A Letter from Ilyas Kusa to the American Jewish Committee Delegation, June 1957

Dated June 17, 1957, this printed letter in English was sent from Ilyas Kusa to the American Jewish Committee delegation to Palestine. The letter provides information on the Palestinians of the 1948 Occupied Territory for the purposes of a study conducted by the delegation on the "minority situation" during its stay. Kusa gives the following information, about 1,250,000 dunams of land were seized from Palestinian farmers and the compensation offered by the Israeli government is considerably less than the annual yield of the land. The majority of Palestinians live in areas under Israeli Military Rule which limits their freedom of movement, the education standard of Palestinians is very low, and they are hardly represented in government departments. And even though Arabs pay the same taxes and imposts to the same extent as the Jews, they are treated as second-class citizens and are denied the right to administer and manage their Waqf properties.