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Jewish World Review May 27, 2011 / 23 Iyar, 5771 Putting ‘Palestinian’ claims under the microscope called history By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Arabs say Israel's present borders are illegitimate because they are the product of conquest. Israel took the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip from Egypt in the Six Day War (5-10 June, 1967).
Arabs — and apparently President Barack Obama — think Israel's borders should revert to essentially what they were before the Six Day War.
Those borders too were a product of conquest — Arab conquest. And if Israel's borders are illegitimate, so, too, are the borders of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan.
Israel declared its independence on May 15, 1948. The next day five Arab armies invaded to try to strangle the infant nation in its crib. They failed — but not entirely. Egypt seized the Gaza Strip and Jordan seized the West Bank during this war. Israel's borders from 1949 to 1967 were the UN-brokered armistice lines from the 1948 war.
But the legal history of Israel's borders — and those of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan — go back to the end of World War I. For 500 years before then, all these lands had been provinces of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire.
The League of Nations, predecessor to the United Nations, carved out of the corpse of the Ottoman Empire four "Mandates" — for Syria, Lebanon, Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Palestine, which was later subdivided between what was intended to be the "Jewish National Home" and Transjordan (now Jordan).
"Recognition has been given to the historic connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country," all 51 countries in the League of Nations declared on July 24, 1922.
The "Mandate for Palestine" gave Jews the legal right to settle anywhere in western Palestine, an area of 10,000 square miles stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The area set aside for "Jewish Palestine" included the Golan Heights, all of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
The League guaranteed the right to self government for Jews in the Mandate for Palestine, for Arabs in the other three. The League gave responsibility for administering the mandates in Lebanon and Syria to the French; in Palestine and Iraq to the British.
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So, according to the borders established by the League of Nations' Mandates, Israeli settlers in the West Bank aren't squatting on Arab land. The Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza are squatting on Jewish land.
There'd been a Jewish state for more than 1,000 years in "Jewish Palestine," but there was never a sovereign Arab state in the region, which was known as "Judea" until the Romans changed the name in the year 135 after crushing a Jewish revolt. The Jews in "Jewish Palestine" started calling themselves "Israelis" after independence in 1948. Before then, it was they who customarily were referred to as "Palestinians."
I have some sympathy for the argument these boundaries were drawn by European colonialists with little regard for the desires of the inhabitants, and ought no longer to be valid. But that would apply as well to the borders of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. Iraq and Jordan didn't exist until the League of Nations Mandates created them.
Most Israelis wish neither to incorporate the 4.2 million Arabs who live in the West Bank and Gaza into Israel, or to expel them by force from "Judea and Samaria." The best solution, from an Israeli perspective, would be for Jordan to take back the West Bank, and for Egypt to take back Gaza. But neither Jordan nor Egypt want much to do with today's "Palestinians."
So most Israelis support creation of a Palestinian state. They ask only as a precondition that Palestinian leaders recognize the right of Israel to exist, and stop making terror attacks against Israelis. Legally and morally, it should pretty much be up to the Israelis to determine what the borders of a Palestinian state should be.
President Obama's understanding of Middle Eastern history seeems to go back no further than 1967. If he learned a little more, he'd make fewer mistakes.
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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.
© 2009, Jack Kelly |
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