Kushner, Jordan, & the Saudi Peace (of the grave) Plan: The Gall of the Hashemites by Gerald A. Honigman
Please allow me to begin with excerpts from an article in Israel National News on 7/31/19 about President Trump’s adviser’s current visit to the Middle East…
“…President Donald Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner met with Jordan’s King Abdullah II in Amman on Wednesday for talks on a controversial US plan for Israeli-PA peace. The two discussed ‘efforts to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’…adding Kushner was ‘visiting Jordan on a tour that includes a number of countries in the region’…
Abdullah stressed ‘the need to achieve a just and lasting peace to ensure the establishment of an independent Palestinian state…with east Jerusalem as its capital, living in peace and security alongside Israel’…said any plan should be based on the internationally backed “two-state solution”and in accordance with the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative [italics GAH]. The [Arab] initiative called on Israel to withdraw from all land it liberated in1967, in exchange for normalization between all Arab states and Israel. Kushner was accompanied by Trump’s Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt…” http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/266764
Note the part of the statement above in italics where Abdullah states that any agreement must be based on the 2002 Arab peace initiative.
What he left out is that initiative also calls for Israel to be inundated by millions of allegedly “returning” Arab refugees, raised on decades of murderous hate. Note that more Jews fled “Arab”/Muslim lands than Arabs who fled in the opposite direction due to a war that over half dozen Arab states launched immediately upon Israel’s rebirth in May 1948. To this day, children are taught, by both Hamas and the PA’s Abbas folks, how to murder Jews in their summer camps, schools, television programs, and elsewhere. The Internet has plenty of references regarding this.
Back on July 1, 2007, in an interview with the Jordanian newspaper, Al-Ghad, Abdullah stated that all of the photo-op sessions and such regarding the region ultimately mean nothing because Palestinians “face a solid enemy that works according to programs and plans.” He warned that Israel will never have the peace and security it wishes unless it surrenders to all of the Arabs’ territorial demands. Indeed, this has been the traditional expectation Arabs have had in their “negotiations” with Jews. Forget about fair compromise between enemies: Arabs will simply take what the Jews will be forced to give–one way or another–and for the sake of a “peace” which Arabs openly describe as being a Trojan Horse and part of the openly-stated post-’67 War new Arab goal of Israel’s “destruction in phases” plan for Israel. Arafat, Abbas’s former boss, called this “The Peace of the Quraysh”–the hudna ceasefire that which Muhammad granted his enemies in the 7th century C.E. until he gathered the strength for the final blow. And those offering Israel this alleged grand deal have been the latter day Arafatians-in-suits…the so-called moderates.
The Jordanian King’s remarks regarding Kushner’s current visit are virtually the same as above.
Now, for someone whose country consists of almost 80% of the original 1920, post-World War I borders of Mandatory Palestine–and whose population is mostly “Palestinian” (however one defines that, since most of the latter were actually newcomers to the Mandate themselves)–I can understand that the King might be a bit nervous about this subject.
Add to this his Dad’s (the late King Hussein) slaughter of more Palestinian Arabs in a month than all who have died during their years trying to destroy Israel, Abdullah’s remarks are a supreme lesson, indeed, in chutzpah. “Black September” is how the Palestinian Arabs remember this–when Arafat’s PLO allied with Syria in 1970 and tried to seize the bulk of Palestine from the Arabian Peninsula transplants, the Hashemites, and were slaughtered by the thousands in the process. Many fled into Israel to escape the wrath of their Arab brothers. And it was Israel’s mobilization in the north which saved Hussein’s derriere from further Syrian involvement.
Periodically, one Jordanian spokesman or another engages this touchy issue, so a reality check is in order. The points are so basic to this conflict that many of us, for a variety of reasons, feel obligated to repeat them over and over–ad nauseam. But since the Arabs bring this up repeatedly to reach new generations of the naive and vulnerable, especially in these “Progressive” times on campus, what other choice is there than to confront their deliberate “taqiyya” lies however often that is necessary?
Despite the King’s recent comments, indeed, the Hashemites would be wise not to address this issue to anyone with any actual knowledge, as opposed to fairy tales, of the actual history involved. Since many folks, unfortunately, do not possess this, Abdullah and his comrades feel free to rant–and then count on either the hypocrisy or ignorance of their audiences.
As many of us have instructed our readers and students over the years, to truly appreciate what comes next, first find a map of the Middle East. One of the world will do, but everything will be much smaller. Locate Jordan and then find the sliver that is Israel to its west.
As has been written often, and as hinted to above, in 1922, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, to reward Arab allies in World War I (remember the movie, Lawrence of Arabia?), virtually chopped off the lion’s share of the original Mandate of Palestine issued to Great Britain on April 25, 1920–all the land east of the Jordan River (the East Bank)–and created the purely Arab “Emirate of Transjordan”…today’s Jordan. This gift to Arab nationalism was engineered by Churchill in 1921 at the Cairo Conference. Transjordan gained its official independence in 1946, two years before Israel.
Emir Abdullah (the current Jordanian King’s great-grandfather), who received the land on behalf of the Hashemites who were in the process of getting booted out of the Arabian Peninsula by the rival clan of Ibn Saud (hence, Saudi Arabia today), attributed this gift to “an act of Allah” in his memoirs. Sir Alec Kirkbride, Britain’s East Bank representative, had much to say about this separation of the bulk of the Palestinian Mandate as well…”in due course, the remarkable discovery was made that the clauses of the Mandate relating to the establishment of a National Home for the Jews had never been intended to apply to the mandated territory east of the river (A Crackle of Thorns, page 27).”
Thus, right from the getgo, Arab nationalism was awarded most of the original 1920 Palestine Mandate.
The mainstream media, international forums, and others like pro-Arab professors typically ignore all of this when discussing or teaching this topic. The main starting date for them is not 1920, but 1947…the proposed partition of “Palestine.” Of course they conveniently omit explaining that this was the second partition of the land–which the Arabs rejected themselves–and pretend that Jordan was always a separate state. Had the Arabs accepted this second partition, they would have wound up with some 90% of the territory. So much for the standard Arab line that Jews got all or most of the land.
The Jordan-Palestine connection is just one of many well-documented facts (not “Zionist propaganda”) completely ignored or distorted by spokesmen such as King Abdullah and, unfortunately, little known by much of the rest of the world. Arabs typically claim Jews got 78% of all of the land, and leading newspapers typically prepare segments on the Middle East ignoring this crucial connection as well.
When Egypt’s Nasser decided, once again, in June 1967 to drive the Jews into the sea, he contacted Abdullah’s father, King Hussein (his calls were intercepted and taped) and convinced him to join in the massacre of the Jews. For its part, Israel, through the United Nations, begged Hussein to distance himself from Nasser. Hussein didn’t listen and instead launched an attack on the Jewish half of Jerusalem instead.
The rest of the story is, as they say, history–and is how Jordan lost Judea and Samaria (only since the 20th century renamed by British imperialism and Transjordanian expansionism, the West Bank)–which it illegally seized in the 1948 fighting and subsequently changed its name from Transjordan to Jordan as a result (since it now held territory on both banks of the River). Led by British officers under the command of Sir John Bagot Glubb (Glubb Pasha), and (like Egypt) equipped with huge quantities of weaponry left over from the Brits’ Rommel Campaign in North Africa, etc., Transjordan joined other Arab countries in attacking a minuscule, reborn Israel in 1948, trying to nip it in the bud.
Whatever will or won’t become of the land in question–and an effective territorial compromise, a la the post-’67 War final, accepted draft of UNSC Res. 242 is a must, what the “Settlement Issue” is largely all about–it must be noted that the territories, which the Jordanian king refers to, is disputed territory–not “Palestinian” land.
Jewish history played out there for millennia, and Jews lived and owned property in Judea and Samaria until their slaughter by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s.
In reality, the “West Bank” consists of non-apportioned parts of the original 1920 Mandate, and leading authorities such as Eugene Rostow, William O’Brien, and others have stressed that these areas were open to legal settlement by Jews, Arabs, and other residents of the Mandate as well. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of Arabs poured into the area from all over the region: Arab settlers setting up Arab settlements. The Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations and other valid major documentation testify to this… http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13420
Indeed, that Commission documented scores of thousands of Arabs entering into Palestine just from Syria alone and in just a brief period of time–not including what transpired afterwards. Hamas’s “patron saint”–for whom its rockets and terror force is named–Sheikh Izzedine al-Qassam, was from Latakia, Syria. Scores of thousands of Syrian Jewish refugees would later flee Syria as well. Another “native Palestinian,” Fatah’s Arafat himself, was from Egypt. It’s estimated that many more Arabs entered the Mandate, to take advantage of the economic development going on because of the Jews, under cover of darkness and were never recorded.
Returning to the present and President Trump’s current peace initiative, Israel does not deserve the continuously nasty comments it receives from Jordan’s king–regardless of the delicate balancing act he must indulge in given the realities of the Jordan-Palestine connection.
Israel does not seek to rule over millions of Arabs in Judea and Samaria. What it must have, however, is a reasonable–but meaningful and effective territorial compromise over these disputed lands to get the secure, more defensible, and real borders to replace its pre-’67 War, 9-15 mile wide zipper-like existence that the ’49 Auschwitz/armistice lines left it with… http://q4j-middle-east.com
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