Israel Hasbara Committee
The Two-State Solution is 86 Years Old
By Victor Sharpe
[ISRAEL] In 1920, Great Britain was given the responsibility by the League of Nations to oversee the Mandate over the geographical territory known as Palestine with the express intention of facilitating within its territory a Jewish National Home. The territory in question stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the eastern boundary of Palestine, which was a border that would separate it from what was to become the future state of Iraq.
Upon receipt of the Mandate the British Government began creating a number of articles which were in line with the original intent of the Balfour Declaration of November, 1917. But at the last minute, a new article was introduced in 1922 by the British Colonial Office: article number 25.
At first the sudden addition of this article did not alarm the Zionist leaders but gradually it became apparent that its inclusion directly enabled Great Britain to tear away all the territory of geographical Palestine, east of the River Jordan. This vast area constituted four fifths of the Palestine Mandate and its arbitrary removal from the proposed Jewish National Home was a perfidious act by Britain and the Colonial Office towards the Jewish people.
This was the first partition of Palestine and created a brand new entity covering some 35,000 square miles. This new Arab entity was handed to the Emir Abdullah in 1922, some 86 years ago, and it became known as Transjordan. Immediately Jewish residence in the territory was forbidden and it became in effect judenrein (the German term for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from a territory).
This betrayal by none other than Winston Churchill, the Colonial Secretary at the time, was a devastating blow to the Jewish and Zionist leadership, which now saw the promised Jewish homeland reduced to the remaining narrow territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan - an area barely 50 miles wide. Shortly afterwards, in 1923, the British and French colonial powers divided up the northern part of the Palestine Mandate and stripped away the Golan Heights (ancient biblical Bashan) 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. Indeed many months before the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, the Zionist leadership and the British Foreign Office had mutually agreed that the eastern boundary would run well east of the Hedjaz railway. The incorporation of the railway, it was agreed, would be an economically essential requirement of the Jewish community living east of the River Jordan as well as providing it with vital security.
The squabbling by the French and British colonial powers over the final frontiers of the Palestine Mandate had earlier led the London Times to urge Paris to accept sensible and rational frontiers in both the north and east of Jewish Palestine. As early as September 19th, 1919 it 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 Jordan ... Our duty as Mandatory is to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling state but one that is capable of vigorous and independent life ...
But Jewish aspirations inevitably were dashed and a new British Foreign Secretary was to take the place of Lord Balfour. This new British official was Lord Curzon who within weeks of succeeding Balfour made it clear that Britain was intent upon separating Transjordan from Palestine: the first two-state solution.
The succeeding history of the remaining one fifth of the original territory promised to the Jewish people by Lord Balfour and the British government was one of continuing British betrayal as each successive Mandatory administration displayed pro-Arab and anti-Jewish policies.
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 Arab states.
Britain’s sorry record of appeasement of the Arabs, at the expense of Jewish destiny in the remaining territory culminated in the infamous 1939 White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration to just 10,000 souls a year for five years. This onerous and draconian policy, coming as it did on the eve of the outbreak of World War 2, was a death blow to millions of Jews fleeing extermination by Nazi Germany.
Britain’s mismanagement of the Mandate finally led to the United Nation’s Partition Plan of 1947. The Jewish Agency reluctantly accepted this additional dismemberment of what was left in Mandatory Palestine of the promised Jewish National Home.
They did this in order to provide a refuge for the surviving Jewish remnants of the Holocaust and for the growing numbers of Jewish refugees being driven out of their homes throughout the Arab world - a number which easily eclipsed that of the Arab refugees, most of whom left Mandatory Palestine at the behest of their corrupt Arab masters. In contrast to Jewish acceptance of the Partition, the Arabs regimes rejected the Partition Plan for they would not accept then, as now, the existence of an independent Jewish state.
Israel was officially re-born in 1948 and the 600,000 Jews survived the massive Arab onslaught, which was intended to wipe out the Jewish state. The war ended in tortuous armistice lines resulting in an Israeli border a mere nine miles wide at its most densely populated area, which stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the now Jordanian occupied West Bank.
These were the existing and dangerously vulnerable borders, which Israel’s late Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, described as the Auschwitz borders. In 1948, Trans-Jordan, renamed Jordan since 1946, joined the other Arab nations in invading the Jewish state, illegally annexing the Biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria and renaming it the West Bank. This act of aggression was recognized by only two states, Great Britain and Pakistan.
Nineteen years later the Arab states declared their imminent intention to destroy Israel. In 1967 Israel liberated Judea and Samaria from Jordan in a defensive war. Desiring peace at almost any cost, Israel offered to give away the newly liberated West Bank to the Hashemite regime in Jordan and the Gaza Strip to its erstwhile Egyptian occupiers but the Arab League meeting in Khartoum delivered the infamous three No’s: No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.
It is within the narrow territory remaining for the Jewish state, if one includes Judea and Samaria, that the world now demands the establishment of yet another Arab state. Gaza would be included in this future Arab state to be called Palestine; a state which has never existed before by that name - certainly not as an independent Arab state - in all of recorded history.
Gaza has already been given to the Arabs and they have turned it into a terror base from which they have launched a lethal missile blitz against Israel numbering to date some 8,000 rockets.
The disputed West Bank, which is the ancient Biblical heartland of Israel, is now the territory U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, is pressuring Israel to give away to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
Rice has visited Israel some sixteen times to push for Israeli withdrawal from the territory and allow yet another partition to take place within the tiny sliver of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan. This is the present day so-called two - state solution.
According to the Washington Times, “Secretary Rice seems determined to pound the Israeli government into a series of untenable security concessions. It's a State Department tradition that no one should be proud of.” The Washington Times was alluding to the long history of State Department reluctance to support Israel mainly due to fears of alienating the Arab oil producers.
The Secretary of State appears to prefer remaining oblivious to the stark fact that the Arabs, whom she embraces and who today call themselves Palestinians, are as committed as their parents and grandparents were before them to destroy the Jewish state; whatever size its borders.
One wonders if Ms. Rice knows, let alone cares, that eighty six years ago the original two - state solution was enacted in infamy and that today, the four fifths of Mandatory Palestine torn from the Mandate is in actuality a Palestinian State. Though it is called Jordan, its Hashemite rulers are a minority in a kingdom in which two thirds of its population call themselves Palestinians.
An Arab Palestine already exists.
Source: Exclusive article submitted by the author, an IHC Featured Writer
Copyright © Victor Sharpe 2008
Edited by IHC staff, www.infoisrael.net
Published 15 May 2008