Very few people understand why Israel is now balking at a two-state solution and are against Obama's plan. This is an excellent explanation of why and what has been happening to the area. -Nadene Goldfoot
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 a Jewish National Home.
The British Mandatory power, however, arbitrarily tore away 80% of the Palestine Mandate in 1922, 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 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 50 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 Jewish refugees who were being driven from Arab lands at the time of Israel's rebirth.
The miniscule size of the state was also reluctantly accepted in order to facilitate the absorption of the surviving Jewish remnant still languishing in European refugee camps following 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 in order to completely destroy it and drive the surviving Jews into the sea.
The Jordanian Arab Legion, led by British officers, occupied the eastern half of Jerusalem along with Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), driving the Jews out of their towns and villages. In the south, the Egyptians 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.
In June, 1967, the Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians, launched a new aggression against Israel with the avowed intention of annihilating it. Israel defeated her Arab enemies in six amazing days and in so doing liberated the eastern half of Jerusalem, along with Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), from the Jordanians. At the same time, Gaza was freed from Egyptian occupation.
Despite subsequent and repeated offers by Israeli governments to give away territory in return for a true and lasting peace with the Arab belligerents, the Arab world continued to support terror and refused to accept a Jewish state within the Middle East.
Interestingly in April, 2009, the Holocaust denying leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, 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.
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. Thus ends the history lesson.
The creation of a Palestinian Arab state within the mere 50 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.
The Iranian mullahs, perhaps soon armed with nuclear weapons, will have a command and control base within the territory given away to the Arabs. They will be ensconced in Gaza on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, determined upon launching ever more lethal terror against what is left of Israel and threatening Europe itself.
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 waist 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, I propose 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 even though it includes territory promised in Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration and by the League of Nations as a Jewish National Home.
Jordan's population is currently made up of 75% Arabs who call themselves Palestinians with the remainder being Hashemite Bedouins. As it is 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 west from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. That would still only be a distance of barely 50 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 forcefully as a truly "just and equitable" solution.
When Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu arrives for his fateful meeting with President Barak Obama on May 18, 2009, it is unlikely that this solution will be raised. That is a shame because the accepted wisdom, now exercising the minds of Obama, the neo-libs who surround him, his problematic advisors, 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 one of the greatest scams in history, swallowed 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.
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."
President Obama has made it crystal clear that he is not prepared to let such inconvenient truths deter him from his strange obsession in forcing through the creation of a terror supporting Palestinian Arab state during his term of office.
He intends to shower the Arab and Muslim world with favors. No favor could be more eagerly snatched at than that of the Israeli democracy abandoned by this American President to the tender mercies of the ever circling mullahs, imams, dictators and oligarchs.And as the President prepares to leave on his strange mission to Egypt to give a speech to the Muslim world he will also no doubt ignore the fact that from the Al Azhar University in Cairo spews forth a constant stream of Islamic hatred towards non-Muslims; those they call "infidels."
Doubly strange that President Barak Hussein Obama should choose Egypt whose government controlled media routinely drips anti-Jewish poisonFor Binyamin Netanyahu, May 18th, 2009 may therefore, to paraphrase Dickens, be the best of times and the worst of times. He may surprise us yet by being a leader not made of petroleum jelly, but one who finally stands up to President Obama and simply says, No.
After all, the stakes are harrowingly high - the very survival of modern Israel. But it is worth doing the right thing, or, as Mark Twain put it:
"... always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
