What occupation? Victor Sharpe

Posted By on November 28th, 2023

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/231127

Since October 7, 2023, everything has changed

The latest Hamas and Hezbollah aggression, unleashed against Israeli civilians by the mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, masks the growing and insidious myth that has metastasized in the West, namely the endlessly repeated lie by Arab propaganda that the Jewish state occupies a country called Palestine and that Israelis are colonists and occupiers. I first became aware of this baseless lie during the last two weeks of May 2003 when I spent time in England visiting family and friends.

My visit afforded me an opportunity to sense how the British media was treating Israel in its daily news coverage. I was already aware of the corrosive and institutionalized bias by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) towards Israel, but what I saw and heard exceeded my worst fears.

On one day alone, the BBC ran a program called “Correspondent” in which Israel’s construction of a security fence to protect Israeli citizens from Arab terror was roundly criticized. The BBC correspondent expressed no understanding of Israel’s basic needs of defense; instead, the program blamed Israel’s “occupation” for the Palestinian violence and denounced the fence as a “wall of apartheid.”

Of course, when Arabs use the word “occupation” they are not talking of Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank) or Gaza, they are talking about all of Israel. Thus, when they speak of peace once Israel withdraws from “occupied territory” what they really mean is that there will be peace once Israel no longer exists. That is also what they mean when they scream, “From the River to the Sea.”

 

The same day on British TV’s Channel 4, a bizarre opera called “The Death of Klinghoffer” was aired. This filmed opus, composed by a John Adams, dealt with the hijacking by Palestinian terrorists of the cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, in 1985 and the murder of the hapless wheelchair bound Jewish American, Leon Klinghoffer, who was subsequently tossed overboard by the Arab hijackers. The opera provided a misplaced dignity to the terrorists and attempted to excuse their actions in part because of the Israeli “occupation.”

Earlier in the week, BBC 1 was to have televised “Raid on Entebbe” and viewers tuned in only to be dismayed that the Beeb, as the BBC was once affectionately known, arbitrarily cancelled the program. The showing of the film, which cast Israeli commandos in a heroic light as they rescued hijacked Jewish passengers from a German/Palestinian gang in Idi Amin’s Uganda, was deemed by the BBC spokesperson as “insensitive at this time of terrorist alerts.”

Time and time again in the broadcast media and in several newspapers, the most egregious Palestinian atrocities against Israelis were linked to Palestinian Arab frustration against the “occupation.” What is this Israeli “occupation” that is almost universally accepted around the world as being the raison d’etre for the Arab violence and genocide against the Jewish State?

As always, it is necessary to go back into history to understand what is taking place today. According to Professor Talia Einhorn of the TMC Asser Institute, an international law body in The Hague, the Jewish residents in the so-called occupied territories are there by legal and moral right. The West Bank, which is, in fact, biblical Jewish Judea and Samaria, was part of the British Mandate awarded to Great Britain by the League of Nations at the 1920 San Remo Conference. The Mandate’s Charter implicitly underlined the international recognition of the historic ties between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.

The geographical territory, known as Palestine at that time, embraced what is now the Kingdom of Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The British gave away all the territory east of the river Jordan in 1922 to the Hashemite Bedouin tribe led by the Emir Abdullah. The Hashemites had fallen out with what later became known as the House of Saud, and the British Colonial Office in one stroke thus gave away 80% of the original mandated territory reserved for a Jewish Homeland.

Professor Einhorn, in an interview she gave to Israel’s Arutz-7 news service, stated that the remaining 20% of the original mandate, that is the land from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan – a mere forty miles in width – is allowed, under international law, to be redeemed by Jews. During Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Judea and Samaria (The West Bank) was illegally occupied by the Kingdom of Jordan, an Arab occupation recognized only by Pakistan and Great Britain. In turn, Egypt seized the Gaza Strip. Both Jordan and Egypt had been two of the seven Muslim Arab countries, which had immediately invaded Israel upon its declaration of independence.

Professor Einhorn returned to the original mandate and pointed out that Clause 2 charged Britain with “ensuring the existence of political, administrative, and economic conditions that will guarantee the establishment of the Jewish national home.” Sadly, the international media and most talking heads seem totally unaware of these facts or prefer to ignore them. There is nothing in international law that requires a Palestinian state to exist between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. Even the UN Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947, which calls for the establishment of separate Arab and Jewish states, is only a recommendation, not a requirement. As the Arab states rejected the Partition Plan, the recommendations are devoid of any legal basis.

The constant repetition of Israeli “occupation” is an utterly baseless charge. Subsequent UN Resolutions 242 and 338 were carefully crafted to avoid using the definite article “the” when referring to the withdrawal from territories. It was never implied that after the 1967 Six-Day War – during which Israel fought the combined Arab attempt to destroy her – she was meant to withdraw from all the territories she now liberated.

Israel subsequently withdrew from all the Sinai Peninsula after the peace accord between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. This withdrawal, by itself, constituted giving away over 90% of the territories.

Tragically, the relentless power of Arab propaganda and the eager willingness by so many in the mainstream media to swallow the false claim of “Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory” is now so far ingrained that it is difficult to see how the truth can ever emerge universally. The great myth of an Arab independent state called Palestine, now occupied by Israel, became accepted wisdom by huge numbers throughout the world.

Ending the so-called “Israeli occupation” is a false premise based on Arab fabrications and mythology. There has never – in all recorded history – existed an independent Arab state called Palestine. Jordan, which consists of 80% of the Palestine Mandate and whose population is 80% Palestinian is, in fact, the Palestinian State in all but name.

There is no “occupation” by Jews of another people’s land. Jews are not foreign settlers or colonialists but the indigenous people of the land and to be literally driven out of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza – the very birthplace of the Jewish People – is to create a monstrous injustice in our time and to deny history and the Bible.

A so-called Palestinian state already exists east of the River Jordan, one carved out of the defeated Ottoman Empire by the British Colonial Office some 100 years ago, now called Jordan and run by the minority Hashemite Bedouin tribe, but populated by the majority Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

Jordan is three times greater in size than tiny Israel and is for all intents and purposes the already existing State of Palestine:

Jordan is Palestine: Period.

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