Chutzpah...Arab Style - @MidEastTruth

Chutzpah...Arab Style

By Gerald A. Honigman
February 28, 2004

Dr. Aaron Klieman's book, Foundations of British Policy In The Arab World: The Cairo Conference of 1921 (Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), should be "must reading" for those who truly want to make sense out of the conflict between Arab and Jew in the Middle East today. It's one of those references that other scholars used to cite in their own works. Nowadays, however, with much of this field being hijacked by a blatantly anti-American and anti-Israel fraternity, things have changed.

The chief tenured prof who teaches this subject at Ohio State, for instance, Carter Findley, managed to teach an entire graduate course (I know...I was there) on the Mandatory period without ever bothering to mention either Klieman's book or the facts which you'll read below. And that was over two decades ago. And woe unto thee if you dared bring such things up. Again...I know. Things have gotten even worse today.

The Associated Press report headlined in my local Florida paper on February 25, 2004 read as follows: "Jordan Joins Chorus Against Israeli Wall." It was Jordan's turn to lay it on the Jews. Prince Zeid al Hussein complained that the barrier might send Palestinian Arabs fleeing into his own kingdom. He also justified the suicide bombings by blaming them on the four decades' old Israeli occupation.

Now for a reality check...Indeed, the Hashemites would do themselves a favor by not addressing this issue to anyone with a knowledge of the actual facts and history involved. Since many do not possess this, they feel free to rant, as the late King Hussein's widow has also done in her recently published book. To appreciate what comes next, first find a map of the Middle East. One of the world will do, but everything will be much smaller. Find Jordan and then find Israel to its west. And now hold onto your seats...

In 1922, Colonial Secretary Churchill, to reward Arab allies in World War I (remember the movie, Lawrence of Arabia?), chopped off roughly 80% of the original Palestinian Mandate issued to Great Britain on April 25, 1920--all the land east of the Jordan River--and created the purely Arab "Emirate of Transjordan"--today's Jordan. This was engineered by Churchill a year earlier at the Cairo Conference.

Emir Abdullah, who received the land on behalf of the Hashemites of Arabia, attributed this gift to an "act of Allah" in his memoirs. Sir Alec Kirkbride, Britain's East Bank representative, had much to say about this separation of the lion's share of the Palestinian Mandate as well. Let's listen:

"In due course the remarkable discovery was made that the clauses of the mandate relating to the establishment of a National Home for the Jews had never been intended to apply to the mandated territory east of the river ( A Crackle of Thorns, page 27)."

So, right from the getgo, Arab nationalism was awarded the bulk of the Palestinian Mandate. While it too officially remained tied to the whole, Jordan, nonetheless, became a virtually separate entity. From 1922 onwards--after already receiving most of the territory--Arabs would next point to what was left of "Palestine" to make yet further claims.

Arabs answer by citing geographical and other differences between some Arabs and others. Using this logic, since there are Jews in Israel from over a hundred different countries (including one half who were refugees from "Arab" lands and some whose families never left Israel since the days of the Roman conquest), then Jews are therefore entitled to multiple states as well.

Think of it... Less than one half million Arabs were entitled to a Kuwait.
Over two million Jews can stake a claim to parts of Morocco, Iraq, etc.

Arab and pro-Arab professors typically ignore all of this when teaching this topic. The main starting date for them is not 1920, but 1947...the proposed partition of "Palestine." Of course they conveniently omit telling their students that this was the second partition of the land (which the Arabs rejected) and pretend that Jordan was always a separate state. And the students take it all in.

The Jordan-Palestine connection is just one of many well-documented facts (not "Zionist propaganda") completely ignored or distorted by Arab spokesmen and, unfortunately, little known by the rest of the world. Arabs typically claim Jews got 78% of all of the land, and leading newspapers typically prepare segments on the Middle East ignoring this crucial Jordan-Palestine connection as well.

While discussion now revolves around a "two state" or even a "one state" solution to the conflict between Jews and Arabs, the reality is that Jordan is historically and demographically Palestinian.

So there is a third solution...though it's kept hushed up these days. Jordan has been a reasonable neighbor of late...relatively speaking at least...so Israel hasn't made an issue of this.

Indeed, it was Israel which saved the Hashemites' collective derrieres in 1970 when the PLO decided to cash in on this third alternative. I say all of this not as a Likudnik (while I agree with many of their positions), but simply to set the record straight.

Palestinian Arabs "fleeing into Jordan" a la Prince Zeid's remarks would, in reality, be moving simply to another part of Palestine. And did anyone ask why Israel is obliged to provide work for the butchers of its innocents?
That supposedly would be one of the main reasons for the Arab flight into Jordan. Arab workers have killed their Jewish employers. Yet Israel has taken pains to create passage ways for these people through the fence.

When Egypt's Nasser decided it was time to drive the Jews into the sea, he contacted Jordan's King Hussein--his calls were intercepted and taped--and convinced His late Majesty to join in the massacre. Israel, through the United Nations, begged Hussein to distance himself from Nasser's plans. The King didn't listen and instead launched an attack on the Jewish half of Jerusalem instead.

The rest, as they say, is history. And that's how Jordan lost the West Bank--which it seized in the 1948 fighting--in the first place. Transjordan--led by British officers-- joined other Arab countries in attacking a reborn Israel, trying to nip it in the bud.

So the Prince would be better off not bringing this subject up...at least not to those with any sense of fair play.
When you launch a war and lose, there's a price to pay...especially if the land you launched your attack from was not yours in the first place.

Whatever will or won't become of the land in question, it must be noted that this is disputed territory, not "Arab" land, as those testifying before the court in Geneva now claim.

Jews lived and owned property there until their slaughter in the 1920s. Judea and Samaria, only in this century known as the "West Bank" (largely as a result of British imperialism and Transjordan's later annexation), were unapportioned parts of the Mandate, and leading authorities such as Eugene Rostow, William O'Brien, and others have stressed that these areas were open to settlement by Jew, Arab, and other residents of the mandate alike.

Indeed, hundreds of thousands of Arabs poured into the area from all over the Middle East. The League Of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission documented scores of thousands of Arabs entering into Palestine from just Syria alone. Hamas' "patron saint", Sheikh Izzedine al-Qassam, was from Aleppo.

It's estimated that many more Arabs entered the Mandate, to take advantage of the economic development going on because of the Jews, under cover of darkness and were never recorded...more Arab settlers setting up more Arab settlements. Why are these "legal" and those of the Jews not?

While it's been said many times, it's worth repeating. The good cop/bad cop team of Arafat and Hamas/Islamic Jihad created the security fence now on trial in Geneva. And until those leopards change their spots, Israel must do what any other nation would do to protect its citizens from Arab barbarity. Indeed, many other nations have constructed such fences for far less compelling reasons.

As for the route of the fence, in the wake of the June '67 War, UN Resolution #242 expressly did not call for Israel to return to the status quo ante bellum and the suicidal armistice lines imposed upon it at the close of hostilities in 1949. Among other things, those lines made it a mere 9-miles wide at its waist.

What #242 did call for was the creation of "secure and recognized borders" to replace those vulnerable lines.

Adding a few more miles of buffer in strategically important areas on the West Bank, etc., is precisely what the Resolution had in mind. The architects of the final draft of the resolution (Rostow, Goldberg, etc.) have stated this themselves.

Israel does not seek to rule over millions of Arabs' lives. What it does want is a reasonable compromise over these disputed lands...not the unilateral, Munich style solution too many of the folks in Geneva now have in mind.

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