Found on the Web: Is Jordan "Palestine"?

Here at IsraPundit

The “Jordan is Palestine” solution has been mooted for decades. It is now gaining traction due in part to the Arab Spring which began a year ago. Jordan now is feeling the tremors. The majority of Palestinian leaders in Jordan, favour Jordan becoming a democratic/secular state. They have watched in dismay as similar forces in Egypt were overwhelmed by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists. They are determined not to share their fate. They are lead by Mudar Zahran the author of Jordan’s King and the Muslim Brotherhood: An Unholy Marriage.

Zahran in his ground-breaking article, “Jordan is Palestine” published by Middle East Forum in December 2011, argues:

“Empowering Palestinian control of Jordan and giving Palestinians all over the world a place they can call home could not only defuse the population and demographic problem for Palestinians in Judea and Samaria but would also solve the much more complicated issue of the “right of return” for Palestinians in other Arab countries. Approximately a million Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in Syria and Lebanon, with another 300,000 in Jordan whom the Hashemite government still refuses to accept as citizens. How much better could their future look if there were a welcoming Palestinian Jordan?

“The Jordanian option seems the best possible and most viable solution to date. Decades of peace talks and billions of dollars invested by the international community have only brought more pain and suffering for both Palestinians and Israelis—alongside prosperity and wealth for the Hashemites and their cronies.”

The rationality and achievability of this solution, needs no elucidation. It only needs the US to get behind it. While such an initiative by the US would be a departure from the position it has held since the founding of the State of Israel, it would not be a departure from her original position. As noted in the proposed Florida Senate resolution mentioned above, such a position was “affirmed by both houses of the United States Congress,” in 1922. These resolutions unanimously endorsed the “Mandate for Palestine,” confirming the irrevocable right of Jews to settle in the area of Palestine – anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea”

And Zahran’s brave stance in which he wants the new Jordan, governed by Palestinians, to embrace Israel in true friendship, is also not new or novel. It is a return to Emir Feisal’s warm embrace of the Jews in 1919.

Think about these:

was Palestine more that Israel + Judea & Samaria ('West Bank')?

if so, were should a territorial compromise establish borders?

were there previous territorial compromises? did they work? do they Arabs accept the idea at all?

is "Palestinianism" a nationalism that has nothing to do with the 'East Bank'?

if it does, who are the Hashemites? are they foreign occupiers?

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On the Other Side of the Jordan

Wikileaks provides this insight (with thanks to Victor S):-

¶15. (C) The right of return is certainly lower on the list of East Banker priorities in comparison with their Palestinian-origin brethren, but some have thought the issue through a little more. NGO activist Sa'eda Kilani predicts that even (or especially) after a final settlement is reached, Palestinians will choose to abandon a Palestinian state in favor of a more stable Jordan where the issue of political equality has been resolved. In other words, rather than seeing significant numbers return to a Palestinian homeland, Jordan will end up dealing with a net increase in its Palestinian population.

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So, Is Jordan "Palestine", Or What?

From an interview conducted by Yoel Meltzer, published in the American Thinker with a Jordanian/Palestinian dissident named Mudar Zahran. Mudar fled Jordan and currently lives in England.  He's very critical of the regime in Jordan and amongst other things he openly says that Jordan is Palestine. In other words, he's an Arab speaking out against the so-called "two-state solution" since he believes that there already is a Palestinian state on the eastern side of the Jordan River.

Excerpt:

YM: What would you suggest vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian issue? What should Jordan do?


MZ: ...Jordan has been excluding its Palestinian majority from jobs, government positions and even from joining the police force and now practices serious apartheid policies against them in education, medical treatment, etc. The results are the Palestinians are constantly feeling as outsiders in their country thus bringing up the so-called right of return issue, which just complicates the peace process as it is not feasible or legally acceptable...

YM: So you're saying that the King is encouraging Palestinian Jordanians to leave Jordan and move to the other side of the Jordan River in order to "flood" Israel. Do I understand correctly?

MZ: Yes. Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Nayef al-Qadi defended an official policy of stripping Jordanians of Palestinian heritage of their citizenship, a policy that has resulted in the denaturalization of more than 2,700 so far according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch. In an interview with a London-based Arabic newspaper, Qadi said that "Jordan should be thanked for standing up against Israeli ambitions of clearing the Palestinian land of its people" which he described as "the secret Israeli aim to impose a solution of Palestinian refugees at the expense of Jordan."

YM: So where exactly is "Palestine"? Is it west of the Jordan River or is Jordan also Palestine?

MZ: What we should apply here is the law. The international law under the League of Nations identified Palestine as the area between the Mediterranean and the desert of Iraq. Maps say so and that is where all things started with international law. Jews were promised all of this under international law, and then the Arabs were given two thirds of it. Then the Hashemites occupied the land and changed its name and now they are claiming the Palestinians who moved there from Israel are not Jordanians...what is not Palestinian in Jordan? Amman is more Palestinian than Ramallah. The only un-Palestinian thing in Jordan is the king and his family, a group of 50 people.

One more:

YM: Let's assume tomorrow you or someone like you is running Jordan. What would you suggest regarding the Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria?...Truth is the region would probably have more stability if Israel had sovereignty from the Sea to the River and Jordan was to become Palestine. No?

MZ: I cannot comment on that yet I can tell you this much. A democratized Jordan where the Palestinian majority gets their rights and where money is spent on economy rather than a big army and where the Jordan River is a good fence - good fences make good neighbors - that alone can establish peace in the Middle East...

Read it all here.

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When Israel's Diplomat Forgets History

A participant in a recent evening with an Israeli diplomat felt a bit disturbed by the resposnses and phrases he heard.

The event he attended was with Ishmael Khaldi, a Bedouin Israeli diplomat. It was sponsored by a group called Dor Chadash which seems to be a great idea, linking up young Israelis who are stuck in America with American Jews who haven't yet made the decision to get unstuck. They want to

1.Create meaningful connections with Israel through cutting edge programs and engaging events focused on Israeli culture, heritage and current events.
2.Develop social bonds with members who are equally passionate about Israel.
3.Become actively involved in the local, national and global Jewish community.

Don't we all.  Anyway, the participant found that

...the talk was rambling and the hosts had to ask him several times to wrap it up so that we could get to the Q-&-A period.

More substantively, though: Khaldi said the vast majority of Israelis, including himself, favor the creation of a Palestinian state/the two-state solution. In the Q-&-A period, on the interrelated issues of his thoughts on the Jewish State question and the question of whether Jordan is in fact the second state...He said that the Jewish State "is a fact." He did not endorse or reject that fact, and before moving on to another question he said "There is a problem with the national anthem." On the second point, he explicitly and repeatedly denied that the British Mandate for Palestine had resulted in the creation of two states, Israel and Jordan. He said that Jordan ("like Saudi Arabia") was separate, part of a separate territory and process, having nothing whatsoever to do with the British Mandate. His line of argument seemed to be that the Mandate territory equals present-day Israel and that therefore, the second state has not yet been created.

My informant was perturbed, as I am.

First, Jordan was administered up until 1946, when it gained independence, as part of the Palestine Mandate:

Britain administered the part west of the Jordan, 23% of the entire territory, as "Palestine", and the part east of the Jordan, 77% of the entire territory, as "Transjordan." The subsequent two mandates were administrated under one single British Foreign Office High Commissioner which does not prejudice or vacate the international principle whereof official League of Nations documents referred to them as if they were two separate mandates.

Moreover, in 1946,

...When the UK announced plans for Transjordanian independence, the final Assembly of the League of Nations and the General Assembly both adopted resolutions which indicated support for the proposal. However, the Jewish Agency and many legal scholars raised objections. Duncan Hall said that each mandate was in the nature of a treaty, and that being treaties, the mandates could not be amended unilaterally. John Marlowe noted that despite Transjordan's theoretical independence as conferred by the 1946 Treaty, the Arab Legion continued to be used, under nominal Transjordanian but actual British command, for police duties and for frontier control in Palestine. The Jewish Agency spokesmen said that Transjordan was an integral part of Palestine, and that according to Article 80 of the UN Charter, the Jewish people had a secured interest in its territory...Transjordan applied for membership in the United Nations. The President of the Security Council, speaking in his capacity as the representative of Poland, said that Transjordan was part of a joint Mandate. He denied that the Mandate had been legally terminated and asserted the rights and obligations of the United Nations. He mentioned that US Secretary of State Byrnes had spoken out against premature recognition of Transjordan, and he added that the application should not be considered until the question of Palestine as a whole was addressed. Transjordan's application for UN membership was not approved. At the 1947 Pentagon Conference, the USA advised the UK it was withholding recognition of Transjordan pending a decision on the Palestine question by the United Nations.

And on that two-state solution, polls on that issue are hazy.  The indications are that while many  belive that that is the solution, very few believe it will come about.

In any case, I think the diplomat needs some review lessons on Mandate history.

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On Jordan, The Kingdom Of

An opinion:

...the Hashemites should never have become the so-called “sovereign” of Jordan. That was a dirty British trick initiated by Churchill and the Colonial Office he headed in 1921-1922, that was absolutely prohibited under the very terms of the article upon which this trick was based – i.e., under Article 25 of the Mandate for Palestine, as well as under Article 5; both articles forbade a permanent territorial partition of the country as well as granting sovereignty to a foreign Power over an integral part of Palestine.

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So, What Is The Legal Status of Jordan?

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Wasn't Jordan formerly TransJordan, formerly Palestine Mandate territory?

So, is it part of the solution or not?

Source:

United States Department of State / Foreign relations of the United States, 1946. General; the United Nations (1946)

The United States at the United Nations: the United States position regarding certain problems of United Nations organization and procedure, pp. 411-413

West, East, West

I found here, this observation:

The Palestinian submission to US pressure that Israel’s large West Bank settlement blocs be annexed to Israel against a fictitious land swap is another vindication of the Israeli belief that facts created are facts accepted. But if West Bank land east of the 1967 border is still contested, so is Israeli land to the west. Hasan Abu Nimah comments.

So, I left this comment there:

If so, that Israeli land to the west of the former armistice line can be contested, then why not the land east of the Jordan River? After all, up until 1923, that territory was part of the British Mandate for Palestine and only in 1946 did the Kingdom become independent.

And then I found the original full article here, and left a similar comment:

If the former 1949-1967 armistice/cease-fire lines are not sacred, and it is suggested that what is West of the former Green Line is to be included, then why not east of the Jordan River, territory that was part of the Mandate for Palestine until 1946 when Jordan became an independent kingdom? The Jewish National Home included, until mid-1923, all of TransJordan. Tha, too, then, should be part of the land equation that would enable a more equitable division of the land between the two peoples.

Is Jordan Palestine?

Here's a site for your elucidation.

Sidney Zion, In Memoriam

Sidney Zion, a Daily News columnist (and more), covered the Middle East since the Six Day War for numerous publications. He won the Overseas Press Club award, with Uri Dan, in 1979 for a series in The New York Times Magazine titled "Untold Story of the Mideast Talks."

He passed away last Sunday.

Here's from his "The Palestinians Have a State" from 2003:

It's called Jordan.

...The Oslo peace process lies in ruin, and the road map plan is off to a shaky start, due to the inability of the parties involved to agree on a formulation of principles concerning the right, or lack thereof, of the Palestinians to determine their own future on the West Bank of the river Jordan -- the area universally regarded as the historic, political, geographic, and demographic landmass of Palestine.

But...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.``

...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...

...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.

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.

This mandate was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922 and remained unchanged during the League`s lifetime.

The mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration, the famous 1917 proclamation by which Great Britain committed itself to provide a homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people; it did not provide a homeland for the Arabs living there, but it did protect their 'civil and religious,' although not their political, rights.

However, two months after the League of Nations approved the mandate, Winston Churchill, then Britain`s colonial secretary, changed the rules of the game.

"One afternoon in Cairo," as Churchill later boasted, he simply took all the land east of the Jordan River and inserted the Hashemite Abdullah - the great-grandfather of the present King Abdullah - as its emir.

But he did not free it from the mandate, and the people living on the East Bank were in all respects Palestinians. The people living there traveled under Palestinian passports, as did the Jews and Arabs living on the West Bank. But the whole country was effectively ruled by Britain...Britain`s East Bank representative, Sir Alec Kirkbride, [said] this land, constituting 80 percent of the mandate, was "intended to serve as a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the National Home for the Jews in Palestine, which they were pledged to support, became an accomplished fact. There was no intention at that stage of forming the territory east of the river Jordan into an independent Arab state."

Indeed, Churchill persuaded the Zionists to go along with the suspension of Jewish immigration to the East Bank on the grounds that this would mollify the indigenous Arab population on the West Bank - then 200,000 strong - and thus make possible a Jewish homeland west of the Jordan.

Of course, it did no such thing; instead, it whetted Arab appetites for the whole of Palestine, an objective which was nearly achieved several time: the Palestinian Arab uprising against the Jews in 1936; the British White Paper of 1939, which cut off the Jewish immigration to the Holy Land, locking European Jews in with Hitler; and the united Arab war against the newly proclaimed State of Israel in 1948...what began in 1920 as a mandate to turn Palestine into a Jewish homeland turned into a reverse Balfour Declaration, creating an Arab nation in four-fifths of Palestine and leaving the Jews to fight for statehood against the Arabs on the West Bank.

The upshot: Jordan is now considered an immutable entity, as distinct from Palestine as are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq.

But a country whose population is virtually all Palestinian can hardly be considered as something less than a Palestinian nation.

...When the Zionists agreed in 1922 to suspend immigration to the East Bank, in accordance with Churchill`s request, Vladimir Jabotinsky signed on.

But Jabotinsky -- the elegant, fiery Zionist leader who later became the father of the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi and the "eagle" of its commander, Menachem Begin -- changed his mind about the deal a year later after it became clear that the Jews had traded away most of the mandate for nothing.

...The Jabotinsky vision held that both sides of the Jordan belonged to Israel; he wrote a song about it: ``The West Bank is ours, and the East Bank is ours.``

Menachem Begin marched to this tune most of his life. For domestic political reasons he dropped it in his later years, but it was surprising, to say the least, that he did not even allude to it after he became prime minister.

Had he insisted on educating the world about the true history of Palestine, Begin could have cleared up the confusion and made a contribution toward peace.

Thus, if the world were to understand that Israel occupies only 20 percent of Palestine rather than 100 percent, would it not make a difference?

If it became clear that the Arab refugees and their children who crossed over to Jordan in 1948 did not enter a "host country" but rather the Arab part of their own country, would it not make a difference?

Of course it would make a difference.

Israel is being robbed of its political, historic, and geographic legitimacy while seeming to rob the Palestinians of a nation it already has.

...said the late Peter Bergson, who led the Hebrew Liberation Movement in the 1940's - "But if we paint Jordan as if it`s just another Arab nation, as if it`s Saudi Arabia, then the fight is on for the extinction of Israel in stages.

"Because," Bergson added, "if we insist that the whole of Palestine is the West Bank, anything we return is simply the fruit of a crime. But if we tell the truth, if we point out that 80 percent of the land is already in the hands of the Palestinian Arabs, everyone - here and around the world - will see this dispute for what it is."

...Indeed, no neighboring Arab nation really wants a separate state on the West Bank - not Egypt, not Saudi Arabia, not Syria, not Lebanon.

Some of them say they want it, but whosoever accepts rhetoric in the Middle East belongs in the U.S. State Department.

And this:

Don't Tell Me Brits Were Benign, from July 10th 1997

"The British love freedom almost as much as they love depriving people of it," wrote Ben Hecht. I know of no better history of the British Empire, whose sun just fell into the China Sea and barely flickers over Northern Ireland.

Misery followed the Union Jack across the seas and across the centuries. The world was its outhouse, however civilized it appeared at home. Check India, Palestine, Egypt, Hong Kong, Ireland check America on the Fourth of July.

So imagine my surprise and maybe yours when I read on this very page the other day the headline over a column by Charles Krauthammer: "Sun sets on Brit empire, but not on its fine legacy."

Krauthammer sees the handover of Hong Kong as a "melancholy" end to British colonial rule over the Pacific, and he waxes nostalgic over the "benevolent" empire, under which he was raised as a child in Montreal.

Montreal was maybe the exception that proved the rule, but oh, Charlie, don't sing "Melancholy Baby" to us about the Brits. Not a good Jew like you, who backs Israel to the hilt, and ought to know what the English did to your people.

Fifty years ago, the Hebrew Revolution was in full swing against the British occupation of Palestine. The Brits, who had closed off Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939, on the eve of World War II, thus locking the Jews of Europe into Hitler's death camps, now had 100,000 troops in the Holy Land with the sole purpose of killing off a Jewish State. Against this, the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and the tiny but lethal Stern group, fought a street revolution unparalleled in history. Never more than 5,000 strong, they blew up British installations, copped British arms and flogged and hanged in retaliation British soldiers.

Condemned in the world press as "terrorists," informed against, kidnaped, tortured by the Jewish Agency, led by David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, they somehow managed to drive the British out of the Holy Land.

The Brits were brutal; as always the broken neck was their answer. In the spring and summer of 1947, they hanged Jewish patriots in Acre prison as a matter of course.

Dov Gruner, an Irgun soldier captured by the British, became the symbol of the Jewish revolt. His poignant letters from prison caught a little of the world's sympathy. The Brits hanged him anyway, and in secret, even as they invited his sister to visit him.

Few remember Dov Gruner in Israel, and far fewer remember him in America. Who, after all, knows that there was a Hebrew Revolution? Say the word and people shake their heads like a batter fighting off a fastball from Randy Johnson.

The reason is that Israel has denied its revolution, because the "wrong people" fought it. The official Jewish Army, the Haganah, laid down its arms in the midst of the fray. In the summer of 1946, the British arrested the leaders of the Jewish Agency, and that was that for their fight against the British.

"The Hebrews learn it backward, which is absolutely frightening," said Henry Higgins. In that vein, Israel had as its first leaders Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann and Golda Meir those who collaborated with the English by opposing those who fought them, the Irgun and the Stern group.

When Menachem Begin finally took over in 1977, he was no longer a revolutionary. And so the history of the Hebrew Revolution has been buried like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Next year the Israelis celebrate the 50th year of the War of Independence, which they say began after the British left the country, when the Arab world attacked the new Jewish State.

It's as if our War of Independence was the War of 1812. Israel's real War of Independence was against the British Empire. A guy as wise as Charles Krauthammer would know this, if history hadn't been blotted out like a foggy day over London town.