A Look Back at the First Disastrous ‘Two-State Solution’ By Victor Sharpe
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/01/a_look_back_at_the_first_twostate_solution.html
In the 11th hour and the 59th minute of his miserable term in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama struck his knife deep into the heart of the embattled Jewish state.
With the appalling anti-Israel passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, engineered by President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry, the blame for the Israel-Palestinian conflict was falsely imparted upon the easy target: Israel and the so-called “settlements.”
There were no “settlements” before the 1967 Six-Day War, when the Jewish state survived yet another Arab war of genocide and freed the embattled nation from the existing 1947 nine- to 15-mile-wide armistice lines, which Israel’s then minister of foreign affairs, Abba Eban, called the Auschwitz lines.
It is not from 1967 that the conflict with the Arab and Muslim world or the so-called Palestinians began. To fully understand its origins, we must go back to the early years of the 20th century.
In 1920, Great Britain was given the responsibility by the League of Nations to oversee the Palestine Mandate with the express intention of reconstituting within its territory a Jewish national home.
The League of Nations created a number of articles in line with the original intent of the Balfour Declaration of November 29, 1917. At the last minute, however, a new article was introduced by the British Colonial Office: article 25.
It became apparent that its inclusion directly enabled Great Britain in 1921-22 to tear away all the vast territory east of the River Jordan and give it to the Arab Hashemites. The territory to become Trans-Jordan, led by the emir Abdullah.
British officials claimed that the gift of Mandatory Palestine east of the Jordan River was in gratitude to the Hashemites for their contribution in helping defeat the Turks. However, T.S. Lawrence described in derisory terms the Hashemite role as “a side show of a side show.”
Ironically, Britain was aided far more by the Jewish Nili underground movement in defeating the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which had ruled geographical Palestine for 400 years.
This was the first partition of Palestine, the first two-state solution, and created the new Arab entity nearly 97 years ago called Trans-Jordan, covering some 35,000 square miles, or nearly four fifths of the erstwhile Palestine Mandate. Immediately, Jewish residence in this new Arab territory was forbidden, and it is thus historically correct to state that Jordan is Palestine.
In 1923, the British and French colonial powers also divided up the northern part of the Palestine Mandate. Britain stripped away the Golan Heights (with its ancient biblical Jewish roots) and gave it to French-occupied Syria.
The Balfour Declaration issued by Lord Balfour, British foreign secretary, never envisaged that the Jordan River would be the eastern boundary of the reconstituted Jewish homeland.
As early as September 19, 1919, the London Times newspaper had thundered in an editorial: “The Jordan will not do as the eastern frontier of Palestine[.] … Palestine must have a good military frontier east of the River Jordan[.] … Our duty as Mandatory is to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling state but one that is capable of vigorous and independent life[.]”
During its administration of the remaining Palestine Mandate up until 1947, Britain severely restricted Jewish immigration and purchases of land while turning a blind eye to massive illegal Arab immigration into the territory from neighboring stagnant Arab territories.
Britain’s sorry record of appeasement of the Arabs, at the expense of Jewish destiny in the remaining tiny territory, culminated in the infamous 1939 White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration to just 75,000 souls for the next five years. This draconian policy, coming as it did on the eve of the outbreak of World War 2, was a deathblow to millions of Jews attempting to flee extermination by Nazi Germany.
Britain’s mismanagement of the Mandate finally led to the United Nations’ Partition Plan of 1947. The Jewish Agency reluctantly accepted this additional dismemberment of what was left to them of the promised Jewish national home in Mandatory Palestine.
They did this to provide a refuge for the surviving Jewish remnants of the Holocaust and for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees being driven out of their homes throughout the Arab world. In contrast, the Arab regimes rejected the Partition Plan. Then, as now, they worked against the existence of an independent Jewish state.
Israel was officially reborn as a sovereign nation in 1948, and its 600,000 Jews fought to survive the massive Arab onslaught, which was intended to wipe out the Jewish state.
In 1948, Trans-Jordan, now renamed the Kingdom of Jordan, joined the other Arab nations in invading the Jewish state, driving out the Jewish inhabitants from east Jerusalem and the Old City, annexing the biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria and renaming it the West Bank. Only Britain and Pakistan recognized the illegal annexation.
Nineteen years later, the Arab states declared again their imminent intention to destroy Israel. In the June 1967 Six-Day War, Israel liberated Jewish and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria from Jordan in a defensive war.
Israel foolishly offered to give away newly liberated Judea and Samaria to the Hashemite regime in Jordan in a hoped for full and lasting peace. But the Arab League, meeting in Khartoum in August 1967, delivered the infamous three nos: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.
It is within the narrow 40-mile-wide territory remaining for the Jewish state, if one includes Judea and Samaria, that the world now demands the establishment of a fraudulent Arab state to be called Palestine – a state that has never existed before in all of recorded history.
Here then is the next so-called two-state solution, which dismembers what is left of Israel and drives hundreds of thousands of Jewish residents from their homes, villages, and farms – what a hostile world pejoratively calls “settlements.” Why? Because just as in Jordan, Jews will not be permitted to live within Muslim Arab territory, while Arabs can remain free to live within Israel.
The searing tragedy is that the next two-state solution may presage for the Jewish people yet another Final Solution – the German Nazi regime’s euphemism for the Holocaust.
The fact is that this is not a dispute over borders. This is a religious war, and the Arabs, so long as the overwhelming majority remain Muslim, will never accept the existence of a non-Muslim state in territory previously conquered by them in the name of Allah.
Nearly ninety-seven years ago, the original two-state solution was enacted in infamy. Certainly, the outgoing Obama administration and present State Department, consumed as they are by their anti-Israel animus, could not care less about such historical correctness.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of the acclaimed trilogy Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish State
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