Dutch politician Geert Wilders ruffled more than a few feathers by suggesting that one solution for the Middle East would be to change Jordan's name to Palestine and make that the Palestinian homeland.
"Jordan is Palestine," declared Wilders, who heads the third-largest party in Holland. "Changing its name to Palestine will end the conflict in the Middle East and provide the Palestinians with an alternate homeland."
Wilders also said that Israel deserved a special status in the Dutch government because of Jerusalem and called for the Dutch government to refer to Jordan as Palestine and move its embassy to Jerusalem.
"If Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next. Thus, Jerusalem is the main front protecting the West. It is not a conflict over territory but rather an ideological battle, between the mentality of the liberated West and the ideology of Islamic barbarism," he said.
According to the Saudi paper Al-Watan the Kingdom's embassy in the Hague was outraged, and said that the Dutch ambassador in Riyadh would be summoned to explain Wilder's remarks as well as how democracy works in all likelyhood.
Jordan's minister for media affairs and communications, Nabil Al Sharif, described Wilders' statements as "an echo of the voice of the Israeli Right" and "crows' screams".
"Jordan is an independent and secure country which supports the Palestinian issue, and these imaginings of finding them an alternate homeland are nothing but the delusions of a few people," he said.
Delusions, hmmm? *chuckle*
The fact is that Wilders is correct,both historically and demographically.
The Kingdom of Jordan was a made up country courtesy of the British Government, and it sits on over 80% of the original Palestine Mandate.The Brits received the Palestine Mandate in 1919 from the League of nations with the express, written responsibility of creating a Jewish homeland there.This was in accordance with Britain's Balfour Declaration of 1917, and aside from an expression of philo-semitism by Christian Zionists like Arthur Balfour was partially a reward for the services of the Zion Mule Corps at Gallipoli, the Jewish spy ring in Palestine and chemist Chaim Weitzman's discovery of a way to extract nitrogen from air, without which the Allies would have run out of materials to make gunpowder and would have had to sue for peace.
What the British did five years later was to lop off 80% of Palestine, bar settlement to any Jews and remove those who had settled east of the Jordan River and install a Hashemite Bedouin monarchy over the Palestinian Arabs there under Abdullah, the son of the Bedouin Arab leader Feisal. Feisal's other son Ali, the one Lawrence of Arabia had the hots for, ended up with what was thought to be the far richer prize of another made up country, Iraq.
The idea behind the partition of Palestine aside from giving Abdullah a throne was to create both an Arab and a Jewish state there to eliminate any future tensions. Needless to say,even 80% of Palestine wasn't enough and the Arabs objected to any presence of Jews in the Middle East unless it was under sub-Jim Crow style dhimmi status.
Even worse from the Palestinian's view point, they were placed under the rule of what amounted to a foreign potentate and his henchmen, the minority Bedouin Hashemites who viewed these non-Bedouin local town Arabs with disdain.
Both the Bedouin and the Palestinians have recognized this reality in different ways.After the Jordanians and their British officers ethnically cleansed Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem of their Jewish populations, every 'Palestinian' residing there was made a Jordanian citizen. And even after Jordan lost these areas after attacking Israel in 1967, the Kingdom of Jordan passed laws stating that every inhabitant of these areas 'who was not a Jew' remained a Jordanian citizen.
Even more bizarre was the spectacle of Jordan keeping its own citizens out of what was supposedly their own country! The Palestinian 'Jordanian citizens' living there were restricted to Judea and Samaria by the Hashemite monarchy and forbidden to come into Jordan proper without special permission, which usually included depositing a substantial cash bond with the Jordanian government to make sure they returned.
The Palestinians, for their part attempted to overthrow the Hashemite monarchy and crate a Palestinian state in Jordan under Yasir Arafat in 1970.
The Palestinians might have succeeded in ousting King Hussein with Syrian help if it wasn't for the Israelis the Jordanians currently hate so much. When the Syrians began to move armor and troops into Jordan to support Arafat, the IDF mobilized at the request of President Nixon as a counterweight and the Syrians withdrew, leaving Arafat and the Palestinians at the mercy of King Hussein's Arab legion.
This event is known in Palestinian annals as 'Black September' because of the huge amount of Palestinians who were killed ( conservative estimates run at better than 10,000) and expelled with the PLO, mostly into Lebanon, where many of them still live in squalid camps like Ein-Al-Hewar.
Arik Sharon, in his autobiography 'Warrior' makes the case quite well that moblizing Israeli troops to protect the Hashemite monarchy was a major strategic error on both Israel and America's part, because it deprived the Palestinians of their actual and historic homeland in order to maintain what basically amounts to a foreign monarchy installed by the British over the local population.
At this point, the ratio of Palestinian to Bedouin is roughly 80% to 20%, respectively and the Bedouin monarchy is trying its best to even the odds even now by arbitrarily depriving Palestinians of Jordanian citizenship who have held it for years.
The entire idea of another Palestinian state has always been a fiction, which is why no one called for it or even mentioned the 'Palestinians' as a separate people until after Israel took over the areas west of the Jordan.
It's simply been a tool used to deligitimize Israel, because the idea of the hated Jews living in 'Arab Land' in peace and equality has always been the real issue.
The Arab countries not only got away with waging aggressive war on Israel in defiance of the UN in 1948, they also got away with not having to integrate into their countries the Arab refugees whose plight they were directly responsible for, or having to pay a dime for their keep ever since.
Wilders is entirely correct that integrating the 'Palestinians' in Judea and Samaria into Jordan where they're already a huge majority and then making a final border settlement with Israel would provide them with a homeland and go a long way towards effectively ending Arab-Israeli conflict.
Unfortunately, the only solution most of the Arabs would be interested in accepting involves Israel disappearing entirely.
5 comments:
If I'm not mistaken, Mr. Wilders has been making these suggestions for quite a while. It's just that now they're paying more attention since he has those 24 seats...funny how some power makes one more visible.
He can speak like this because the Dutch are still suffering somewhat over their cooperation with the Nazis. Unlike the French, they didn't try to bury what they did.
You can expect regular servings of Arab-flavored "outrage" from the M.E. usual suspects, especially Jordan, which already wants Wilders arrested and brought there for making "Fitna". I think GW is thinking "in for a dime, in for a dollar -- might as well make my case for Israel while I have the bullhorn"...
BTW, when y'all talk about the Mandate and the history of the place, it would be helpful to have some maps to show your points. If you found some good images to illustrate your point, you could just drag them out as needed. For the geography-impaired, like me, it would be such a help.
All absolutely correct, but it ain't gonna happen, as they say. No Arab leader is going to accept the overthrow of another. The truth is the Palestinians in Jordan will have to do it themselves and then heaven help Israel, it will have a third islamo-fascist regime on its borders.
Oh, I think it would be far better, IP.
As a matter of fact, King Hussein actually suggested it to Israel's 'hero' Rabin as a solution - in exchange for Israel ceding ten percent of Judea and Samaria, he offered to integrate the 'Palestinians' fully into Jordan.
Rabin dithered, and at the next Arab League meeting they named the PLO the 'sole representative of the Palestinian people.'
Remember also that Jordan is an established state with actual borders, so that any aggression can be handled on a national basis with an address.
Making Jordan the Palestinian state would end the conflict to a large degree. That's exactly why the Arabs want no part of it and it incenses them so much.
Dymphna, your wish is my command.
So you admit it was Israel's fault. Jordan's regime should've been erased as much as Israel's.
Anyways, these views are incredibly racist. So you are suggesting that the Arab of Israel/Palestine all be transfered to Jordan just to make room for Jews?
Do you know how racist that sounds, even if it was within the same state? It's like moving all the black people of, say, New York to Mississippi to make way for whites. Oh it's the same country, so why does it matter, right?
I like how you ignored the rights of Palestinians to STAY where their ancestors lived, to GO BACK to Israel. Jews too have a right to go back to Muslim countries - though most of them are American backed dictatorships (including Jordan), so it's really America's call.
Jordan is a monarchy ruling over a foreign population; overpopulating them with people with a sense of foreign identity would threaten that, especially if Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine try to topple it.
Furthermore, who gave the British the right to partition Palestine to begin with? They should've just gotten the Hell out of the Middle East as soon as WWI was over.
You think Palestinians just handed their land on a plate of silver? No! Syria was invaded by France while its southern parts, Palestine, were invaded by Britain.
So you infer that big influential men have the right to sit around a table and discuss what to do with a territory and imposing that decision on the people that actually live there?
This verges on comedy, AEB. Sorry...you'll have to do a lot better, at least with someone who actually knows the history of the area.
First, there were no 'Palestinians' until 1967, when, as I mention, Jordan attacked Israel. Up to that time, no one considered the 'Palestinians' a separate nationality. In fact, 'Palestinians' was almost universally used to describe the Jews who lived there,believe it or not.The 1939 NY World's Fair, for instance featured the Jewish Palestine Pavilion.
Second,the British and French got the 'right' to redraw the map because they won a war and the Ottomans were on the losing side.Do you think only Arabs have the right to dictate terms when they win, as they did when they ethnically cleansed every Jew out of Judea and Samaria in 1948? And the right to administer the territory and create a Jewish state was specifically granted to the British by the League of Nations.
Third,many of the actual refugees of the 1948 conflict chose to leave...the ones who stayed became Israeli citizens with more rights than they would have in any Arab country.The Jews had no such choice.And to suggest that the Jewish refugees could just move back to the Arab world tells us you would just as soon have them all murdered.
Some 'Palestinians' were involuntary refugees - but lots of others took a bet on jihad against the Jews and lost. Life is tough sometimes.
As for moving non-Israeli Arabs out of Israel - why not? The Palestine' expect every single Jew to be removed from 'Palestine', Fair's fair.
Amazing that you would vent your anger on Israel, the only country in the Middle East that has ever given the Arab refugees of 1948 any land to call their own.
Fourth there is no 'Israel/Palestine' except in your imagination. Read the article again. The Arabs in Judea and Samaria were Jordanian citizens, and many of them were deliberately moved into the area in an attempt to colonize it that lasted nineteen years.The Israelis would have been well within their rights to repatriate all of these Jordanians back to their home country after 1967,especially since Jordan only signed a ceasefire and remained in a de facto state of war with Israel.
And I love the bit about it being 'Israel's fault' that King Hussein decided to kill thousands of 'Palestinians' ( who are actually a mix of Quraysh Arabs from places like Egypt, the Hejaz, Syria and Lebanon)to stop Yassir Arafat from taking over his kingdom.
All the Israelis did was to do America a favor and keep the Syrians from coming in ... a mistake on Israel's part, I grant you but blaming them for Black September is a real reach..unless you suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome.
Thanks for playing.
Regards,
Rob
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