A ‘Palestinian’ State Already Exists

A Palestinian state already exists. Israeli officials have, it’s true, seldom mentioned that the land which became the Emirate of Transjordan (today’s Jordan) was originally intended, under the Mandate for Palestine, to be included in the future Jewish National Home. That land, on the east side of the Jordan River “out to the desert,” constituted 78% of that territory. But in 1921, the British, as holder of the Palestine Mandate, decided to seal off eastern “Palestine” from Jewish immigration, in order to create, as a kind of consolation prize for the Hashemite Emir Abdullah, a state he could call his own, just as the British had made his younger brother Feisal the King of Iraq. The Israelis need on every possible occasion to repeat that historical truth: Israel today, with the “West Bank,” consists of only 22% of the territory the Zionists had originally been promised by the League of Nations. That should eventually, sink into some minds. People like to say that “Lies win out by dint of repetition.” But the truth, in this insufficiently informed and credulous age, needs to be repeated just as much. The history of the Arab war on Israel is a complicated thing: how many people can be expected to know about the Balfour Declaration, the Treaty of San Remo, the Mandate for Palestine (especially its Preamble and Articles 4 and 6), and so much more? Just keep telling all who will listen that “78% of the original territory of the Mandate for Palestine became the Arab Kingdom of Jordan. Now you want to strip Israel of still more territory, in order that there will be a 23rd Arab state?” That makes an impression. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Israel cannot entrust its security to peace treaties with Arab states; it has to explain to the world that the model for Muslim treaty-making with non-Muslims is the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya that Muhammad made with the Meccans in 628 A.D. The treaty was to have lasted for 10 years. But after 18 months, feeling that his side had grown sufficiently strong to defeat his enemies, Muhammad broke the treaty and attacked the Meccans. The Hudaibiyya Treaty is a model for Muslims to emulate; they extol Muhammad for his “cleverness” in outsmarting the trusting Meccans. Israel has to remember the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya every time it is told that it must base its security not on the possession of “secure [i.e. defensible] and recognized borders” (as UN Resolution 242 stipulates), but on the signing of “peace treaties” with the Arabs which may — or may not – last.

The chief drafter of Resolution 242 was Lord Caradon (Hugh M. Foot), the permanent representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations from 1964 to 1970. At the time of the Resolution’s discussion and subsequent unanimous passage, and on many occasions since, Lord Caradon always insisted that the phrase “from the territories” quite deliberately did not mean “all the territories,” but merely some of the territories:

Much play has been made of the fact that we didn’t say “the” territories or “all the” territories. But that was deliberate. I myself knew very well the 1967 boundaries and if we had put in the “the” or “all the” that could only have meant that we wished to see the 1967 boundaries perpetuated in the form of a permanent frontier. This I was certainly not prepared to recommend.

On another occasion, to an interviewer from the Journal of Palestine Studies (Spring-Summer 1976), he again insisted on the deliberateness of the wording. He was asked:

The basis for any settlement will be United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, of which you were the architect. Would you say there is a contradiction between the part of the resolution that stresses the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and that which calls for Israeli withdrawal from “occupied territories,” but not from “the occupied territories”?

Nota bene: “from territories occupied” is not the same thing as “from occupied territories” – the first is neutral, the second a loaded description. Lord Caradon answered:

I defend the resolution as it stands. What it states, as you know, is first the general principle of inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war. That means that you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it. We could have said: well, you go back to the 1967 line. But I know the 1967 line, and it’s a rotten line. You couldn’t have a worse line for a permanent international boundary. It’s where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948. It’s got no relation to the needs of the situation.

Had we said that you must go back to the 1967 line, which would have resulted if we had specified a retreat from all the occupied territories, we would have been wrong.

Note how Lord Caradon says that “you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it,” with that “merely” applying to Jordan, but not to Israel, because of the Mandate’s provisions allocating the territory known now as the “West Bank” to the Jewish state. Note, too, the firmness of his dismissal of the 1967 lines as nothing more than “where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948,” that is, nothing more than armistice lines and not internationally recognized borders.