A Prince and A Tale of "Palestinian Territories"

As Caroline Glick notes, Yediot Ahronot reported (in Hebrew) that Kensington Palace has insisted that William’s visit to Jerusalem is part of his official visit not to "Israel" but to the Palestinian Authority (and what it calls the “Occupied Palestinian Territories”)*. That is, rather than finesse Britain’s position on the most explosive issue in the Arab conflict with Israel, Britain decided to use Prince William’s "non-political" visit to do what no government, other than Pakistan, ever did: claim, in an official act, that these sections of Jerusalem belong to the Arabs, not the Jews.

Kensington Palace is presenting William’s visit as nonpolitical. But the opposite is the case.

As Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates Riyad Malki announced to the press after the UNGA vote this week:

“After 51 years of occupation and 70 years since Al-Nakba, the State of Palestine will not relent in its efforts to uphold international law and protect our people towards the realization of justice, the fulfillment of their inalienable rights and legitimate national aspirations, including to independence in a State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital."

As Eugene V. Rostow, then of the National Defense University in Washington, D. C. wrote to Commentary Magazine in a Letter To the Editor published on February 1, 1989 the territorial provisions of Resolution 242 do not demand a total withdrawal from lands Israel administered since June 1967.  Moreover,

As the occupying power, Israel could take such steps [according to the Camp David Accords] unilaterally if no Arab interlocutors are willing to come forward. Actions of this kind, both in Israel’s military dispositions and in its arrangements for civil autonomy in parts of the West Bank, could lay the foundations for an eventual peace with Jordan and the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip when the political atmosphere becomes more propitious. Until those parties make peace, however, Israel has no real choice but to stand on its right under Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 to continue to govern the West Bank and the Gaza Strip which it occupied in 1967.

And he continued:

[as to] the question of whether Jordan is Palestine...Transjordan was part of the Mandate not “for a few months” in 1921, as [some claim], but for twenty-five years until 1946, when it became independent and was recognized as a state. During that period, the State Department referred to Transjordan as “the Transjordanian province of the Palestine Mandate.” Defense, foreign relations, and other functions were in British hands, and the inhabitants carried British Mandatory passports. Most revealing of all, the Jewish right of settlement under the Mandate in Transjordan was not abolished in 1921, but only suspended.

In 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations, whose substantive resolutions can never be more than recommendations, recommended to the Security Council that the parts of the Mandated territory west of the Jordan River be partitioned between the Arabs and the Jews, with a special regime for Jerusalem. The Arab states rejected that proposal and went to war. The Security Council never acted on the partition resolution directly, but turned its attention to stopping the war...In 1950, Jordan attempted to annex the West Bank, but its decree of annexation was not widely recognized (and was recently repudiated by King Hussein)...Thus there is no basis for claiming Jordanian or “Arab” sovereignty in the West Bank. The proposition that Jordan was part of the territory of the Palestine Mandate, and is the Palestinian Arab state intended to divide the remainder of the Mandate territory with Israel, is not an “eccentric” view or simply a matter of partisan politics in Israel. It is an indisputable fact, and a fact, moreover, which has consequences in international law and politics.

It follows that the Arabs who live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are not the only “Palestinians.” The Jordanians and the Israelis should be called Palestinians also, because the only conceivable definition of the word must be drawn from the territorial boundaries of the Mandate...

William certainly has read The Canterbury Tales.  Let's recall some of the Wife of Bath's words therein:

 15 Biside a welle, Jhesus, God and man,

                Beside a well, Jesus, God and man,

16  Spak in repreeve of the Samaritan:

                Spoke in reproof of the Samaritan:

Does Prince William not think that the Samaritan came from Samaria?  And Samaria preceded the "Palestinian Territories" by almost three millenia, did it not?

The towns conquered by Shishak indicate a territory that was not restricted to a narrow sliver along the sea but on both banks of the Jordan River for that was the Land of Israel:

William, sir, those "territories" you'll be visiting are all part of Eretz-Yisrael, the Land of Israel. The British Government in 1917 knew that, the San Remo Conference participants knew that in 1920 and the ambassadors at the League of Nations knew that in 1922.

The High Commissioner and Lord Peel knew that in 1937 when a partition was proffered and even Ernest Bevin knew that at the time of the UN Partition of 1947.

Don't be fooled, Prince William, in 2018.

* UPDATE:

"...the British prince’s tour of the Western Wall and sites holy to the region’s three religions will be included in his visit to the Palestinian Authority rather than in his visit to Israel."

^