The Everlasting Hatred (28 page)

In a letter to then-Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill from Col. T. E. Lawrence in January 1921, Lawrence it stated that Emir Feisal, the man who had led the Arab revolt, had “agreed to abandon all claim of his father to [Western] Palestine,” if Feisal got Iraq and Eastern Palestine as Arab territories. (See copy of letter in Appendix A) In fact, Emir Feisal had written in his own hand a letter agreeing to exactly this in a 1919 meeting with Zionist representative Chaim Weizmann. (See Appendix B)

Furthermore, in an agreement worked out between Chaim Weizmann, leader of the British Zionist movement, and Feisal, both sides pledged the “closest possible collaboration” and “most cordial goodwill” in working out the details of the creation of the
modern Arab states and Israel.
²¹⁸
(See complete copy of Agreement in Appendix C).

The Arabs probably felt magnanimous at the time because they had just come out of having nothing of their own during the many centuries of the Ottoman occupation. Then suddenly Britain hands them an enormous gift of land and sovereign states for doing virtually nothing to earn it. This is why Lord Balfour could not imagine that they would “begrudge the small notch of land” the Jews were being given.

It wasn't long, however, before Abdullah, brother of Feisal ibn-Hussein, decided he should have Transjordan as his kingdom. He protested to the British, who unilaterally decided to carve out of the Jewish Palestine mandate 75 percent of its territory, the area then known as Transjordan, and hand it over to Abdullah.
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The main reason Abdullah, who was a Hashemite, was in Transjordan was because the tribe of Ibn Saud and his fanatical sect of Wahabi Muslims had just driven the Hashemite tribe out of Mecca and Medina. The Hashemites had been custodians of those holy sites for centuries, but now the Wahabis were in charge of Mecca and Medina and all of Arabia.

Feisal, the ruler of the Hashemites, was the one with whom the British Foreign Office made promises for fighting against the Turks. Abdullah argued that the British gave his brother Feisal Ibn-Hussein both Syria and Iraq, but had given him nothing. So the British Foreign Office scrambled to give Abdullah the major part of the land they were bound by League of Nation mandate to give to Israel. Now recall, this was all done on the basis of the T. E. Lawrence myth that said they had significantly helped Britain defeat the Ottoman Turks in the Middle East.

The League of Nations mandate for Palestine remained unchanged even though Britain had unilaterally altered its map
and its purpose,” explains Joan Peters. “The Mandate included Transjordan until 1946, when that land was declared an independent state. Transjordan had finally become the de jure Arab state in Palestine just two years before Israel gained its Jewish statehood in the remaining one-quarter of Palestine; Transjordan comprised nearly 38,000 square miles; Israel, less than 8,000 square miles.”
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(See map No. 3 on page 189)

When Britain gave Transjordan to Abdullah, it specifically violated Article 5 of the mandate given by the unanimous approval of the League of Nations at the San Remo Conference July 24, 1922. (See complete document in Appendix C)

Article 5 stated, “The Mandatory [Britain] shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of, the Government of any foreign Power.” Abdullah was a foreign power and certainly not part of the Zionist organization to whom Transjordan had been given.

The local British officials of the Foreign Office grossly violated the main reason for Britain being given the mandate by the League of Nations. They were specifically charged
only
with facilitating the immigration of Jews to Palestine to populate and settle the land that had been granted as a Jewish homeland. Britain had express instructions
not
to allow or facilitate more immigration of Arabs into the land mandated for the Jewish homeland.

As the following details will show, the British did exactly the opposite of what they were mandated to do. They increasingly restricted Jewish immigration while opening the floodgates to Arab immigration.

1921 35,000 square miles of the Jewish National Homeland were given to Arabs (80% of their promised land was lost).

This historical footnote to the Arab-Israeli conflict should shatter another Muslim myth. The modern-day state known as the Royal Kingdom of Jordan was and is clearly and literally an independent Palestinian-Arab state located geographically on most of the land once called Palestine. Its population is mostly made up of the former migrant Arab farmers who began to call themselves “Palestinians.” Abdullah and other Arab leaders admitted as much just prior to launching their war of aggression against the new state of Israel in 1948.

Western Media thought that former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was just being sarcastic and evasive when a newsman asked him, “If he would give the Palestinians a state.” He answered, “There already is a state of Palestine—it's called Jordan.” That sounded preposterous to the reporters, because most of them have no knowledge of that area's history. But Sharon not only knew that history well, he is a living eyewitness to the reasons Chaim Weizmann was willing to forfeit 75 percent of Israel's mandated territory. It was because Feisal Ibn-Hussein, acting on behalf of the Arab people, signed an agreement that this would be used as the homeland of any migrant Arabs, also known as “Palestinians,” that might be displaced by the mandated Jewish homeland.

“Palestine and Transjordan are one, for Palestine is the coastline and Transjordan the hinterland of the same country,” said Abdullah. His prime minister, Hazza al-Majali, went even further: “We are the army of Palestine . . . the overwhelming majority of the Palestine Arabs are living in Jordan.”
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This confirms that the Arabs recognized Jordan as a homeland of the so-called Palestinians.

It is the forgotten concept of “Eastern” and “Western” Palestine that is at the root of another Arab myth. Because as we have seen already, most of the Palestinian population was “excluded from the new state of Israel not by force but by where borders were drawn on the map by the British, false assumptions have been perpetuated on the world. This is at the root of why people generally accept the idea that Jews forced Palestinians out of their homeland. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the settled Muslim population in what became the Jewish state only began growing after the time Jewish emigration began in the 1880s through 1948. The evidence repeatedly shows that the migrant Arab workers came to Palestine seeking jobs after the Jews began to reclaim the land.

As Peters, who conducted a first-hand population study in the region, puts it: “The ‘unprecedented' sudden ‘natural' increase among Arabs of Western Palestine after centuries of static population figures was intriguing. That extraordinary increase was represented as a countrywide ‘phenomenon.'”
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The purpose of Peters' original study was “to determine whether in fact there was a large-scale displacement of Arab natives by Jews in Western Palestine before and at the time of the November 1947-1948 war of Arabs against Jewish independence.” Peters admits that when she began the investigation her sympathies were with the “Palestinian refugees.” She expected to find evidence of Israeli aggression against helpless Palestinians and of Jewish occupation of Palestinian family lands.

Peters was astonished at the evidence she found. She writes, “What the calculations indicate is that, rather than a situation in which a teeming Arab people, present ‘from time immemorial,' was forced off or excluded from its land, the situation is almost the exact opposite . . . the Jews, whose presence attracted Arab migrants, and the Jews' land, earmarked as their Home, was
usurped by the arrival of these Arab in-migrants from outside Jewish-settled areas.”
²²³

Peters also found in her original population investigation:

Even the earlier conservative estimates of Muslim population in the Jewish-settled areas of Palestine had been grossly exaggerated.
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Arabs indeed migrated from the depressed areas of the region to those places where they could gain greater economic advantage in the Jewish-settled areas.
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So, why was this factor of “explosive Arab population growth” not investigated or at least considered before? It was simply because the British never attempted to count Arab in-migration or illegal Arab immigration. They only quantified Jewish immigration into the Holy Land, and they did this with scrupulous zeal for details. Furthermore, Peters found, the population was never accurately identified by location or analyzed according to Jewish and non-Jewish areas.

Amazingly, the false assumptions in subsequent generations have been that “all Palestine was Jewish-settled” and “Jewish-settled Palestine was all Arab Palestine.” Most of the British Foreign Service could never get it through their heads that the Jews came to a land that was an utter desolation and almost entirely barren of settled people of any kind. But some influential British Foreign Service officers did not care what the facts were. They just didn't like Jews.

So what made the British turn a blind eye toward this kind of one-sided population movement? Clearly, within the British
Foreign Service there were men who wanted to see the idea of a Jewish state fail. For the sake of their own imperial ambitions in the Middle East, they preferred working with the Arabs rather than with the more troublesome, independently minded Jews.

When British Gen. Edmund Allenby walked reverently into Jerusalem, leading his army of liberation on December 9, 1917, he was set to institute a military government. Unfortunately, virtually the entire staff of Ronald Storrs, the governor of Jerusalem, was riddled with army officers who did not believe in the principles of the Balfour Declaration. Without authorization, they reversed on the field the official policy of their government and sabotaged the mandate given their country by the League of Nations. Had this been discovered and investigated at the time, it would have been considered a crime at best and treason at worst. These men betrayed the official policy of their government.