In the first few years after World War One - after the British issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, viewing "with favor "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and after they had wrested the country from the Ottomans - the borders of "Palestine" embraced also the eastern bank of the Jordan River, or Trans-Jordan, the territory that is today the Hashemite  Kingdom of Jordan.
  Shortly after the war the Hedjazi prince, Abdullah, great grandfather of Jordan's current king Abdullah II, invaded the east bank and, with the connivance of the British Colonial Office, headed by Winston Churchill, crowned him as Emir of Trans-Jordan. In June 1922, one month before the League of Nations assigned the Palestine Mandate to Britain, Churchill issued his White Paper excluding Trans-Jordan, some 78% of "Palestine," from the provisions of the Mandate pertaining to the "Jewish National Home."
  Henceforth, the name "Palestine" applied only to Eretz Yishrael west of the Jordan River.
  In 1948 the Arabs in Eretz Yishrael, with the help of the armies of 5 neighboring Arab countries, tried to throttle the reborn Jewish State at birth. In the course of the war, Jordan occupied eastern Jerusalem, including the Old City and dozens of Jewish holy and historical sites, large parts of Judea and Samaria, annexed them and dobbed them "the West Bank." Only Britain, Jordan's patron and Moslem Pakistan recognised the annexation of eastern Jerusalem.

  At the end of that war, the territory of Israel constituted some 75% of former "Western Palestine," that is 75% of 22% - or 16.5%-of "Palestine" before Churchill's 1922 White Paper.
   In June 1967 our neigbours again set out to wipe us off the map. The battle cry of Jordan's king Hussein, broadcast to his troop over Amman radio on the 3^rd day of the war, was the koranic one of "kill the infidels where ever you find them!" (the Jerusalem Post, June 8 1967).
(Later, of course Hussein became the 2^nd Arab leader to sign a peace treaty with Israel.)

We won a stunning victory in the 6 Day War, in the course of which the Arab aggressors lost several territories to us. These included the above - mentioned Jordan-occupied areas of former "Western Palestine".
  Soon afterwards a larger group of citizens-religious and secular; men and women; urbanites and farmers; capitalists and socialists; politicians, artists, writers, journalists, intellectuals-joined forces to establish what they called in Hebrew "Tnuat Eretz Yisrael Hashlema," and in English " Land of Israel Movement," ommiting the "Haslema/Whole" part. Their reasoning was that we had regained those areas in rebelling aggression and were therefore entitled to keep them, especially in view of the fact noted by distinguished international jurists that Jordan had in the first place occupied them illegally.

  Those areas refered to as "the cradle of the Jewish Nation," contained, many Jewish sites, the Temple Mount and the Western Wall; Hebron where Patriarch Abraham made the first territorial purchase; Shechem (Nablus) where Patriarch Jacob make the second purchase; Shiloh and Beit El, where the Tabernacle had stood; Samaria, capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
  The movement's founders understood "Eretz Yisrael Hashlema" to apply strictly to former "Western Palestine." never did any responsible person call that movement "Greater [Land of] Israel" or utter irredentist thoughts, implied in this designation, of invading the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in order to regain the rest of what Lord Balfour and the rest had originally considered "Palestine."
   Indeed, the only "Greater" idea lurking in our region is the Greater Syria idea in which Lebanon is "Western Syria" and Israel and Jordan (and more) are "Southern Syria".
   Moshe and Barbara Kohn
    Jerusalem in the Sources.
     E-Mail: moshbarb@netvision.net.il.
     Address: POB 9275 Jerusalem 91092 Israel.

Return to Belief   Statements/11 British

After last Thursday's meeting between President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, BBC World News ran quotes throughout the night from its reporter Rageh Omaar in Baghdad.
The Iraqi authorities, Omaar said, were not just "passively pursuing the minutiae of the disarmament process, although they are doing that", but they were also discussing defence strategies on television every night, including means of luring the Americans into urban warfare.

This somewhat callous approach to civilian safety didn't appear to shock Omaar when he next reported that he was impressed by the "calm" in Baghdad. Residents were not fleeing, he said. But where could the Sunni residents of Baghdad go? To the Kurds in the North who have faced Baghdad's poison gas? To the South, where the suppressed, exploited and tortured Shi'ites live?

And if urban warfare was to be the strategy, how did reporter Omaar think people whose tyrant has used them as human shields in the past would leave Baghdad - in buses while the authorities waved them to evacuation centres safe from allied bombs?

This is all of a piece with the BBC's steady campaign, climaxing in Sunday's Panorama, that the United States has not presented a case for war in Iraq. The BBC is by now pretty much an agitprop organisation for the old Left. This may be unconscious in some staffers who have simply imbibed those values with mother's milk.

When circumstances force, they do a slight course correction. Jeremy Paxman last week rather ungraciously conceded that "Suddenly Donald Rumsfeld makes sense. And you don't often hear that said." This was after eight European countries supported America's policy on Iraq in the face of French and German opposition - just as Rumsfeld had predicted when he labelled France and Germany as "old Europe".

The United States has been explaining the reason for military action in Iraq since George Bush said on September 11, 2001 that America would not distinguish between terrorism and those that harbour terrorists.

It repeats the ABCs of its case: Iraq's refusal to comply with the 16 UN resolutions asking it to disarm; information from the scientist who headed Iraq's nuclear programme; Iraq's use of chemical weapons and its aggressive actions in the region; Saddam Hussein's subsidy of suicide bombers, along with his blood-curdling threats.

But America is unlikely to persuade people who walk about with sacks over their heads rather than hear facts that would confound their credo.

The roster of the anti-war movement contains the usual suspects. There are members of the old Left such as the Guardian, Gerald Kaufman MP and Mayor Ken Livingstone, who, at the London anti-war rally last September 28, told the crowd "there is only one regime in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons and it is not Iraq but it is Israel, for 30 years, and there is no action plan to take weapons from Sharon".

There are the CND supporters who give succour to Iraq's nuclear weapons programme by opposing forcible disarmament, while protesting against nuclear energy in Britain. There is the Muslim Alliance of Britain, which is organising the next anti-war demonstration in London, and on whose website you can get a helpful link to the fatwas demanding that all Muslims boycott American and Israeli goods until "Israel" (their quotation marks) is returned to Palestine again.

Ideologues apart, some people are simply afraid of terrorism at home as a response to any military action abroad. Others worry about the harm to innocent civilians in Iraq - though the sincerity of this is somewhat attenuated by their indifference to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis already killed or maimed by Saddam Hussein. Some European countries have another element in their antipathy to America's firmness in Iraq.

The opposition of Germany and France (as well as the protesters in Britain) is the presentation of history's bills. Some of history's price tags reveal themselves slowly. Britain and France set about dismantling the Ottoman empire in the late 19th century. In doing so, they made a reciprocal commitment to promoting the revival of the Arab world. They encouraged Arabists in their foreign offices and among their policy makers, civil servants, bureaucrats and diplomats. They wanted to have the Arabs as allies against the Turkish Porte and in so doing they took on a mutual commitment to these new friends.

All those countries that are now neighbours of Israel - from Syria to Lebanon and Jordan to Iraq - did not exist until these colonial masters created them to serve imperial ambitions. See Iraq invented

The emotional commitment exists to this day. Arabia commands sympathy and credulity from the British policy establishment - as well as the British royals.  One encounters officials in the Government and Civil Service who seem right out of a Lawrence of Arabia syndrome.

This has affected immigration policy and law enforcement with the result that some rabid mosques have flourished in Britain.

The situation has similarities in continental Europe. In the dying days of the French empire, France decided to solve the problem of secession in Algeria by making Algeria a part of metropolitan France. The consequence was not that France extended itself to Algeria but that Algeria extended itself to France.

As a result, both France and Britain are aware of their vulnerability to an unassimilated minority containing an indeterminate number of people who are not just a troubling electoral factor but are ready to make trouble. Our countries are home to some of the most violent Islamists in the world.

Germany did not have quite the same problems, since empire eluded it. Its unassimilated minorities stem from the great post-war prosperity that created a need for "guest workers" who came from Turkey and other parts of the world to build up the resurgent German economy. But Germany has other factors in its adamant resistance to American military action.

We successfully instilled such guilt in the Germans over their past militarism that they have acquired an anti-militaristic psychology. Added to this is the natural feeling of finally getting their own back on the America that defeated and occupied their land - and rescued their old enemy France. These peculiar twists of history, together with the necessity of small powers to seek accommodation rather than force to resolve problems, have given Germany and France the idea that they can make some sort of separate peace with the terrorists.

For now, America is not making too much fuss about the defection of allies. But after Iraq is resolved, it will face the question of what to do about such associations, including its membership in both Nato and the UN.

To a large extent, Nato is America. That defence alliance was to counter a real threat, acute as well as chronic, from an expansionary Soviet empire. The ideal defence organisation doesn't have to win wars; it just has to prevent them - and Nato did that through the might of the American defence establishment. With the collapse of the USSR, most of Nato's raison d'etre vanished.

One could argue that the action in Kosovo was to some extent a search for a purpose for Nato. The Iraqi problem has exposed how hollow that search was.

The United Nations has been a thorn in the side of the free world since the mid-1970s, when Unesco was taken over by unfree countries of the Third World and the General Assembly passed the "Zionism is racism" resolution in 1975. Even so, some of us argued in print that, so long as the UN contributed a 0.1 per cent chance to helping maintain world peace, it was a worthwhile investment. That argument has worn thin.

By now the United Nations, with its Human Rights Commission chaired by Libya, is not only irrelevant; it is coming peri lously close to endangering world peace and security. The majority of its members are in breach of most tenets of the UN Charter and yet these same members are rewarded with plum UN assignments.

In March, Iraq will assume the chairmanship of the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. The UN is rapidly becoming more of a force for harm than good.

Countries that actually practise and value the UN constitution should probably withdraw from it. But at the very least, America, as its chief source of funding, should give the organisation notice after Iraq that reform is necessary. One can't advocate the formation of an alternative organisation to the UN by the liberal democracies, for many reasons - primarily because the existence of two hostile power blocs would hardly help peace.

Still, if America pulled out, an unreformed UN steered by such luminaries as Kofi Annan and Mary Robinson would likely collapse under its own irrelevant ineptitude or be forced to reveal itself as a collection of quasi-Marxist and Islamist dictatorships with a few whey-faced Europeans strutting about.

The hostilities with Iraq have yielded this one unexpected side-benefit: they have forced America to face up to the emptiness of its old alignments and ultimately will force Britain to make a choice between "old Europe" and a new world order. One aspect is not in doubt: I know which side the BBC will choose. 

JWR contributor Barbara Amiel is a columnist with London's Daily Telegraph, where this column originated. Comment by clicking here.

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Return to Beliefs : 11. Brit. Colonial Office, 23.  Palestinian

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