The so-called Two-State Solution (TSS) directly contradicts the two most important documents in history regarding the Arab war against Israel: the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine of 1922 and United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967, and it is time Israel’s leaders and Israel’s supporters worldwide say this loudly and clearly.
The TSS calls for, as the Barack Administration wants, a “Palestinian” state in Judea and Samaria based on the pre-June 1967 lines, when UNSC Res. 242 signed five months later did not call for a return to them. On the contrary, the text called for “Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” By implication, there would be new lines, not a return to the old ones.
Moreover, while “every State in the area” had a “right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries,” there was no demand for the creation of a new state for “Palestinians.”
In fact, not until 1970 did the word “Palestinians” appear in any UN Security Council or General Assembly resolution. Until then, legally speaking, there were no “Palestinians” as a party to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The TSS also violates the even older League of Nations Mandate for Palestine that was later embedded in Article 80 of the new UN Charter of 1945 and is therefore still legally binding. The Mandate foresaw the creation of a country called Palestine that had not existed before the First World War and the birth of the League. Not for fourteen centuries of Muslim rule was there ever such a jurisdiction, so the League had to create it. And the Mandate explicitly intended it for the a Jewish homeland.
The League also — initially — envisioned a map of Palestine that did not depict the Jordan River as a national boundary and that is because the maps found in all the encyclopedias published before the First World War relied on the classic, Biblical lines in which the Jordan River is not its eastern boundary but located near to the center.
So the League, pressured by Britain, France, the United States, the Zionist organization under Dr. Chaim Weizmann and Prince Faisal of Mecca created a new map of Palestine much larger than its historic boundaries, though amputated was its northern tier. That was awarded to France that ultimately divided it between the newly created states of Lebanon and Syria.
The League then decided to make the Jordan River a border between peoples; the Arabs on the east bank and the Jews on the west.
Thus, the new country called Palestine would be created as the Jewish homeland but not over all historic Palestine. The River would become a border between the vast Arab nation and the tiny Jewish nation. Historically, rivers have served as national borders and thus it seemed the rational, natural thing to do.
The decision was in fact foreshadowed before the Peace Conference even opened for business in Paris January 1919 when the month before in London Chaim Weizmann, successor to Theodor Herzl as head of the Zionist Organization, signed an agreement with Prince Faisal, the two of them envisioning two states, one called “The Arab State,” the other called “Palestine.”
Faisal obviously had no objection to the use of Palestine as the name of for a projected Jewish state. Faisal was a man cut from very different cloth than most Arabs today. He did not deny the historic connection between the Jewish people and their ancient homeland. Never in history had Arabs called it Palestine; he had no attachment to it. The name appears nowhere in the Koran. The Arabs’ traditional name for the region was always Bilad a-Sham or “Damascus Territory.” They use Falastin today but that is a very late development.
In sum, the League Mandate also called for a “two-state solution” but not today’s TSS. The League foresaw one state for Arabs on one side of the Jordan River, one for Jews on the other, not one Arab state on one side, and another Arab state on the other.
Moreover, in 1948, when Israel declared independence and Jordan’s King Abdallah sent his army across the River, he had no authorization from the United Nations to do that, let alone conquer Jerusalem and expel all of its Jews who had been the largest community in it from time immemorial.
Jordan also overran and annexed Samaria to the north and the hills of Judea to the south and remained in place for the next 19 years during which time neither King Abdallah nor his successor King Hussein ever considered the Arabs west of the River to be “Palestinians” with a separate national identity and a right to their own state. Jordan’s kings are direct descendants of Muhammad, and if they never saw in the Arabs in Judea and Samaria a separate nationality deserving of an independent state, why should Israel?
Why is Israel obligated to honor the arguably delusional notion that today’s “Palestinians” and “Jordanians” are two separate nationalities when there is not an ounce of difference in national characteristics between them. How are they different? In language? Cuisine? Religion or religious sect?
Instead of employing Prime Minister Netanyahu’s tactic of recognizing a “Palestinian” nation with a right to independence in the heart of the Land of Israel (albeit with impossible conditions attached), Israel might stop trying to “make nice” to its enemies and the world and start demanding its right to keep Judea and Samaria as authorized by 1) the League of Nations and 2) the natural right of victors to annex the spoils of war, especially when the victors had been the victims of their neighbor’s aggression. The denial of Israel’s right to keep these spoils – to exact punitive damages — is nothing but age-old anti-Semitism in modern dress.
It is time for Israel to demand its rights and stop trying to satisfy the demands of a putatively Paleolithic, phantom “Palestinian” people.