A Two State Solution — But on Both Sides of the River Jordan Victor Sharpe
https://drrichswier.com/2024/07/10/a-two-state-solution-but-on-both-sides-of-the-river-jordan/
The phrase “Two State Solution” has been embraced by politicians and journalists alike, repeated endlessly, and touted as the panacea for a “just and equitable” solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
It has assumed the repetitious role of a muezzin’s call to Islamic prayer. But it is based on erroneous geography and history, on a mixture of wishful thinking, naiveté and a brilliant Arab propaganda campaign of disinformation and falsehood. To understand why, it is necessary to learn a small but vital chapter of Middle Eastern history.
Shortly after the conclusion of the First World War and the total defeat of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which had ruled most of the Middle East from 1517 to 1917, Britain was made trustee by the League of Nations for the whole of the geographical and non-state territory known as Mandatory Palestine. Incorporated within the Mandate was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which specifically referred to the historical connections of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the moral validity of reconstituting within it the Jewish National Home.
The British Mandatory power, however, arbitrarily tore away 80% of the Palestine Mandate which lay east of the River Jordan in 1921 giving it to the Hashemites, a Bedouin tribe with links to Mecca. Only the land west of the River Jordan remained from the original Mandate territory promised to the Jewish people as a National Home.
Jewish residency was immediately forbidden in all the lands east of the River Jordan, which in time became known as Trans-Jordan and then as the Kingdom of Jordan.
The U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 proposed two states, Jewish and Arab, which were roughly equal in size. But these two states were to occupy only the remaining western geographic area of Mandatory Palestine – from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan – barely 40 miles wide and a mere 20% of what now remained of original Mandatory Palestine.
This plan was accepted by the Jewish leadership with deep reservations, but as a pragmatic solution to the plight of the 850,000 Jewish refugees who were being driven from Arab lands at the time of Israel’s rebirth.
The miniscule size of the state was also reluctantly accepted in order to facilitate the absorption of the surviving Jewish remnant languishing in European refugee camps following the Holocaust.
The State of Israel, thus reconstituted in part of its ancient and biblical homeland in May 1948, was immediately invaded by seven Arab armies in order to completely destroy it and drive the surviving Jews into the sea.
The Jordanian Arab Legion, led by British mercenary officers, occupied the eastern half of Jerusalem along with Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank), driving the Jews out of their towns and villages. In the south, the Egyptians occupied the Gaza Strip, similarly driving the Jews from their homes.
The Jewish state astonished the world by surviving the Arab aggression. The Arab states, however, totally rejected the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East and an uneasy armistice remained in force routinely broken by acts of Arab terror.
In June 1967, the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians, launched a new aggression against Israel with the avowed intention of annihilating it. Israel again defeated her Arab enemies in six amazing days and in so doing liberated the eastern half of Jerusalem, along with Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank), from the Jordanians. At the same time, Gaza was freed from Egyptian occupation.
Despite subsequent and repeated offers by Israeli governments to give away territory in return for a true and lasting peace with the Arab belligerents, the Arab world continued to support terror and refused to accept a Jewish state within the Middle East.
In April 2009, the Holocaust denying leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, Israel’s supposed peace partner, rejected any willingness to accept Israel as a Jewish state; a sure indication of the falsity of any Arab claim to live in full and lasting peace with Israel.
True, a peace exists today between Israel and Jordan and between Israel and Egypt, but it is a frigid, cold, and precarious peace with neither Jordan nor Egypt truly interested in full and mutually beneficial relations. Thus ends the history lesson.
The creation of a Palestinian Arab state within the mere 40 miles separating the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is a recipe for war and for the piecemeal destruction of the Jewish state. Such a hostile Arab state will more than likely soon fall under the control of the Islamist Hamas movement, itself a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks a worldwide Islamic Caliphate. Gaza, and what is has become, is living proof.
Israel will again be reduced as it was before 1967 to a nation a mere nine miles wide at its most populous region. When President Bush was still Governor of Texas he flew over Israel’s then tiny width and remarked, “…why, in my state we have driveways longer than that.”
To repeat: The present-day Kingdom of Jordan occupies four-fifths of geographical Palestine. This territory consists of the land east of the River Jordan, extending north to Syria, east to Iraq and south to Saudi-Arabia.
Compared to Israel, it dwarfs the Jewish state, yet it originated in an act of unprincipled perfidiousness by the British government of the day and remains an Arab state that has from its inception forbidden Jewish habitation within its borders, even though it includes territory promised in Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration and by the League of Nations as a Jewish National Home.
Jordan’s population is currently made up of 75% Arabs who call themselves Palestinians with the remainder being Hashemite Bedouins. As it is on land originally forming four fifths of Mandatory Palestine, and as the population is three fourths Palestinian Arab, it follows that the “just and equitable” solution to the creation of a Palestinian Arab state should be within the present day Kingdom of Jordan and, therefore, east of the River Jordan.
The Arabs who call themselves Palestinians and who choose to remain in Judea and Samaria should be required to end all terrorism against Israel – hardly an onerous demand – and by finally living in peace could flourish within an Israel whose territory would now formally extend west from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. That would still only be a distance of barely 40 miles at its widest. The United States in comparison is some 3,000 miles wide.
Israel would now formally possess most of her biblical and ancestral Jewish lands – with the exception of the biblical Jewish territory east of the Jordan River, the ancestral lands of the biblical Jewish tribes of Manasseh, Gad and Reuben which are in present day north-western Jordan.
If there is a desire within the international community to truly arrive at a “just and equitable” solution, then this would be it. Of course, if this was a perfect world, it would satisfy historical, geographical, religious and ethnic considerations. But, alas, it is anything but a perfect world and the fanatical desire among Arab and Muslim nations to wipe out all vestiges of a sovereign Jewish state is, perhaps, insurmountable.
Nevertheless, it can do no harm to raise it in the corridors of power and promote and articulate it forcefully as a truly “just and equitable” solution. Indeed, the clarion call should always be Jordan is Palestine.
When Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu arrives for his fateful address to Congress later this year it is unlikely he will be well received by the Democrats and certainly not by the malignant and hate filled Islamist squad. Alas, the accepted belief now exercising the minds of Biden, his problematic advisors and those who have succumbed to the churning mills of the Arab propaganda machine, is that there exist a people called Palestinians with a distinct history who lived in an independent Arab state called Palestine.
It is a lie, perhaps one of the greatest scams in history, swallowed by the ignoramuses in direct proportion to the number of times it has been repeated. It is a fraudulent history of a fraudulent people in a fraudulent land.
Indeed, there has never in all of recorded history existed an independent, sovereign Arab nation called Palestine.
Here are the words of a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, speaking in 1937 before the Peel Commission, which was considering partition of the Palestine Mandate, west of the River Jordan:
“…There is no such country as Palestine! …That is a term the Zionists invented! …There is no Palestine in the Bible.”
Professor Philip Hitti, the Arab-American history professor at Princeton, said in unambiguous words before the 1946 Anglo-American Committee:
“…There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.”
President Obama made it crystal clear that he was not prepared to let such inconvenient truths deter him from his strange obsession in forcing through the creation of a terror supporting Palestinian Arab state during his term of office.
He intended to shower the Arab and Muslim world with favors. No favor could be more eagerly snatched at than that of the Israeli democracy abandoned by an American President to the tender mercies of the ever-circling mullahs, imams, dictators, and oligarchs.
And as Obama prepared to leave on his strange mission to Egypt soon after becoming President and give a speech to the Muslim world, he no doubt ignored the fact that the Al Azhar University in Cairo was spewing forth a constant stream of Islamic hatred towards non-Muslims; those they call “infidels.” Doubly strange – or was it – that President Barak Hussein Obama should have chosen Egypt whose government-controlled media routinely dripped with anti-Israel propaganda.
For Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, his latest visit to Washington DC may, to paraphrase Dickens, be in the best of times and the worst of times. He may yet again display that he is still a leader who stands up to the Left and to a Democrat President.
After all, the stakes are harrowingly high – the very existence of modern Israel. But it is worth doing the right thing, or as Mark Twain put it:
“… always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
Comments are closed.
