What the Grand Mufti's Successor Told Prince William (And What Saudi Arabia & Jordan Told Israel)

As reported (in Arabic) at Arab21:

Akrama Sabri reveals to Arabi 21 details of his conversation with Prince William

The head of the Supreme Islamic Committee in the occupied city of Jerusalem and the preacher of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Ekrema Sabri, revealed the details of what took place between him and Prince William Duke of Cambridge during a visit last Thursday to the Al-Aqsa Mosque about a week ago.

"Jerusalem belongs to Muslims and Christians, a Palestinian city occupied by the Israeli occupation that is trying to Judaize it, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque belongs to Muslims alone and has nothing to do with the Jews," Sheikh Sabri said.

Sabri told "Arab21" that he had addressed William so: "Britain has historically harmed the Palestinians, and this damage still exists. Britain must remove this damage, because the Balfour Declaration was a disaster for the Palestinians."

On the response of the British Prince to this talk, Khatib al-Aqsa said that the prince "listened, and stressed that Britain's foreign policy is still considered the city of Jerusalem occupied, and did not agree to the American decision on the occupied city of Jerusalem," when US President Donald Trump acknowledged Jerusalem "the capital of Israel," he said.

That theme, of "Judaization", is expressed in an analysis provided by an expert on sites of sanctity, Dr. Najih Bkirat, whose title is Director of Religious Education in Jerusalem, when he elucidated on the "three dimensions behind the daily incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque" in Al-Watan's July 2 issue. 

Claiming that about 16 thousand settlers had "stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque" since the beginning of this year until the beginning of June, and expecting more during the next six months, "especially with the exploitation of Jewish holidays, as well as the so-called 'destruction of the alleged temple'", he said in a press statement: 

"We are facing a phenomenon that has beyond it and that the war of intrusions launched on the Aqsa Mosque can be read in three dimensions. First, removing holiness from all Islamic manifestations and Arab buildings, to replace the "alleged structure" Islamic and remove the place [Al-Aqsa]".

"The second dimension of the incursions, is the process of  'Jewish settlement, a settlement of human worshipers and worshipers and the people of the mosque, "by increasing the number of settlers, which provides them with special rules to guard them and welcome them to encourage them to break into the daily.

...the third dimension, which is the most dangerous, is the conflict over sovereignty and administration, meaning that "despite the presence of Arab tutelage [that is, Jordan's custodianship] and management of the Haram with the presence of more than 500 employees inside and outside the sacred compound, there are attempts to take sovereignty not only outside the gates, but to move to the stage of managing the place, under the pretext of taking care of the intruders, which will entail interference in the administration of endowments and the management of guards, in addition to many other departments.

What also irks them is activity at the Bab al-Rahma [the Golden Gate] Cemetery - the setting of an iron wall south of the cemetery on an endowment land tract overseeing al-Husaini Hill.

For those who follow me, this language of storming, Judaization, taking-over, et al. is almost as incendiary as Hamas kites.

In the meantime, Haaretz reports:

Jordan, Saudis and Palestinians Warn Israel: Erdogan Operating in East Jerusalem Under Your Nose; Israel is 'sleeping at the wheel,' they caution

And Israel Hayom has it so:

In bid to buy influence, Turkey hands out money in east Jerusalem

Turkey wants a foothold.  It is suggested to cut that short.

And Amit Segal on Channel 10 TV just now, as I am writing, informs us that MKs will be allowed to ascend the Temple Mount.  Confirmation: once-every-three-months.

I am guessing if Jordan keeps quiet, Netanyahu will bump Turkey out of Jerusalem entirely, including sponsoring Temple Mount interference.

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The King David Hotel Operation, Again

The Daily Mirror took advantage of Britain's Prince William's stay at the King David Hotel to cover the Irgun operation in 1946 when the southern wing was severely damaged and nearly 100 persons were killed.

The story by Steve Myall, the paper's Deputy Features editor, 

highlights the paper's correspondent in Mandate Palestine at the time, Barbara Broad, who was at the entrance of the hotel when the blast occurred.

The story does have its problems.  For example, we read that

The militia viewed the King David Hotel as a strategic target because it housed the British administrative headquarters

First of all, what was targeted was the southern wing, not the entire hotel. The northern wing was the "civilian" section where tourists stayed and was not harmed.  In constantly writing "the King David Hotel", the reader receives the impression that the entire hotel was intended to be damaged.

Even when the distinction is made, as here:

The entire southern wing of the hotel – all seven floors – was totally destroyed.

the accompanying photographs

obviously show that the main damage, while considerate, for sure, was to the front section of the wing and that the eastern part, to the rear, remained standing.

Moreover, only a careful reader would catch reading the story that the southern wing also housed the HQ of the British Army in the country, quite a legitimate military target.

But what is really diabolical in Ms. Broad's account, faithfully and uncritically copied by Myall, is here:

the diabolical thoroughness with which Jewish terrorists planned this brutal and bloody attack was made clear to me by a senior Air Force and Army officer.  Half an hour before the main explosion, a jeep, full of Jewish terrorists armed with tommy guns, drove up the curving entrance way to the King David Hotel, the right wing of which houses the Secretariat, with British Military HQ on the top floor.

One lone shot rang out as they penetrated past the ring of sentries.  There was a pause and then a volley of machine gun fire. A few moments later a diversionary mine was exploded on tire pavement opposite the Secretariat, and a warning was rushed to headquarters that all troops, ATS and officers must move up to the top of the building.

The warning was in time for most of headquarters staff, but the Secretariat employees rushed to the windows to see the military and police activity in the street below.  The terrorists had reckoned on this, for at that moment the main explosion took place while they made off in a taxi.

No jeep drove up to the entrance. There was no exchange of fire.  

Some 25 minutes before the explosion (more about this 25 minutes below), the Irgun fighters retreated from the basement after placing the explosives around the central pillar of the Cafe Régence. Spotted by the paras on the roof (the building then was only five stories high), having been alerted by a telephone operator in the basement, they were fired on. One Irgunist eventually bled to death in an Old City hideout overnight.. The entrance to the hotel was facilitated by the adoption of a disguise in that the penetration team dressed as Arab porters who were to deliver the daily dairy supplies of milk, cheese, cream and labaniya. No frontal assault was conducted.

But there is a contradiction to the normative version that no warning was given.  There was. Not only should a fire-fight be enough of a warning and not only does the above section read explicitly that a warning was given to evacuate by someone British, but we then read:

For reasons that have never been clarified, the staff of the government secretariat and military command remained in their rooms despite the warning calls.

Whose fault and responsibility was that?  The Irgun's? Or the British? The French staff at their Consulate just down the road did open their windows. Shaw always denied receiving a warning.

One last point in that connection: that 25 minutes vs. the planned 30, actually 45, minutes.

Despite Thurston Clarke's excellent retelling, almost minute-by-minute, 

Joseph Evron's book, Gidi: One Chasing a Thousand, is a must.  (And see from p.96 here)

On page 179, referencing documents HHA 1049/112 (42)  and (43) and (52) in the Hagana Archives, one discovers that a bomb-disposal unit had been alerted (!) and sent to the hotel. The Davar newspaper reported this openly the day following the explosion. 

On p. 176, the Irgunist who fixed the timing mechanism, which had been set for 45 minutes and not 30, intimates that someone had attempted to defuse the explosives.

Given that he had set a mercury initiator anti-defusing device to prevent just such an attempt, the fact that the bombs ignited prematurely meant to him that (a) the British knew the bombs where in the building; (b) where they were; (c) what potential damage existed;  and (d) that they gave no proper advance order to orderly evacuate.

Moreover, the fact that the British had an agent in the Irgun, who just happened to be second-in-command, is the real story here. Expecting to be forewarned by him, they perhaps were semi-hesitant when no message came through from him.

One last point: the operation was granted preliminary approval by the joint X Committee of the United Resistance Movement on May 15 that year and the go-ahead operational order was issued to Menachem Begin on July 1 by Moshe Sneh, Head of the Hagana Command and Yitzhak Sadeh, operations officer of the Palmach, approved the plans.

The mirror need be held up to the British officials and officers in the hotel at the time.

Thanks to MP for alerting me.

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Follow-Up on "A Prince and the Tale of 'Palestine'"

The previous blog.

The follow-up:

One more:

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When the Temple Mount Was Occupied British Territory

Prince William is not the first member of the Royal Family to visit Jerusalem.  Among others was Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn.

He was the seventh child and third son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Among other positions, he acted as the King's representative through the first years of the First World War.

One of those duties was a visit to Jerusalem to General Edmund Allenby and his itinerary included the barracks at the David Tower courtyard where he awarded medals and ranks:

and the Temple Mount on May 22, 1918:

The Duke is between a Muslim official to his right and General Allenby to his left.  And the two Christians are wearing cloth over their boots (the other soldiers are Muslim from the Egyptian army).

I presume that the area was defined as "Occupied British Territory"?

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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."

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