#899 4/15/18 – Abbas This Week: “Palestinians and Jordanians Are One People in Two States – Jordan and Palestine”; Mull Over That

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Western publics understand the Palestinian Arab homeland claim – the place is called “Palestine” and we’re “The Palestinians.”  Even we Jews call them that.  But Abbas said something this week that we can use to make as clear and understandable a case.  Palestine – i.e., the Palestine Mandate – has been partitioned into two existing viable states, the far bigger part an 85% “Palestinian” state.

Abbas This Week:  “Palestinians and Jordanians are one people in two states – Jordan and Palestine.”  Mull Over That

Of the two aspects of anti-Israel media bias – inaccurate misleading portrayal of facts in particular stories, and inaccurate misleading terms in which those stories are told – I’ve focused in this media watch more on the latter.

E.g., the media’s universal use of 1950-invented “West Bank” in place of “Judea-Samaria,” used for millennia; “East” Jerusalem for every inch of the city beyond the old, 1967-obliterated 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines, as though those parts of the city, embracing historic Jerusalem with its Old City and City of David, have less Jewish connection; “West Bank” and “East” Jerusalem “Jewish settlements” alongside “Palestinian neighborhoods” and “Palestinian villages”; “Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories”; “1967 borders,” etc., etc.

In particular, I rail against our folly in having gratuitously abandoned what had been, as late as the mid-twentieth century, Jewish equity in terms central to the Jewish-Arab Palestine conflict.

***  Not only had “Judea and Samaria,” which the media relegates to having been “the biblical name for the West Bank,” remained in actual use all through the post-biblical centuries, but the United Nations itself had used it – “The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea [as in “Jew”] starts on the Jordan River” – in its very Palestine partition resolution of 1947.”

***  Not only had the Arabs of Palestine not been “THE Palestinians” to the U.N. in its Palestine  partition resolution, but that U.N. document called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.”

The media’s perspectives of respective Arab and Jewish Palestine equities being what they deeply are, it’s unrealistic to expect reporters and editors to cease using “West Bank” and “THE Palestinians” and all the rest, but we can stop using these terms, fundamentally because Jews using Jewish homeland-delegitimizing terms is self-disrespecting, but further because our non-acquiescence in the Arab-and-media terms will show the partisanship in the media’s usage.

The point of all this is to make as clear and simple a case to the world that the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, including historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, is the homeland of the Jews, and not, as Abbas put it this week, the “state of Palestine” of “the Palestinians.”

A David Israel article in the Jewish Press this week reported on Palestinian Authority President Abbas’ address to an international conference in which he railed against the Balfour Declaration, Trump moving the embassy to Jerusalem, etc.  The article then added this:

     “But it was journalist Khaled Abu Toameh that caught the most important line of Abbas’s speech when he admitted, ‘Palestinians and Jordanians are one people in two states – Jordan and Palestine.  We won’t accept the idea of the transformation of Jordan into a Palestinian homeland.’”

David Israel added:

     “Self-identified ‘Palestinians’ make up 85% of Jordan’s population, which makes one wonder, how many more states do the ‘Palestinians’ need?”

Abbas has it backwards.  Twentieth century-created Jordan, carved by Churchill out of the Palestine Mandate, 78% of it, “with a stroke of the pen,” with its 85% self-identified “Palestinian” population (i.e., more “Palestinian” than Israel is Jewish), doesn’t need to be “transformed” into a Palestinian homeland.  It is a Palestinian homeland, and it is Abbas who’s trying to transform it, despite that Palestine origin and Palestinian demographic, into a not.

Western publics can understand this:  The Palestine Mandate has been partitioned into two separate states for Arabs and Jews claiming Palestine homelands – 78% for Arabs and 22% for Jews.  It is as clear and understandable as the Arabs and their worldwide friends chanting:  “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.”   They claim the entirety of western Palestine as Arab, and we go around pointing out that 242 doesn’t say “the.”  On the “right of return” claim, the media says our objection is that Israel will cease to be majority Jewish.  We have to say that the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, is ours and not theirs.

We have no choice.  The original conception of the Jewish National Home was whittled down by “Churchill’s stroke of the pen” to a still-viable zone – the historic land of Israel, with Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, Palestine west of the Jordan.  A “two-state solution” including a second Palestinian Arab-majority state in western Palestine’s hill country, Judea-Samaria, leaving a lowland coastal strip as the center of Israel, is an indefensible sliver of that initial restored sovereign Jewish homeland conception.  And, apart from military security, a Jewish homeland sans historic Jerusalem might as well be in Uganda.