The Truth About the Mideast - REPOST

    October 7, 2002 10:00 a.m.
    
The Truth About the Mideast
    
Fourteen fundamental facts about Israel and Palestine.

    By David G. Littman

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 % — 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 an 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.