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.