Is History To Repeat Itself In The Middle East?

Did you know that in 1919 Emir Feisal wrote to Chaim Weizmann and welcomed him home as part of the Feisal-Weizmann Agreement?  Most people do not.  Here is a history of the area and a new proposal to make Jordan the home of the Palestinians. Ironically, that was to be the way it was with the Balfour Declaration in 1917.  

The attached posting gives a history from 1917 to the present. It is well worth reading.

Conservative Tom

Palestine, Back to the Future… Again.

Unknown - Unknown,  June 25th, 2012

There was a time when the lands now known as Israel, (including Judea and Samaria and Gaza), and most of Jordan were called “Palestine”.  In fact, theBalfour Declaration of 1917 declared

“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.

There followed considerable cooperation between the Jews, represented by Chaim Weizmann and the Arabs living in Mesopotamia, now Iraq, and Jordan, represented by Emir Feisal.  As a result, the Feisal-Weizmann Agreement was signed in January 1919, in which it was agreed that the Jews would get the lands lying west of the Jordan River watershed to the Mediterranean and the Arabs would get the land east of it.

Two months later Faisal wrote to Felix Frankfuter, the then leader of the American Zionists, extending a welcome:

“We Arabs, especially the educated among us look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate proper. We will

do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.”

Unfortunately that initial agreement and embrace were overtaken by events.  The British and the French had other plans.

Finally in 1920, the allied powers, Britain, France, Italy and Japan adopted theSan Remo Resolution in evidence of their agreement

“The High Contracting Parties agree to entrust, by application of the provisions of Article 22, [Covenant of League of Nations ] the administration of Palestine, within such boundaries as may be determined by the Principal Allied Powers, to a Mandatory, to be selected by the said Powers. The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 8, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,”

This agreement was binding in international law as these powers had the right to dispose of these lands.

What remained was for the League of Nations to draw up the Palestine Mandate. Originally, the boundaries of Palestine included what is now Jordan, but a few months prior to the Palestine Mandate being confirmed by the Council of League of Nations on July 1922, the Jews were told that they must consent to the removal of Transjordan from the Jewish homeland if they wished the Mandate to be passed.  And so they did, under duress. And so was born Article 25 of the Mandate:

“In the territories lying between the Jordan [river] and the eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined, the Mandatory shall be entitled, with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations, to postpone or withhold application o

f such provisions of this mandate as he may consider inapplicable to the existing local conditions, and to make such provision for the administration of the territories as he may consider suitable to those conditions”

Pursuant to this paragraph, Britain severed all lands lying east of the Jordan River from the Palestine Mandate and gave the lands to the Hashemites. It was first renamed Trans-Jordan and then just Jordan,

When the League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations in 1945, the Charter of the United Nations described “Mandates” as “Trusteeships” and specifically included in Article 80, the following,

“…nothing in this Chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.”

in order to preserve the rights the Jews had acquired under the League of Nations.

There followed many White Papers, resolutions, wars and peace processes, all designed to erode Jewish rights to the land described in the Palestine Mandate, all to no avail, For all intents and purposes, the peace process is dead and Abu Mazen, otherwise known as Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the PA, has been refusing to negotiate for the last three years.

This futile effort has resulted in a search for alternate solutions. Newt Gingrich went public with his newsworthy statement “”We’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community,”. Gov Romney did him one better and said “It’s the Palestinians who don’t want a two-state solution; they want to eliminate the State of Israel,” Didn’t they know that in our PC world, one is not supposed to declare that the Emperor has no clothes. The fiction underlying the failed peace process is more important than the truth.

Just a couple of weeks ago the Republican National Committee passed aresolution  providing that  “.. peace can be afforded the region only through a united Israel governed under one law for all people.”

The Florida Senate just filed a similar resolution with some important changes. It was preceded by these recitals, inter alia:

“WHEREAS, the legal basis for the establishment of the State of Israel was a binding resolution under international law,  which was unanimously adopted by the League of Nations in 1922     and subsequently affirmed by both houses of the United States Congress, and

“WHEREAS, this resolution affirmed the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in the historical region of the Land of Israel, including areas of Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem, “

In it, the Members of the Senate affirmed that they

“support Israel in its legal, historical, moral, and God-given right of self-governance and self-defense upon the entirety of its own lands, recognizing that Israel is neither an attacking force nor an occupier of the lands of others, and that peace can be afforded the region only through a whole and united Israel governed under one law for all people”.

Of particular interest is the fact that the Florida Senate is affirming that the San Remo Resolution  was a binding resolution, under international law, for the legal basis for the establishment of the State of Israel.  This flies in the face of all attempts by the international community to deny Israel those rights by asserting their interpretation of the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention as making the settlements, or the “occupation”, illegal.  It does no such thing.  Nor has anything else, since the Mandate in 1922, derogated from such rights. Futhermore, UN Res 181 , which was the basis of the Partition Plan, was a recommendation only. Also SC Res 242 didn’t contradict the original rights of the Jews.

This resolution is expected to pass and also to be incorporated into the Republican Party platform.

If not the two-state solution, then what?
The “Jordan is Palestine” solution has been mooted for decades. It is now gaining traction due in part to the Arab Spring which began a year ago.  Jordan now is feeling the tremors.  The majority of Palestinian leaders in Jordan, favour Jordan becoming a democratic/secular state. They have watched in dismay as similar forces in Egypt were overwhelmed by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists. They are determined not to share their fate. They are lead by Mudar Zahran the author of Jordan’s King and the Muslim Brotherhood: An Unholy Marriage.

Zahran in his ground-breaking article, “Jordan is Palestine” published byMiddle East Forum in December 2011, argues:

“Empowering Palestinian control of Jordan and giving Palestinians all over the world a place they can call home could not only defuse the population and demographic problem for Palestinians in Judea and Samaria but would also solve the much more complicated issue of the “right of return” for Palestinians in other Arab countries. Approximately a million Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in Syria and Lebanon, with another 300,000 in Jordan whom the Hashemite government still refuses to accept as citizens. How much better could their future look if there were a welcoming Palestinian Jordan?

“The Jordanian option seems the best possible and most viable solution to date. Decades of peace talks and billions of dollars invested by the international community have only brought more pain and suffering for both Palestinians and Israelis—alongside prosperity and wealth for the Hashemites and their cronies.”

The rationality and achievability of this solution, needs no elucidation.  It only needs the US to get behind it. While such an initiative by the US would be a departure from the position it has held since the founding of the State of Israel, it would not be a departure from her original position. As noted in the proposed Florida Senate resolution mentioned above, such a position was “affirmed by both houses of the United States Congress,” in 1922. These resolutions unanimously endorsed the “Mandate for Palestine,” confirming the irrevocable right of Jews to settle in the area of Palestine – anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea”

And Zahran’s brave stance in which he wants the new Jordan, governed by Palestinians, to embrace Israel in true friendship, is also not new or novel.  It is a return to Emir Feisal’s warm embrace of the Jews in 1919.

Thus we are returning to our future.

- – -

Author, Ted Belman is Chief Editor athttp://www.israpundit.com/

Israel's Rights to Exist Guaranteed By International Law

Those who are anti-Israel insist that the country has no right to exist for a couple reasons. First, they say that Jews have never  had a presence in the area. Secondly, they say there never was any international agreement that gave the land to Israel. Both arguments are not based on fact or history.

 

There  have been Jews in Israel since the time of Abraham and Moses.  Jerusalem has had two Jewish Temples and of course, the Old Testament blows away the first argument.

 

We will let the following article answer the second false argument.  Here it is:

Jewish Rights to Palestine Are Guaranteed by International Law

Eli E. Hertz - Myths & Facts, October 24th, 2011

Successive Israeli governments have failed to recognize the supreme importance of the “Mandate for Palestine” [24 July, 1922] a historical League of Nations document that set forth the irrevocable Jewish legal rights to settle anywhere in western Palestine, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, an entitlement unaltered by international law and valid to this day.
Leadership, both in Israel and in the Diaspora do practically nothing effective with the best legal weapon they will ever have: “The Mandate for Palestine.”
In the first Report of the High Commissioner on the Administration of Palestine (1920-1925) presented to the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, and published in April 1925, the most senior official of the Mandate underscored how international guarantees for the existence of a Jewish National Home in Palestine were achieved:

The [Balfour] Declaration was endorsed at the time by several of the Allied Governments; it was reaffirmed by the Conference of the Principal Allied Powers at San Remo in 1920; it was subsequently endorsed by unanimous resolutions of both Houses of the Congress of the United States; it was embodied in the Mandate for Palestine approved by the League of Nations in 1922; it was declared, in a formal statement of policy issued by the Colonial Secretary in the same year, 'not to be susceptible of change.'

Article 27 of the Mandate for Palestine states that the “consent of the Council of the League of Nations is required for any modification of the terms of this mandate.” No such consent was ever passed.
Eleven successive British governments, Labor and Conservative, from David Lloyd George (1916-1922) through Clement Attlee (1945-1952) viewed themselves as duty-bound to fulfill the “Mandate for Palestine” placed in the hands of Great Britain by the League of Nations.
In 1947 the British put the future of western Palestine into the hands of the United Nations, the successor organization to the League of Nations which had established the Mandate for Palestine.
When describing trust agreements such as the Mandate for Palestine, Article 80 of the United States Charter states that “nothing in this Chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states of any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties”.
Thus, the Mandate for Palestine is still in effect today.
It is time to tell the free democratic world:

Effective immediately, the Government of Israel reaffirms the Mandate for Palestine as the foundation and the starting point for any and all peace discussions between the Jewish state of Israel and the Arab inhabitant in Judea and Samaria.

The Palestinian Lesson That Needs To Be Learned

Fouad Ajami writes in the Wall Street Journal  on June 1, 2011 a very insightful article on the lesson that was learned and the one that should be learned by the Palestinians.  I think it is well worth the time reading and would love to hear what you think.   It is reprinted from  the UCI (Unity Coalition on Israel) site.

Here is the article:

The U.N. Can't Deliver a Palestinian State


Fouad Ajami - The Wall Street Journal, June 1st, 2011



It had been quite a scramble, the prelude to the vote on Nov. 29, 1947, on the question of the partition of Palestine. The United Nations itself was only two years old and had just 56 member states; the Cold War was gathering force, and no one was exactly sure how the two pre-eminent powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, would vote. The Arab and Muslim states were of course unalterably opposed, for partition was a warrant for a Jewish state.

In the end, the vote broke for partition, the U.S. backed the resolution, and two days later the Soviet Union followed suit. It was a close call: 10 states had abstained, 13 had voted against, 33 were in favor, only two votes over the required two-thirds majority.

Now, some six decades later, the Palestinians are calling for a vote in the next session of the General Assembly, in September, to ratify a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. In part, this is an appropriation by the Palestinians of the narrative of Zionism. The vote in 1947 was viewed as Israel's basic title to independence and statehood. The Palestinians and the Arab powers had rejected partition and chosen the path of war. Their choice was to prove calamitous.

By the time the guns had fallen silent, the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, had held its ground against the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Its forces stood on the shores of the Red Sea in the south, and at the foot of the Golan Heights in the north. Palestinian society had collapsed under the pressure of war. The elites had made their way to neighboring lands. Rural communities had been left atomized and leaderless. The cities had fought, and fallen, alone.

Palestine had become a great Arab shame. Few Arabs were willing to tell the story truthfully, to face its harsh verdict. Henceforth the Palestinians would live on a vague idea of restoration and return. No leader had the courage to tell the refugees who had left Acre and Jaffa and Haifa that they could not recover the homes and orchards of their imagination.

Some had taken the keys to their houses with them to Syria and Lebanon and across the river to Jordan. They were no more likely to find political satisfaction than the Jews who had been banished from Baghdad and Beirut and Cairo, and Casablanca and Fez, but the idea of return, enshrined into a “right of return,” would persist. (Wadi Abu Jamil, the Jewish quarter of the Beirut of my boyhood, is now a Hezbollah stronghold, and no narrative exalts or recalls that old presence.)

History hadn't stood still. The world was remade. In 1947-48, when the Zionists had secured their statehood, empires were coming apart, borders were fluid, the international system of states as we know it quite new. India and Pakistan had emerged as independent, hostile states out of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, and Israel had secured its place in the order of nations a year later. Many of the Arab states were still in their infancy.

But the world is a vastly different place today. The odds might favor the Palestinians in the General Assembly, but any victory would be hollow.

The Palestinians have misread what transpired at the General Assembly in 1947. True, the cause of Jewish statehood had been served by the vote on partition, but the Zionist project had already prevailed on the ground. Jewish statehood was a fait accompli perhaps a decade before that vote. All the ingredients had been secured by Labor Zionism. There was a military formation powerful enough to defeat the Arab armies, there were political institutions in place, and there were gifted leaders, David Ben-Gurion pre-eminent among them, who knew what can be had in the world of nations.

The vote at the General Assembly was of immense help, but it wasn't the decisive factor in the founding of the Jewish state. The hard work had been done in the three decades between the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the vote on partition. Realism had guided the Zionist project. We will take a state even if it is the size of a tablecloth, said Chaim Weizmann, one of the founding fathers of the Zionist endeavor.

Sadly, the Palestinian national movement has known a different kind of leadership, unique in its mix of maximalism and sense of entitlement, in its refusal to accept what can and can't be had in the world of

nations. Leadership is often about luck, the kind of individuals a people's history brings forth. It was the distinct misfortune of the Palestinians that when it truly mattered, and for nearly four decades, they were led by a juggler, Yasser Arafat, a man fated to waste his people's chances.

Arafat was neither a Ben-Gurion leading his people to statehood, nor an Anwar Sadat accepting the logic of peace and compromise. He had been an enemy of Israel, but Israel had reached an accord with him in 1993, made room for him, and for a regime of his choice in Gaza. He had warred against the United States, but American diplomacy had fallen under his spell, and the years of the Clinton presidency were devoted to the delusion that the man could summon the courage to accept a practical peace.

But Arafat would do nothing of the kind. Until his death in 2004, he refrained from telling the Palestinians the harsh truths they needed to hear about the urgency of practicality and compromise. Instead, he held out the illusion that the Palestinians can have it all, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. His real constituents were in the refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, and among the Palestinians in Kuwait. So he peddled the dream that history's verdict could be overturned, that the “right of return” was theirs.

There was hope that the Arafat legacy would go with him to the grave.The new Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas had been a lieutenant of Arafat's, but there were hints of a break with the Arafat legacy. The alliance between Fatah and Hamas that Mr. Abbas has opted for put these hopes to rest. And the illusion that the U.N. can break the stalemate in the Holy Land is vintage Arafat. It was Arafat who turned up at the General Assembly in 1974 with a holster on his hip, and who proclaimed that he had come bearing a freedom fighter's gun and an olive branch, and that it was up to the U.N. not to let the olive branch fall from his hand.

For the Palestinians there can be no escape from negotiations with Israel. The other Arabs shall not redeem Palestinian rights. They have their own burdens to bear. In this Arab Spring, this season of popular uprisings, little has been said in Tunis and Cairo and Damascus and Sanaa about Palestine.

The General Assembly may, in September, vote to ratify a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. But true Palestinian statehood requires convincing a decisive Israeli majority that statehood is a herald for normalcy in that contested land, for Arabs and Jews alike.



Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is co-chair of the Hoover Working Group on Islamism and the International Order

Glenn Beck On Israel and Obama

I just finished listening to a 40 minute video of a Glenn Beck program last week after the Obama speech where he "suggested" that Israel retreat to the 1967 borders.  Whether you like Glenn or cannot stand him, it is time well spent to listen to his message.  I believe he is on the right track and that our either naive or self-absorbed President is taking the wrong course.

Glenn explores the geography and history of the region and explains why the Obama approach is one of national suicide if it is followed by Israel.

Please take the time to listen and as always, please become a follower and comment on the posts.  Here is the link:
http://www.israelunitycoalition.org/video/vtemp.php?id=0168