But even as the arguments rage over whether or how this should or can be accomplished – a state, a homeland, an entity? – a lot of well-intentioned people will tell you that there is not now and never has been a Palestinian nation.
The problem with this notion is that it is not true. There is and has been a Palestinian nation since May 14, 1946 – only two years to the day before there was an Israeli nation.
Originally called the Kingdom of Transjordan, that nation is now the Kingdom of Jordan. It lives on the East Bank of the Jordan River and comprises 80 percent of the historic, political, geographic, and demographic landmass of Palestine. It has a population of three million people, virtually all of whom were either born there or arrived there from the other 20 percent of Palestine – Israel plus the ‘occupied territories’ known as the ‘West Bank.’
Palestine, then, includes both sides of the Jordan River, bounded on the west by the Mediterranean, on the east by Saudi Arabia and Iraq, on the south of Egypt, on the north by Syria and Lebanon.
These boundaries were universally acknowledged from the end of World War I until 1946, when Great Britain created by fiat the independent Kingdom of Transjordan – thus lopping off four-fifths of Palestine and handing it to the Arabs, in direct violation of the mandate over the territory granted to Great Britain by the League of Nations.
In the years since, Jordan has been recognized as a nation separate and apart from Palestine, its only connection being its role as the principal ‘host country’ for Palestinian refugees displaced by the creation of Israel.
While Israel won its independence through revolution against the British colonialists, it is viewed as a creature of the United Nations, owing its existence to a world guilt-ridden over the Holocaust.
Since its victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel – it is said – now controls the whole of Palestine. Its refusal to cede completely the territory occupied after that war – from East Jerusalem to the Jordan River, plus the Gaza Strip – is therefore considered the bar to national rights or ‘self-determination’ of the Palestinian Arabs.
So goes the conventional wisdom of much of the world, and, because it is so widely believed, it is naturally thought to be fair and objective. No matter that it is based on an incredible distortion of history, politics, geography, and demography.
Yet, unless this distortion is corrected, there is little hope for anything close to enduring Middle East peace. A brief look at relatively recent events puts the problem in perspective.
A Gift For Abdullah
Before World War I, the word ‘Palestine’ had no clear-cut geographical denotation and represented no political identity. In 1920, however, the Allied powers conferred on Great Britain a ‘mandate’ over the territory formerly occupied by Turkey. It was called the Palestine Mandate and included the land on both sides of the Jordan River.
