are about 310,000 Arabs resident in the Strip, 210,000 of them refugees… Thus there are about 1500 persons to the square kilometre of arable soil… The available fertile soil is intensively cultivated… But, of course, it is impossible for the food thus produced to feed more than a fraction of the population. The 210,000 refugees are fed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The standard ration provides 1600 calories a day, mostly carbohydrates. By Western standards, 1600 calories is a reducing diet…
They live in little huts of mud and concrete blocks, corrugated-iron roofs, regimented row after row. Fairly adequate medical service is provided, probably better than they enjoyed before they were expelled from their native villages. It is especially good in the maternity and child-care clinics, with the result that the infant death-rate is low. Children swarm everywhere. There are primary schools for nearly all of them… [and] secondary schools for a good portion of the adolescents; and a great number of youths can always be seen, around examination times, strolling along the roads memorising their lessons: where else could they concentrate to study? And what will all these youths and girls do when they have finished their secondary school training? There is no employment for them in the Strip, and very few can leave it to work elsewhere…
One does not see people starving or dying of disease in the streets; nevertheless the Gaza Strip resembles a vast concentration camp, shut off by the sea, the border between Palestine and the Sinai near Rafah, which the Egyptians will not permit them to cross, and the Armistice Demarcation Line which they cross in peril of being shot by Israelis or imprisoned by the Egyptians. They can look to the east and see wide fields, once Arab land, cultivated extensively by a few Israelis, with a chain of kibbutzim guarding the heights or the areas beyond. It is not surprising that they look with hatred on those who have dispossessed them."
@jsternweiner Source: E. L.M. Burns, Between Arab and Israeli (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969), pp. 69-70. First published in London by George G. Harrap & Co., 1962. END
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