The Palestinians “Victim” Game is Getting Old

April 17, 2002

by Mary Mostert, Analyst - Banner of Liberty

On April 4th, President George W. Bush announced he was sending Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Middle East to “work to implement United Nations Resolution 1402, an immediate and meaningful cease-fire, an end to terror and violence and incitement; withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian cities, including Ramallah; implementation of the already agreed upon Tenet and Mitchell plans, which will lead to a political settlement.”

In making that statement, he actually was quoting, almost verbatim, from the March 30, 2002 United Nations Resolution 1402. Note that the first order of business is an “immediate and meaningful cease-fire, an end to terror and violence and incitement.” Now who, do you suppose, has been killing whom with sniper fire and suicide bombs and inciting people to hate the other side? Palestinians have been doing that. Yet, rarely has any news source pointed out that not only the UN Resolution but also the President of the United States has consistently put “an immediate and meaningful cease-fire, an end to terror and violence and incitement” before “withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian cities, including Ramallah.”

The president also brought to the attention of the American people some particulars of a suicide bombing that had occurred shortly before he announced Colin Powell’s mission: “When an 18-year-old Palestinian girl is induced to blow herself up, and in the process kills a 17-year-old Israeli girl, the future, itself, is dying - the future of the Palestinian people and the future of the Israeli people.”

As an apparent response to Bush’s statement, a female terrorist from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, blew herself up near a busy supermarket, killing six Israelis and wounding 80. Only the Palestinians, who have decades of practice in portraying themselves as the “victims” of the Middle East conflicts could get away with such behavior and still have the American media treating them with sympathy.

Perhaps a quick review of what the West Bank actually is would help put the current situation in perspective. First, there has never ever been a Palestinian State. The West Bank, for more than 500 years, was part of the Turkish Empire, which basically disappeared after it sided with Germany in World War I.

Following World War I, the League of Nations created the Palestinian Mandate under the control of Great Britain. It included 44,855 square miles of land that is now Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, and which, at the time, consisted of about 600,000 people, Arabs and Jews and a few Christians. Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, issued during World War I, called for “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

In 1921, Britain divided the area, giving two-thirds of the Palestinian Mandate territory to the Hashemite family, which today still rules Jordan, for the Arab State. One-third of the land was supposed to be left for the Jewish Homeland. Yet, during the 1930s, Britain limited Jewish immigration to the Palestinian Mandate, while simultaneously allowing unlimited immigration from other Muslim nations, such as Egypt. Yasser Arafat and his family, for example, emigrated to the Palestinian Mandate from Egypt in 1933.

By the end of World War II, 6 million of the world’s 11 million Jews were dead. At the end of 1946, in the total 44,855 square miles of the Palestinian Mandate, there were 1,269,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews. Jews had acquired by purchase 6 to 8 percent of the total land area of Palestine amounting to about 20 percent of the arable land resided within the borders of Mandate Palestine.

At the insistence of the United States, on November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. According to the records, “The UN partition plan divided the country in such a way that each state would have a majority of its own population, although some Jewish settlements would fall within the proposed Palestinian state and many Palestinians would become part of the proposed Jewish state.”

According to the UN partition plan, Jerusalem and Bethlehem were to become an international zone. However, that never happened. Instead, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq invaded to seize the United Nations-created nation from the Jews.

Israel fought back and when the armistice agreement was signed in 1949, “The country once known as Palestine was now divided into three parts, each under separate political control. The State of Israel encompassed over 77 percent of the territory. Jordan occupied East Jerusalem and the hill country of central Palestine (the West Bank). Egypt took control of the coastal plain around the city of Gaza (the Gaza Strip). The Palestinian Arab state envisioned by the UN partition plan was never established.

Other wars have also taken place, especially the 1967 war which resulted in Israel beating back the same attacking nations again and seizing the entire Sinai Peninsula. However, when Anwar Sadat was Egypt’s leader, he personally came to Israel to speak to the Knesset to make peace with Israel. As a result of Egypt agreeing to live by UN Resolution 242, which requires all nations to respect the sovereignty of others in the area, Israel gave the Sinai back to Egypt.

In 1993 in Oslo, Norway, the Israel-Palestine Liberation Organization Agreement was signed by Yasser Arafat and Yitzak Rabin. That agreement states “the Palestinian police will insure public order.” Arafat also promised that he would abide by UN Resolution 242 which requires “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force...”

Jordan made peace with Israel, finally, on October 26, 1994 and the treaty states that its “international border” consists of the Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers between the two nations and also there will be no “threats to security resulting from all kinds of terrorism.”

What happened to the West Bank? Jordan renounced it. And, so far while Arafat on numerous occasions has agreed to stop terrorism as required by UN Resolution 242 and all the documents he has signed, he has not once actually done so.

Until he does, under the existing agreements, Israel has every right to use its military to provide security for the Jewish people.

_____________________________________


Mary Mostert was writing professionally on political issues as a teen-ager in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1940s. In the 1960s, she wrote a weekly column for the Rochester Times Union, a Gannett paper and was one of 52 American women who attended the 17 Nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland to ban testing of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere. She was a licensed building contractor for 29 years, as she raised her six children. She served an 18 month mission as Public Affairs Director for the Africa Area for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1990-91. In the 1990s she wrote a book, Coming Home, Families Can Stop the Unraveling of America, edited the Reagan Monthly Monitor and talk show host Michael Reagan’s Information Interchange for seven years. She now operates the website, Banner of Liberty.

Send the author an E mail at Mostert@ConservativeTruth.org.

For more of Mary's articles, visit her archives.

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