Israel is the only nation on Earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language, and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago. –Charles Krauthammer
Most people either don’t know the history behind the formation of Israel and the Arab states, or have forgotten it. Here’s a brief refresher.
THE BRITISH MUCK THINGS UP
After WWI and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations gave the British control of what was called Mandatory Palestine. This consisted of quite a large block of land, and the plan, as stated in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, expressed the British commitment to carve out a national homeland in the Holy Land for the Jews—a plan supported by the Allies as well, including President Woodrow Wilson. France was very much on board. Here’s an excerpt from a letter from the French Secretary-General of the Foreign Ministry Jules Cambon:
…it would be a deed of justice and of reparation to assist, by the protection of the Allied Powers, in the renaissance of the Jewish nationality [nationalité juive] in that land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago.
WINSTON’S HICCUP AND BRITAIN’S SLEIGHT OF HAND
Then came "Winston’s Hiccup."
Churchill was Britain’s Colonial Secretary at the time, and legend has it that due to his drinking more than usual, his pen slipped—hence the odd zigzag of the Transjordanian border.
Colorful legend aside, Britain did some fancy footwork in 1922, perhaps caving to Arab pressure, because suddenly, the large block of Mandatory Palestine that encompassed tracts on both sides of the Jordan river shrunk to only the narrow strip west of the Jordan—about 25% of the original territory. And now that 25% was slated to be split into two countries.
What happened to the other 75% so generously carved out of British Mandatory Palestine?
It went to the Arabs. We know it today as Jordan.
This was all the more surprising since:
The Mandate’s primary purpose was to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in Palestine, and since Israel’s ancient tribes had existed on both sides of the Jordan River, the Zionists anticipated the national home would extend beyond the eastern bank of the river and into Transjordan.
Indeed, when the Mandate was finally approved by the League of Nations in 1922, to the chagrin of the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, it contained a revised text enabling Britain to detach Transjordan from the Jewish national home. (Emphasis mine)
In other words, 75% of British Mandatory Palestine was awarded to the Arabs under the pretense that it hadn’t been in the Mandate in the first place! This was an astonishing betrayal of the British promise to create a Jewish homeland in the ancestral land of the Jewish people. Evidently, the Brits had essentially promised much of the same land to both the Jews and the Arabs, and had to weasel out of it.
PEELING THE PIE
So how to divide the remaining slender slice of the pie? British Lord Peel came up with the Peel Partition that proposed about 85% of the remnant of British Mandatory Palestine to the Arabs, and about 15% to the Jews. This was followed by similar slivers for the Jews and most of the land to the Arabs in the 1938 Woodhead Partition.
By now, the Jews were willing to settle for anything they could get. And the Arabs? Refusal after refusal. Ironically, had they accepted the Peel Partition, most of what is Israel today would have been an Arab state! At least in that instance, Arab recalcitrance actually served to benefit the Jews they sought, and still seek, to destroy.
In 1946, ten years after the Arab Revolt of 1936, and after proposing various ways to divide the remainder of the territory to no one’s satisfaction, the British washed their hands of the whole affair, summarily handing it over to the United Nations.
HOW THE DECK WAS STACKED AGAINST THE JEWS
Two facts muddied the waters in the decade or so prior to the UN taking over British Mandatory Palestine.
Much to the shame of the Brits, they actually caved to Arab pressure and denied entry into the Jewish homeland to Jewish refugees from Europe who were fleeing the Nazis! Not only that, but as Victor Sharpe puts it:
During its administration up until 1947, Britain severely restricted Jewish immigration and purchases of land while turning a blind eye to massive illegal Arab immigration into the territory from neighboring failed and stagnant Arab states. These illegal alien Arabs were the originators of those Arabs today who primarily call themselves Palestinians. (Emphasis mine)
The second mindboggling fact I learned while leafing through Joan Peters’ masterpiece of investigative journalism, From Time Immemorial.
In 1948, the UN changed the definition of…wait for it…”refugee”! Instead of people who were forced to leave a “permanent” home, the UN, in an underhanded Orwellian maneuver, redefined the term solely for Arab refugees, as “any persons that had been in Palestine for [a minimum of] only two years before Israel’s statehood in 1948.” (Peters, From Time Immemorial, p.4) Hence grandfathering in nearly all the recent illegal Arab immigrants as “refugees”—who would later claim the “right of return.” Not to be outdone, UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, further redefined “refugee” to include the descendants of those Arabs! Talk about fishy…
THE JEWS FINALLY GET THEIR HOMELAND
In November 1947, the U.N. proposed 43% of the remains of British Mandatory Palestine for the Arabs, and 55% for the Jews. The Jews said thank you. The Arabs said nothing doing. Six months later, in May 1948, the state of Israel was born, only to be immediately attacked by Arab armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Not a very friendly welcome for the skinny new kid on the block. And that was, of course, only the beginning.
Miraculously, the Israelis won that war, and with it, more territory. After their humiliating defeat, the Arabs plotted their next offensives. Their surefire plan was to join forces once more and push the Jews into the sea in the 1967 Six Day War, but much to their chagrin, Israel not only won, but did so within a week, while regaining the Sinai Peninsula the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria, aka the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Maybe a lesson there.
However, the Arabs regrouped and attacked again, just six years later, in 1973, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. This time Israel won territory in the Golan Heights, but withdrew from the land it had won from Syria the following year, as per a “disengagement” treaty. More “land for peace” wishful thinking.
A TRAGEDY OF THEIR OWN MAKING: THE ARABS’ REFUSALS
Even though Palestine was never a nation, so Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank cannot be bereft of a nation that never existed, they are nevertheless in a predicament, and that is true whether we call them Palestinians or Egyptians, Jordanians, or simply Arabs. So how did that predicament come about, and who bears responsibility for it?
As Victor Sharpe reminds us: “…the Arab League, meeting in Khartoum in August 1967, delivered the infamous three no’s: No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel. From 1937, Israeli politicians have five times offered the Arabs a state. Five times the Arabs have rejected the Israeli offers. The reason being the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians want no state next to Israel. They want no Jewish state to exist. Period!” (Emphasis mine)
And from Dr. Sergio Simon’s open letter to Queen Rania of Jordan:
Instead of absorbing them [the Palestinian refugees] into the Jordanian society, they were kept under inhumane conditions in concentration camps to pressure Israel and the United Nations. Nobody wanted the Palestine “problem” solved. … there were also the Jewish refugees from the Arab countries as well!
Hundreds of thousands of Jews had to flee Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen and Morocco without anything, leaving behind all their belongings and properties… But Israel did not put them in camps. They were readily absorbed in the Israeli society and today…they are lawyers, doctors, teachers, university professors in Israel. There is no more a “Jewish refugee” problem. This could have happened with the poor Palestinians had King Hussein in Jordan, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and Shukri al-Kwatli and Hafez al-Assad in Syria done the same. (Emphasis mine)
ARAFAT’S GAME OF CAT AND MOUSE
What is the ultimate goal of the Palestinians? Is it possession of their own state?
If so, why did Yassar Arafat agree to the1993 Oslo Accords and then promptly violate virtually all the agreements? And why did he turn down the Camp David II Accords in 2000 proffered under Ehud Barak working alongside President Clinton? That plan would have given the Palestinians 97% of Gaza and the West Bank and a Palestinian Authority (PA) capitol in East Jerusalem. This was everything they’d asked for with a cherry on top! Only 3% shy of the UN’s original plan for a Palestinian state, yet Arafat responded with the Second Intifada.
More telling yet, when Clinton tried making the plan even more appealing to the Arabs, Arafat reportedly admitted in a phone conversation with Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, that it was “the best offer imaginable.” (Meir-Levi: History Upside Down p. 98) Yet Arafat rejected it cold and stepped up the violence. Why?
It would seem that the PLO, and its offshoot the PA, have been playing cat and mouse with Israel for decades. And according to high-ranking Communist defector Ion Mihai Pacepa, this is not by accident:
Brezhnev, according to Pacepa, carried it one step farther when Carter came into office. He suggested to Pacepa that Carter might fall for Yassir Arafat PRETENDING to renounce violence and pretending to seek peace negotiations. He persuaded Arafat to do this by telling him that the West would shower him with gold and glory. It did. Billions of dollars and a Nobel prize. Ceausescu warned Arafat he would have to pretend over and over again. Abbas is still pretending. (Emphasis mine)
This kind of pretense is also sanctioned in the Koran, as Taqiya—the act of lying for a supposedly worthy goal. But what is the goal, if not a Palestinian state?
The utter and complete destruction of Israel through genocide against the Jews.
This appeals to those Arabs who dream of annihilating Israel and creating a worldwide Muslim Caliphate. Furthermore, it fits in with the Globalist/Leftist plan for a One World Government, entailing the eradication of Western civilization of which Biblical Israel has served as a cornerstone. And of course Christianity itself rests upon its Jewish roots.
The decades-long unresolved conflict between Israel and the Palestinians could almost be likened to the dysfunctional relationship between a battered wife and her abusive spouse. And this is why Israel ought never to have “disengaged” from the Gaza Strip, or ceded control of the Philadelphi Corridor on the Egyptian border. As Victor Sharpe points out: “It is under this corridor that Hamas [has] dug hundreds of tunnels through which they smuggle their weapons into Gaza.” Nor should Israel have agreed to a cease-fire and hostage/prisoner exchange before its mission to take down Hamas is complete.
Predictably, in the aftermath of October 7th, the Palestinian psy-op came into play: the jihadist terrorists shape-shifted instantly into the poor, stateless Palestinians. That’s been the game for some 50 years, and that’s what just happened, quick as a wink, after Hamas’ horrifically savage attack on innocent Israeli civilians, including women, children and even babies, many of whom were burned to death after being raped, brutalized, and dismembered.
Amazingly, within a day or two or three, the international hue and cry was for protection for the poor, innocent…Palestinians!
There’s always been tremendous pressure put on Israelis to play nice with people who’ve sworn to kill them. Certainly America is guilty of this—O’Biden in spades—but so is Israel’s own Deep State, comprised, like our own, of Leftists with their own “progressive” globalist agenda.
A FEW UNDENIABLE FACTS
Take a look at the map of the Middle East and North Africa as shown above. What jumps out to the naked eye is how huge Saudi Arabia, Iran and Egypt are, with Iraq and Syria not far behind. Jordan is a little smaller, yet it dwarfs the teeny, tiny sliver on the map that is Israel, in an odd configuration with part of its heart, Judea and Samaria, aka the West Bank, cut out.
There Israel sits, surrounded by a hornets’ nest of hostile Arab Muslim countries, not to mention jihadist Palestinians within its very border. It’s dizzying to count the number of times Arab nations have attacked the Jewish state, or how many times Israel has offered them land in exchange for peace, which they’ve turned down again and again. Why? Because their goal is not peace or land per se: their goal is the annihilation of Israel.
How do we know this?
The Arabs themselves have said so over and over. Take a look at the Muslim Brotherhood charter, not to mention that of the PLO or Hamas—the latter even made it into an Atlantic article entitled “Understanding Hamas’s Genocidal Ideology.” And their actions match their words, as we were reminded on October 7th of this year, the latest in attacks and wars going back to the 1920s when the idea of a Jewish state took shape, and again in 1947, 1948-49, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006, not to mention the frequent bombings, missiles, and sporadic terrorist attacks. Is that enough proof yet to take them at their word?
By looking at the record of unprovoked Arab violence against Israel, how can we blithely accept the narrative that asks us to view Arabs as victims while damning Israel with the slurs of “oppressor” and “aggressor”?
Whom are we going to believe, the New York Times? CNN? MSNBC? The BBC? The UN? Al Jazeera? Iran? Arafat speaking from the grave through next-generation terrorists? Or our own eyes….
ARABS LIVING IN ISRAEL: APARTHEID? OOPS…NO
The fact that some two million Arabs live in Israel and enjoy full citizenship is proof positive that Jews and Arabs can live together in peace. One can find a number of Israeli Arabs who have only praise for Israel. Here’s one that may surprise you: an Arab Muslim who’s an IDF captain!
However, jihadist Arab Muslims can live in peace with no one—not even their brother Arabs, which is why they were chased out of Jordan and Lebanon, and why to this day, no Arab state wants to open its doors to the terrorist-spawning Palestinians.
PREDICAMENT OF THE PALESTINIANS: WHO’S TO BLAME?
It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that the Arab leadership manipulated, exploited and abused the Palestinians beginning in 1947, first by enticing them to leave their homes in anticipation of the promised annihilation of Israel—after which they were told they’d reclaim their homes plus inherit the spoils of Jewish property—then by placing them in “refugee camps” and denying them entry into surrounding Arab nations. And that this systematic abuse has created a monster even they cannot control, but continue to exploit in their unending war against Israel.
The Arab refugee issue goes back to 1949 when Israel offered to return the Arab lands it conquered in the war for its survival, in exchange for a peace treaty. As David Meir-Levi puts it: “This would have allowed hundreds of thousands of refugees to return to their homes. The Arabs said no…”. Instead, they were planning their next winner-take-all war against Israel, which they launched in 1956.
Meir-Levi goes on to say:
At the Lausanne conference in August 1949, Israel again offered to repatriate a hundred thousand refugees even without a peace treaty. The Arab states refused again because such a negotiation would have involved a tacit recognition of the State of Israel. Instead, the Arabs insisted on maintaining the refugees in their squalor and suffering…. (Meir-Levi, History Upside Down, p. 74)
Moreover, as some Arabs were candid enough to announce in public, the refugee problem would serve as “a festering sore on the backside of Europe,” easily converted to moral leverage in the effort to win the emotional support of the West against Israel. (Meir-Levi, History Upside Down, p. 75)
And in a Wall St. Journal Op-Ed, Fred Baumann describes the situation this way:
Rejected by their fellow Arabs, who largely kept them cooped up in camps and fed a diet of hatred and revenge from birth, Palestinians were meant to be a tool for a war of total destruction against the Jewish state. Eventually, the plan backfired and, after the (barely) failed attempt of radicalized Palestinians to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy, they became too dangerous to absorb. To this day, they suffer from their exclusion by their fellow Arabs, while directing their passionate hatred toward Israel.
Within those squalid camps where they were warehoused by Arab leaders, the Palestinians fed upon anger, hatred, envy and vengeance, while their leaders turned down every opportunity Israel offered to ameliorate their situation, including giving them their own territory.
In this climate, terrorist organizations like the PLO were born, with help from the Soviets, as discussed in Part One of “Israel in the Crosshairs.”
To many in the West, it seems puzzling that Palestinians don't migrate to other Arab countries. But those countries will not take them.
Egypt has as little desire to rule a discontented and dangerous Palestinian population as Israel does.
By way of explanation TheLibertyDaily posted a jaw-dropping 4-minute video entitled Here's Why No Muslim-Majority Nations Want Palestinians in Their Countries. View it here. In both Jordan and Lebanon, the Palestinians functioned as a “state within a state,” fomenting unrest and attempting to overthrow the legitimate government. Ring any bells?
The intransigence of the Arab leaders created the predicament of the Palestinians. But the abuse of the Palestinians by these leaders should not surprise us—it is the same principle as that of using children as “human shields” –exploitation of the powerless for political purposes.
There was a watershed moment in 2005 when Israel under Prime Minister Sharon unilaterally gave the Gaza strip to the Palestinians, even forcibly removing Jewish settlers who’d lived there for decades and didn’t want to relocate. The Israelis left them a thriving export business deriving from state-of-the-art greenhouses that supplied fruit and flowers to Europe.
Sadly, as Victor Sharpe points out: “Sharon had foolishly believed…the Arab residents would build a civilized and peaceful society, thus proving to both Israel and the world that they could live in peace with the Jewish state. It was a delusion…”
Instead, the populace, in an uncanny echo of Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, shattered the glass of the previously Jewish-owned greenhouses, and elected the terrorist group Hamas as their leaders.
When you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.
Read more of Cherie's articles here.© Cherie Zaslawsky
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.