Ironically, while the Times was breast-beating over the ‘stateless’ Palestinians, the late left-wing journalist I.F. Stone was complaining in the New York Review of Books that Jewish dissidents, like himself, could not get a word in edgewise in behalf of Palestinian nationhood.
Stone knew all about the two banks of the Jordan, as his piece indicated. It seems, however, that it didn’t register with him; he suggested neither that the Palestinians already have a state nor that the one thing the American press never reports is the fact that Jordan is Palestine.
On the other hand, the Israeli government doesn’t say it either, and a story goes with that fact.
Jordan Vs. Palestine
When the Zionists agreed in 1922 to suspend immigration to the East Bank, in accordance with Churchill’s request, Vladimir Jabotinsky signed on.
But Jabotinsky — the elegant, fiery Zionist leader who later became the father of the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi and the ‘eagle’ of its commander, Menachem Begin — changed his mind about the deal a year later after it became clear that the Jews had traded away most of the mandate for nothing.
The Establishment Zionists, however, stuck with the British ever after.
‘There are no Palestinians, there are only Jordanians,’ said Golda Meir again and again.
Of course, she was wrong. In fact, there are no Jordanians, only Palestinians. One reason why Golda insisted on the opposite – as everyone with a passing knowledge of Zionist politics understands – was that her political enemy Jabotinsky was on the other side.
Meir and her Mapai party, which ruled Israel from the pre-state days until Begin was elected prime minister in 1977, hated Jabotinsky and his followers, considering them all ‘fascists.’
The Jabotinsky vision held that both sides of the Jordan belonged to Israel; he wrote a song about it: ‘The West Bank is ours, and the East Bank is ours.’
Menachem Begin marched to this tune most of his life. For domestic political reasons he dropped it in his later years, but it was surprising, to say the least, that he did not even allude to it after he became prime minister.
Had he insisted on educating the world about the true history of Palestine, Begin could have cleared up the confusion and made a contribution toward peace.
Thus, if the world were to understand that Israel occupies only 20 percent of Palestine rather than 100 percent, would it not make a difference?
If it became clear that the Arab refugees and their children who crossed over to Jordan in 1948 did not enter a ‘host country’ but rather the Arab part of their own country, would it not make a difference?
Of course it would make a difference.
Israel is being robbed of its political, historic, and geographic legitimacy while seeming to rob the Palestinians of a nation it already has.
‘If there is a Palestine, there can also be an Israel,’ said the late Peter Bergson, who led the Hebrew Liberation Movement in the 1940’s.
‘But if we paint Jordan as if it’s just another Arab nation, as if it’s Saudi Arabia, then the fight is on for the extinction of Israel in stages.
‘Because,’ Bergson added, ‘if we insist that the whole of Palestine is the West Bank, anything we return is simply the fruit of a crime. But if we tell the truth, if we point out that 80 percent of the land is already in the hands of the Palestinian Arabs, everyone – here and around the world – will see this dispute for what it is.
‘And what is it but an argument over boundaries?….Every boundary disagreement in history has been settled by drawing new lines. But you can’t settle it if someone thinks his nationhood has been ripped off.’
