A look back at the first disastrous ‘two-state solution’ Victor Sharpe
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/210512
“It is not from 1947 or 1967 that the relentless aggression against Israel by the Arab and Muslim world and the so-called Palestinians began. To fully understand its origins, we must go back to the early years of the 20th century.”
In the 11th hour and 59th minute of his last 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 on December 23, 2016, 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 June, 1967 Six-Day War, when the Jewish state survived yet another Arab war of genocide launched against it and freed the embattled nation from the existing 1947 nine to fifteen mile-wide armistice lines, which Israel’s earlier minister of foreign affairs, Abba Eban, appropriately called the Auschwitz lines. These were the lines that existed after the fledgling Israeli forces in 1948 had pushed back the invading Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Lebanese armies.
It is not from 1947 or 1967 that the relentless aggression against Israel by the Arab and Muslim world and 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 after the ending of the 400 year old Ottoman Turkish Empire’s occupation of much of the Middle East. Britain was to uphold the League’s express intention of reconstituting within the Mandatory territory a reborn 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 Mandatory territory east of the River Jordan and give it to the Arab Hashemite tribe: 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 (Lawrence of Arabia) described in derisory terms the Hashemite role as “a side show of a side show.”
Ironically, Britain was aided far more by the Nili underground movement in defeating the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which had ruled geographical Palestine for 400 years.
This was the first partition of the non-state geographical territory known as Palestine and the first two-state solution. It created a new Arab entity some 100 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 in an act of Islamic apartheid, and it is thus historically correct to state that Jordan is Palestine. Note too that Jordan’s population is comprised of over 75% Palestinian Arabs.
As the map above shows, 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’s tiny territory, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, (a mere forty miles in width) 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. This had been Britain’s policy since it was given the Mandate from 1921/22 up until 1947 and Israel’s subsequent independence in 1948.
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 over 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 over 800,000 Jewish refugees 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. Only since President Trump’s espousal of the Abraham Accords have several Arab states embraced diplomatic relations with Israel in addition to Egypt and Jordan.
However under the new Biden- Harris regime, the Accords may not survive the Democrat/Socialist Administration’s evolving policies and already these new ‘Arab friends’ in the Gulf are falsely blaming Israel for the Arab rioting in Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem, perpetrated at the urging of Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the terrorist Palestinian Authority and now aided by its Islamist rivals, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Both these Gaza based terrorist gangs have, at this time of writing, launched over 1,200 deadly missiles into Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ashkelon and many other Israeli villages and towns. The tiny town of S’derot which is close to the Gaza border, was also struck and an Israeli child killed. S’derot alone has endured over 10,000 missiles from Hamas occupied Gaza during the last ten years.
The great journalist, Caroline Glick, summed up the reality of the latest Arab aggression launched against Israel in a recent article. She began as follows:
“Throughout the month of Ramadan, the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority and Hamas have been inciting Arab Israelis in Jerusalem and throughout the country to attack Jews. And so it happened that at the outset of the month, Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and beyond found themselves beset by gangs of Arab thugs who beat them on the streets and in the light-rail cars just because they were Jews.
“Last week, Hamas’ leaders announced their detailed plans to open a new campaign against Israel on May 9. That date was a conflation of three events: Jerusalem Day – Israel’s national holiday celebrating the unification of Jerusalem in 1967; Muslims marked the holiest day of the month of Ramadan, and Iran marked its own Jerusalem Day, whose purpose is to call for the destruction of Israel and end Jewish rule in its capital city, Jerusalem.”
Israel was officially reborn as a sovereign nation in 1948, and its 600,000 Jews fought to survive the massive onslaught by five Arab armies, which 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. Its British led Arab Legion drove out the Jewish inhabitants from east Jerusalem and the Old City. They burned the ancient Jewish synagogues while desecrating the Jewish gravestones on the Mount of Olives, using them for the Arab Legion’s latrines. At the same time the Jordanians annexed the Biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria, renaming it the ‘West Bank.’ Only Britain and Pakistan recognized that illegal annexation.
Nineteen years later, the Arab states declared again their imminent intention to destroy Israel. In the subsequent June 1967 Six-Day War, Israel liberated Jewish and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, and throughout Judea and Samaria from Jordan’s illegal occupation.
Israel, however, foolishly gave away to the Hashemite regime in Jordan the newly liberated ancestral and Biblical Jewish territory of Judea and Samaria along with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site. This was done in the tragic and delusional hope of receiving a full and lasting peace with the Arab world. But the Arab League, meeting in Khartoum in August 1967, delivered their notorious three nos: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.
It is within the narrow territory remaining for the Jewish state, which includes the more than 3,500 year old ancestral and Biblical Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria, that much of the world now demands the establishment of a fraudulent Arab state to be called Palestine – a state that has never existed in all of recorded history.
Here then would be the next so-called two-state solution, which would dismember what is left of Israel and drive hundreds of thousands of Jewish residents from their homes, villages, and farms – what a hostile world pejoratively calls, “settlements.” Because just as in Jordan, Jews will not be permitted to live within Muslim claimed territory, while Muslim Arabs can remain free to live anywhere within Israel. This is the real apartheid and it exists not in Israel but within the Arab world.
The searing tragedy is that some fear that a second two-state solution may presage for the Jewish state 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 100 years ago, the original two-state solution was enacted in infamy. Certainly, the Obama-Biden administration, consumed as it was by Obama’s anti-Israel animus, was equally infamous during its baleful two terms in office. Now it is increasingly obvious, the present Biden-Harris regime is acting towards embattled Israel in similar ignominy.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance conservative writer and author of seven books including the acclaimed four volume, Politicide
© Victor Sharpe
Comments are closed.
