Austin Raises Hope of Truce for Palestine, NY Herald Tribune, Apr. 11, 1948.

Says Arabs and Jews Are Eager; U. N. Will Try to Give Them Plan Tuesday

By Gaston Coblentz

LAKE SUCCESS. L. I., April 10. -A new glimmer of hope for a Jewish-Arab truce in the Holy and was raised here yesterday by Warren R. Austin, permanent American delegate to the United Nations Security Council.

Mr. Austin told reporters that “we find the parties are eager enough to solve the question peaceably” and that the United States has by no means given up hope that a satisfactory truce proposal can be worked out by Tuesday.

In an informal five-minute discussion of the Holy Land problem, Mr. Austin said that “the emphasis between now and Tuesday will be to hammer out the terms of a truce.”

“When we ask them (the Jews and the Arabs) to volunteer something,” Mr. Austin said, “they are not in a position to do so. We must first explore. They are very eager to have us make some proposals.”

Any new U. N. truce plans developed over the week end, he said, will be presented to Jewish and Arab representatives in New York on Tuesday through Dr. Alfonso Lopez, of Colombia, president of the Security Council.

Mr. Austin’s inference was that the warring parties cannot afford to lose face by making any compromise proposals of their own-that they are both in the position of a trader who is determined to drive a hard bargain and is not prepared to make the first offer to come down in prices.

Mr. Austin’s optimism was met rather indifferently by New York representatives of both the Jewish Agency for Palestine, 16 East Sixty-sixth Street, and the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, whose offices are at the Syrian U. N. delegation, 350 Fifth Avenue.

An agency representative said that the Jews still stand by their demands that prerequisites to any truce are retention of the U. N. General Assembly’s plan to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, as well as the halting of incursions by Arab warriors into the Holy Land from neighboring Arab states.

Isa Nakhleh, representative of the Arab higher committee, said that “of course we want peace-it’s our country-but we want peace with justice.”

The United States is known to be working desperately to try to arrange a truce before the General Assembly’s special session on Palestine convenes on Friday to hear American plans for a U. N. trusteeship to supplant the Assembly’s earlier Palestine partition program.

In London, the British Foreign Office announced that Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech-Jones will head Great Britain’s delegation to the special session, according to The Associated Press. Eighteen more of the U.N.’s fifty-seven members announced here today the appointments of their chief delegates to the session.

The American Association for the U. N., a vigorous backer of Palestine partition, expressed “grave doubts” that the United States plan for a temporary Palestine trusteeship can be carried out any more successfully than the General Assembly’s partition plan.