Go East beyond the River Jordan
Victor Sharpe:
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 for 400 years, Britain was made trustee by the League of Nations for the whole of the geographical area 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 nearly 80% of the Palestine Mandate in 1921/22 giving it to the Hashemites, a Bedouin tribe with links to Mecca. Only the land west of the River Jordan remained from the original 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 created 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 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 plus Jewish refugees who were being driven from Arab lands at the time of Israel’s rebirth and as a refuge for the remnant of European Jewry who survived 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 whose aim was to completely destroy it and drive the surviving Jews into the sea.
The Jordanian Arab Legion, led by British officers, invaded and occupied the eastern half of Jerusalem along with Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank), driving the Jews out of their towns and villages. In the south, the Egyptians invaded and 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 and war.
Interestingly in April, 2009, the Holocaust denying leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and 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. He has repeatedly rejected accepting Israel as a Jewish state; repeating his rejection this last month.
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.
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 an 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 it has become, is living proof of Palestinian Arab genocidal intentions towards Israel.
The Iranian mullahs, perhaps soon armed with nuclear weapons, will have a command and control base within the territory already given away to the Arabs. They will be ensconced in Gaza on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, interested in launching ever more lethal terror against what is left of Israel and threatening Europe. If Israel foolishly gives away parts of Judea and Samaria, there will be no part of Israel or Jerusalem safe from Palestinian Arab missile attacks.
Israel will again be reduced 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 tiny width and remarked, “…why, in my state we have driveways longer than that.”
That is the most likely outcome of the current proposed Two State Solution west of the Jordan River, which the Obama Administration is pushing with the flawed zeal of a misguided zealot. But to truly create a just and equitable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there must be a Two-State Solution on both sides of the River Jordan.
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. This is ethnic cleansing and Apartheid, Arab and Muslim style.
Even though the so-called Kingdom of Jordan includes territory promised in Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration and by the League of Nations as a Jewish National Home, the territory is currently made up of 75% Arabs who call themselves Palestinians with the remainder being Hashemite Bedouins.
As it exists 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 east from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. 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 give up 80% of the originally mandated territory but would now possess all of her biblical and ancestral Jewish lands – with the exception of biblical Gilead east of the Jordan River, which is 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 so many Arab and Muslim nations to wipe out all vestiges of a Jewish state is, perhaps, insurmountable.
Nevertheless, it can do no harm to raise it in the corridors of power and promote and articulate it far more forcefully as a truly “just and equitable” solution.
The accepted wisdom now exercising the minds of Obama, his problematic advisors, the State Department, and the legions of people around the world who have succumbed to the churning mills of the Arab propaganda machine, is that there exists a people called Palestinians with a distinct history who lived in an independent Arab state called Palestine.
It is a lie, perhaps the greatest scam in history, swallowed by so many in direct proportion to the amount 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. Just look at what the Arabs themselves have said about a mythical Palestinian history.
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.”
And here is the PLO executive committee member, Zahir Muhsein, March 31, 1977, in an interview with the Dutch newspaper, Trouw.
“The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.
“For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we claim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”
President Obama showers the Arab and Muslim world with favors. No favor could be more eagerly snatched at than that of Israel abandoned by this American President to the tender mercies of the ever circling mullahs, imams, kings and dictators.
Israel in its own historic territory extending east to the Jordan River and living next to a much larger Jordan/Palestine state, itself extending east of the Jordan River to the borders of Iraq, Syria and Saudi-Arabia, is the moral, just and equitable solution to the conflict. But it will never happen so long as Islam remains un-reformed and Muslims continue to believe that no non-Muslim state can be permitted to exist in land previously invaded and conquered in the name of Allah.
The corollary to this is that the Jewish state must not ever give away any more of its aboriginal, ancestral, biblical, spiritual and physical homeland to a people whose Islamic faith demands of them no recognition or acceptance ever of Israel. Ω © Victor Sharpe 2010
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