The Truth About the Mideast
Fourteen fundamental facts about Israel and Palestine
(click here or here for more facts)
By David G. Littman
October 7, 2002
It's time to look back on 14 fundamental
geographical, historical, and diplomatic facts from
the last century relating to the Middle East. These
basic facts and figures were stressed in recent statements
to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights and its subcommission,
to the surprise of representatives of both states and
non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
1) After World War I Great Britain accepted
the 1922 Mandate for Palestine, and then — with
League of Nations approval — used its article
25 to create two distinct entities within the Mandate-designated
area.
2) The territory lying between the Jordan
River and the eastern desert boundary "of that
part of Palestine which was known as Trans-Jordan"
(nearly 78 percent) thus became the Emirate of Transjordan.
This new entity was put under the rule of Emir Abdullah,
the eldest son of the Sharif of Mecca, as a recompense
for his support in the war against the Turks, and of
Ibn Saud's seizure of Arabia (Faisal, Abdullah's brother,
later received the even vaster Mandate area of Iraq).
3) Turning a blind eye to article 15,
Great Britain also decided that no Jews could reside
or buy land in the newly created Emirate. This policy
was ratified — after the emirate became a kingdom
— by Jordan's law no. 6, sect. 3, on April 3,
1954, and reactivated in law no. 7, sect. 2, on April
1, 1963. It states that any person may become a citizen
of Jordan unless he is a Jew. King Hussein made peace
with Israel in 1994, but the Judenrein legislation remains
valid today.
4) The remaining area west of the Jordan
River (comprising about 22 percent of the original Mandate)
was then officially designated "Palestine"
by Great Britain. As stated in the 1937 Royal Commission
Report, "the primary purpose of the Mandate, as
expressed in its preamble and its articles, is to promote
the establishment of the Jewish National Home."
This was now greatly restricted.
5) U.N. General Assembly Resolution
181 (November 29, 1947) authorized a Partition Plan
in this area: for an Arab and a Jewish state —
and for a corpus separatum for Jerusalem. The plan was
rejected by both the Arab League and the Arab-Palestinian
leadership. Aided and abetted by the neighboring Arab
countries, local armed Arab Palestinian forces immediately
began attacking Jews, who counterattacked. On May 15,
1948, the armies of five Arab League states joined these
militias in the invasion of Israel, but their armies
failed in their goal of eradicating the fledgling state.
6) The armistice boundaries (1949-1967)
left Israel with roughly 16.5 percent, or 8,000 sq.
miles, of the original 1922 Mandate area (about 48,000
sq. miles), while about five percent — less Gaza,
which was occupied by the Egyptians — was conquered
and occupied in 1948 by British General Glubb Pasha,
the commander of Abdullah's Arab Legion. The historic
regions of "Judea and Samaria" — their
official names as indicated on all British mandate maps
until 1948 — were annexed and became the "West
Bank" of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1950.
All the Jews were expelled from the area and from the
Old City of Jerusalem; their synagogues, and even tombstones
on the Mount of Olives, were destroyed.
7) Until King Hussein attacked Israel
on June 6, 1967, Jordan's recognized de facto boundaries
covered 83 percent of Palestine (78 percent east of
the Jordan river, and five percent to the west). Following
its military defeat in the Six Day War, the Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan lost the "West Bank," which
it had illegally annexed 19 years earlier, retaining
the huge "Transjordan" portion (78 percent)
of the original League of Nations territory.
8) Of Jordan's current population of
five million, about two-thirds (over three million)
consider themselves "Arab Palestinians." They
are the descendants either of the original Arab Palestinian
inhabitants of the Trans-Jordan region, or of roughly
550,000 Arab refugees from west Palestine who lost their
homes after the Arab League armies failed to eradicate
Israel first in 1948, and again in 1967. Nearly two
million Jordanian Bedouin citizens and others do not
identify themselves as Palestinians.
9) After the 1967 disaster, an Arab
League Summit Conference held in Khartoum that November
reacted negatively to U.N. Security Council Resolution
247: "No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel,
no negotiations with Israel, no concessions on the questions
of Palestinian national rights." This was also
the determined position of the PLO. Apart from Egypt's
1981 peace treaty with Israel, there was little change,
for the next two decades, in this refusal to negotiate
according to U.N. Resolution 242.
10) In those "West Bank and Gaza"
areas, designated by the Oslo Accords of 1994 to be
placed under the administration of the Palestinian Authority
(covering about 5.5 percent of the "Greater Palestine"
area on both sides of the Jordan), there is now a population
of over 3,200,000, of whom about 35,000 are Christians,
but none are Jews.
11) The population of the Jewish state
— a state envisaged in the 1922 League of Nations
Mandate, and confirmed by the U.N.'s 1947 decision —
is now roughly 6,500,000, of whom roughly 20 percent
are Arabs (120,000 Christians), Druze, and Bedouin citizens
of Israel. Of the more than five million Jewish citizens,
about one-half are those Jewish refugees from Arab countries,
and their descendants, who fled or left their ancient
homeland when massacres, arrests, and ostracism made
life impossible (a further 300,000 emigrated to Europe
and the Americas, where they number over a million).
12) Today, a tiny, vulnerable Jewish
remnant — scarcely 5,000 persons — remains
in all the Arab world, less than half of one percent
from the near million who were there in 1948 (this does
not include the 50,000 in Turkey and Iran, left of about
200,000 in 1945). These are the forgotten Jewish refugees
from Arab lands, from countries that will soon be totally
judenrein just as Jordan has been since 1922.
13) The 22 Arab League countries cover
a global surface of over six million square miles, over
ten percent of the land surface on earth. Israel, by
contrast, covers barely 8,000 sq. miles.
14) Security Council Resolution 242
has now become the panacea for Arab states, yet their
interpretation of its key operative paragraph does not
correspond to the English original, which version alone
is binding. In March 2002, a Saudi "peace plan"
was approved by the Arab League in Beirut, but behind
it lurks the former 1981 "Fahd Plan" —
with a facelift — that would leave Israel with
impossible borders. After the Iraqi menace has been
resolved one way or another, what is needed for the
"Middle East peace process" is a concerted
effort to support the Mitchell plan, which could one
day lead to true peace and reconciliation for the whole
region. But the Palestinian Authority will only become
a genuine partner with Israel, alongside Jordan and
Egypt, if there is a radical break with the past, and
a new spirit of mutual acceptance prevails between the
Arab world and Israel — with individual and collective
security and dignity for all. This will only be feasible
if democratic institutions and a respect for human rights
and the rule of law become the norm, as they now are
not. And it will only be feasible if the Arab world
recognizes the inalienable legitimacy of Israel's existence
in a part of its historical land.
— David G. Littman is a historian.
Since 1986, he has been active on human-rights issues
at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva. His
recent statements on this subject were made as a representative
of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, a nongovernmental
organization.
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