Posted on 04/18/2003 6:30:56 AM PDT by SJackson
The year was 1922, the British were empowered by the League of Nations to fulfill the Mandate of Palestine drafted two years earlier at the San Remo Conference. The Mandate that they accepted, under article 4, obliged them "to secure the cooperation of all willing Jews" and "to assist in the establishment of the Jewish National home". However, in the same year, the 1922 White Paper written by Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill declared that Palestine should not be "as Jewish as England is English". This was allegedly to prevent partitioning the land into two (Arab and Jewish). Although the Churchill´s White Paper stated that the Mandate "is not susceptible of change" the British sliced 76% of the land, east of the Jordan River, and gave it Emir Abdullah (from Hejaz, now Saudi Arabia). That land was renamed Trans-Jordan. Not even a year had passed and Great Britain was in violation of Article 5 of its Mandate, which stated "no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of, the Government of any foreign Power." From this point on, Jewish immigration to newly partitioned Trans-Jordan was forbidden whilst a blind eye was turned to Arab immigration to the west [of the Jordan River], in complete violation of article 2, which demanded "safeguarding the civil rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion".
It was July 1937, Arab and Jewish relations were as bloody as they ever were. The Peel Commission considered a partitioning of the remaining western Palestine. The British government refused on the basis that it should protect the integrity of the land (west of the Jordan River of course, not the exclusively Arabic Trans-Jordan).
It was 1939, the British were just about starting World War II. Britain called for the Saint James Conference, a conference to "settle" the bloody disputes between Arabs and Jews. Mufti al-Husseini´s* Arab delegation refused to meet Chaim Weizmann’s Jewish delegation, which he did not "recognize". These discussions lead nowhere. After rejecting, two years earlier, the idea of a Jewish partition in Palestine recommended by the Peel Commission, and after excluding Jews from 76% of the land rightfully theirs as Jews and as citizen of the Mandate, the British decided to impose a solution; it was called the MacDonald´s White Paper. This paper limited legitimate Jewish immigration to 75,000 over a period of five years. In order to get Arab support against Nazi Germany, the British Government left millions of Jews at the hand of the Nazis, condemning them to die in the most horrific circumstances, which we now know, and forbidding them to go to the land promised to them by the League of Nations 17 years earlier. The League of Nations slammed the British stating that "the policy set out in the [MacDonald] White Paper was not in accordance with the interpretation which, in agreement with the Mandatory Power and the Council, the Commission had placed upon the Palestine Mandate."
During their years as a mandatory power, Great Britain sliced the Jewish National Home and did what they could to dilute Jewish presence in the Holy Land. In 1947 the British proposed the land be split once again and gave birth to UNGAR Resolution 181. They knew that the General Assembly [that passed this resolution] had no power, because General Assembly resolutions are under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, which is not "imperative" and only "give advices", as the Syrian representative said when he rejected the partition plan, but it was nevertheless accepted by David Ben-Gurion. At the end of that year, the Americans declared an embargo on arm sales to the region "hoping it would avoid bloodshed", but the Jordanians, Egyptians, Iraqis and Syrians where fully armed by the British and the French. Britain had a knack of leaving behind countless munitions and arms in the Arab lands they mandated. Even though the partition was accepted by the General Assembly, the Nations of the World created an environment where the Jewish State would be "born dead".
History decided otherwise. The infant Jewish State managed to import arms from Eastern Europe and, against all the odds, defeated her enemies. Britain´s plan to split the land in three was never accomplished. Trans-Jordan was renamed Jordan when it was granted "independence" in 1946, mirroring British policy, to allow citizenship to any citizen of the Mandate excluding Jews [as codified in their Constitution].
It was 1998, Tony Blair becoming UK Prime Minister a year before he decided to cut his own "White Paper". Robin Cook was then Foreign Minister and, in his own words "with the full backing of his government and the European Union", he went to meet the Palestinian delegation in eastern Jerusalem. According to him, it was to "restart the peace process" that he went to the "controversial" site of Har Homa, angering then-Prime Minister Netanyahu´s government. This was a clear statement of Britain´s intentions to impose "borders" for a future "viable State of Palestine", in complete disregard of UN Resolution 242 and 338.
It was 2002 and Tony Blair became UK Prime Minister for the second time the year before. He decided that it was time for Britain to finish "the job" of breaking off the Land of Israel. 70 years ago, it was in order to avoid Arab riots and to gain Arab support against Hitler, today it is to avoid the "clash of civilization" and get Arab Muslim support against terrorism. In the full sense of the term, British parliament, left-right-and-center, stated many times that "what we are doing is to prevent the radicalization of law-abiding Muslims in this country", probably not afraid of the reactions of the Jews, who are unlikely to hijack their airplanes and plant bombs in their cities. Once again, the government of Her Majesty is ready to sell out the Jews to preserve its own interest. During 2002, Tony Blair decided to invite Bashar Assad - dictator of Syria, ruthless occupier of Lebanon and head of a country that has the "head offices" of virtually every Islamic terrorist groups on the planet, and that cooperates and actively finances the Hezbollah terror group, which keeps on launching barbaric attacks on the north of Israel - to England.
It was early 2003, and Tony Blair decided to hold a "conference" to give a new lifeline to Arafat who was previously “set aside” by US President George W. Bush because he was a "leader compromised by terror". After the massacre of twin homicidal bombers in Tel Aviv, which killed almost 30 people and injured countless more, Israel decided to ban the travel of the PLO delegation to London. Despite the fact that the al-Aqsa Brigade, the PLO’s own kamikaze branch, carried out the bombing, Britain decided to go ahead with the conference via video link, claiming that "we need to move toward peace and reject any form of extremism". Yet, it was the heads of the terror group he invited who massacred Jews less than a fortnight before. The aim of the conference was allegedly to "reform" the PLO, but no demand mad at that conference called on the PLO to remove from its charter the clause calling for the "liquidation" of "the Zionist entity" - in other words the destruction of Israel.
It was March 2003 when Tony Blair finally managed to lobby Bush with the new "White Paper" - the "Road Map". He managed to persuade US President Bush to publish the document drafted by "the Quartet". Bush´s words were "we will publish it, hope that the new PA prime minister has real authority and wait for feedback"; to which Blair replied "I agree, the road map will be implemented and we will not move from it". It looks to me that he has a strange definition of was it is to "agree".
"White Papers" have always been Britain´s "answer" in dealing with the "Jewish problem" in their old Mandate. The policy is simple: cuddling Muslim extremists at the expense of Jewish lives to secure their own interest. In a recent speech, Foreign Minister Jack Straw, backed later that day by Tony Blair, accentuated this sense of unbalance by saying that "we need to show the Arab world that there is a even handed approach with Iraq and Israel...Come the end of the war we will push hard on Israel to implement [the UN Resolutions]." To understand the British position, one need only recall the speech by then-Ambassador to the UN for Israel, Abba Eban, on 23 March 1955, which led to UNSCR 106 condemning Israel´s raid on Egypt´s Gaza. Replace the references to “Egypt” with “PLO” and you will have the full picture today.
Eban said: “At the root of these tensions lie a theory and practice of belligerency. Egypt considers and proclaims that there is ‘a state of war’. In the name of that ‘state of war’, Egypt asserts a ‘right’ to perform hostile acts of its choice against Israel. On the other hand, Egypt claims immunity from any hostile response emanating from Israel. This is the doctrine of unilateral belligerency, and it has no parallel or precedent in the jurisprudence of nations. It is another principle of the Egyptian position that decisions of the Security Council relating to Israel have no binding force upon Egypt. On the other hand, the Security Council´s authority is today invoked to protect Egypt against any reaction that its active prosecution of the ‘state of war’ may elicit.
“It would be strictly and scientifically accurate to describe the essence of the Egyptian position in two sentences: ‘Egypt may behave towards Israel as though there were war. Israel must behave towards Egypt as though there were peace.’”
* Mufti al-Husseini was allegedly the great-uncle of Yasser Arafat. He was a frequent guest and friend of Hitler and a leading figure for Bosnian Muslims in the SS.
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Yoram Halberstam is Software Architect and an Internet Service Provider in the United Kingdom.
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