Offers of Statehood
As partisans of Israel repeatedly point out, there has never been an independent entity called Palestine. However, there should have been one following a 1937 British Royal (Peel) Commission which recommended partition of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate into Arab and Jewish states. The Arab representatives immediately refused the compromise.
Better known is the second chance: the November, 1947 United Nations General Assembly resolution which authorized two independent states in the Mandatory territory. Implementing that resolution, the State of Israel came into existence in May of the following year. Their Arab counterparts, backed by the surrounding Arab nations, refused the offer and went to war to eliminate the nascent Jewish state.
That failed effort, halted by UN-sponsored armistices, left some of the intended Arab land in the hands of the Israeli armed forces, while Egypt held the Gaza Strip and Transjordan occupied the Old City of Jerusalem and much of the West Bank (Biblical Judea and Samaria). Significantly, no movement to create a Palestinian state was made while the two Arab powers were in control of those areas. In fact, Transjordan annexed the territory it occupied and renamed itself Jordan.
The Six Day War of 1967 found Jordan an ally of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had recently blockaded Israel. Jordanian forces, under the command of an Egyptian general, shelled Israel, precipitating ground combat which resulted in Israel’s conquest of the entire West Bank, including all of Jerusalem.
Diplomacy in Place of War
Beginning with UN Resolution 242 later that year, the international community has been striving to promote peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. A key objective of that reconciliation effort has been the creation of an independent Palestinian entity on land gained in war by Israel. That land, however, would not be going back to a sovereign Palestinian state which lost it. It would be going, after long and costly delay, to a people whose leaders could have accepted it in 1937 or 1947.
Their refusals were made in the name of the Arabs who then constituted a clear majority of the population inhabiting the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Now, juxtaposed to a modern, prosperous regional superpower, today's Arab inhabitants are a minority there, bitterly divided between proud terrorists and supplicants for statehood to a UN they earlier disdained.
At least 63 years behind in nation building, they bear the burden of the lost opportunities of the past.
Sources: Middle East Research and Information Project: The United Nations Partition Plan
Middle East Forum: Making Sense of the Six Day War, meforum.org/210/making-sense-of-the-six-day-war
David Hornestay - DavidH began a career as a freelancer after 34 years in government management. Keeping a hand in as a consultant in federal human ...
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