A funny thing happened to the map of Palestine after the League of Nations drew up its version of what country looked like. (It was not the classic map, but that is another story.)
What happened was the disappearance of the idea of the Jordan River as a border between two sovereign territories, one Jewish, the other Arab. According to today’s so-called Two-State Solution, the River should be the border between two Arab states; Arab Jordan on the east bank and a new State of Arab Palestine on the west, with its western border the Jewish state confined with the cease-fire line with Jordan of 1949.
This is not what the League foresaw, whose Mandate remains a living, legal document embedded in the Charter of the United Nations Organization that succeeded the League.
The League initially consulted historical maps of Palestine that never depicted the Jordan River as a boundary between two nations; that was to be a League innovation. Historic Palestine (a.k.a. the Holy Land) was synonymous with the land promised to the Jews in the Bible who settled on both banks. For centuries, maps of Eretz Yisrael a.k.a. Palestine showed the Jordan River not as a border near the country’s middle.
When the League drew its own map, it incorporated into its Mandate for Palestine the Balfour Declaration calling for the creation of a country called Palestine – that never existed under Muslim rule – as a Jewish homeland. When the Great War (World War I) broke out in 1914, there was no Palestine on the ground because the Muslim Turks who had ruled for four hundred years at that point never recognized such a country.
The League, pressured from several directions after the War by Arabs, Jews, Britain and France, decided to cede Palestine east of the River to the Arabs and turn western Palestine into the homeland of the Jews. Thus, the Jordan River would become a border between the vast Arab nation one side and the tiny Jewish nation on the other.
This idea of making the Jordan River the frontier between the Jewish homeland called Palestine and Araby seemed like a good and reasonable one at the time. Rivers have commonly served not only as sources of water and fish and waterways to travel on and transport freight; they also serve as borders between nations — the nation being the largest form of group identity known to man. For example, the Rio Grande separates the United States from Mexico; the St. Lawrence separates Canada from the United States; the Rheine separates France from Germany.
Rivers also serve as boundaries between smaller jurisdictions. Nine U.S. states border the Mississippi River (none them extending political control over to the other side.) The Mississippi is the border between Louisiana and the State of Mississippi; it also is the boundary between the State of Mississippi and Arkansas; between Arkansas and Tennessee; Kentucky and Missouri; Missouri and Illinois; Illinois and Iowa; Iowa and Wisconsin; Wisconsin and Minnesota. What is more normal than a river serving as a political boundary?
In fact, when on January 3, 1919 in London Chaim Weizmann, successor to Theodor Herzl as head of the Zionist Organization, signed an agreement with Prince Faisal of Mecca, the two of them envisioned two states, one called “The Arab State,” one called “Palestine.” The former was obviously intended for Arabs and Palestine for the Jews. Faisal did not mind. Played by the great English actor Alec Guinness in the classic film Lawrence of Arabia), he was cut from very different cloth than most Arabs today. He did not deny the historic connection between the Jewish people and their ancient homeland. Never in history had Arabs used the name Palestine. It appears nowhere in the Koran and over fourteen centuries of Islam Muslims never conceived of such a country. Only recently, in the 20th century, did they start calling it Falastin. Its traditional name in Arabic has been Bilad al-Sham meaning “Damascus territory.”
The Weizmann-Faisal agreement then became the model for the League of Nations Mandate that also imagined a homeland explicitly created for the Jewish people in Palestine west of the Jordan River — to be called “Palestine” — with eastern Palestine on the other side of the River given to the Arabs as part of an even larger state.
And in the decades to come, the world would refer to eastern Palestine as Trans-Jordan (from a Latin word meaning “on the other side”), as Palestine west of the River was called Cis-Jordan (from a Latin word meaning “on this side.”)
The League of Nations thus assigned Palestine east of the River to the Arabs, which later evolved first into the Emirate (princedom) of Trans-Jordan and later the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan, with everything west of the River left for the Jewish homeland. In the Weizmann-Faisal Agreement, “Palestine” was meant for the Jews, “The Arab State” meant for the Arabs, and the League of Nations went along with that.
In other words: what could be more natural today — and in keeping with the letter and the spirit of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine of 1922 — than saluting Arab sovereignty east of the River, today’s already existing state of Jordan, and Jewish (Israeli) sovereignty west of it? The League simply did not conceive of one Arab state east of the river and a second Arab state west of it as well.
That is the real meaning of the Two-State Solution. The Arabs then would have two states in Palestine and the Jews only one; and once-again, the Jews would be squeezed into a state only 9 to 15 miles wide.
In 1948, when Israel declared independence, King Abdallah in his capital of Amman (a mispronunciation of its Biblical Hebrew name Ammon) launched his army across the River, he had no mandate from the United Nations to do that.
His army called The Arab Legion, led by an imperialist British officer General John Glubb, captured Holy Jerusalem and expelled all of its Jews who had been the largest community in it for centuries.
Jordan’s army also overran most of Samaria to the north and the hills of Judea to the south and remained in place for the next 19 years. Moreover, a year after this unauthorized invasion, King Abdallah declared his conquest now annexed, part of his kingdom, and bestowed on its Arab residents citizenship as full-fledged Jordanians.
When the king was assassinated a year later by agents of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, his Islamist rival Haj Amin al-Husseini, Abdallah’s son took over but with serious mental problems was soon removed and instead Abdallah’s teenage grandson Hussein became king and ruled until his death in 1999. And at no time did either Abdallah or Hussein ever consider the Arabs west of the River to be “Palestinians” with a separate national identity and a right to national independence.
Today, though, Israel is supposed to do that; that’s the Two-State Solution. Israel is supposed to honor the groundless notion that today’s “Palestinians” west of the River and “Jordanians” east of the River belong to two distinct nationalities when there is not an eyedropper’s worth of difference in national characteristics between them.
Jordan’s kings are recognized as direct descendants of Islam’s founding Prophet Muhammad, and if they never considered the Arabs in Judea and Samaria to be a separate nationality deserving of an independent sovereign state, why must Israel?
Ergo, instead of employing the tactic of today’s Netanyahu administration — recognizing a “Palestinian” nation with a right to independence and sovereign ownership in the heart of the Land of Israel (albeit with impossible conditions attached), Israel might stop trying to “make nice” to its enemies and the world and start demanding its rights to hold onto Judea and Samaria as ownership authorized by 1) the League of Nations and 2) the natural right of victors to keep the spoils of war, especially when the victors had been the victims of their enemy’s aggression.
Shakespeare’s play title Measure for Measure may have been a direct translation of the Biblical Hebrew expression mida kaneged mida. In 1967, the Arabs attacked Israel to take land away from the Jews; they lost, and as punishment – punitive damages for their aggression — they deserved to lose land to their victims. Mida kaneged mida.
After World War II, the victorious Allies handed over to Germany’s victimized neighbors some 44,000 square miles of pre-War German territory; after the Mexican War with the United States (1846-48), Mexico lost half of its pre-war territory. Why the double standard when it comes to the world’s only Jewish state?
Israel’s leaders, mostly secularized and de-judaized, are simply unaware of the ugly, covert antisemitism behind the demand that Israel give back the spoils of war taken in 1967. Since when do the victors have to return the spoils of war to their aggressors?
And as for the fate of the Arabs living on this land: legislation found in the Jewish people’s constitution a.k.a. Bible and Talmud regarding the ger toshav/resident alien, his rights, obligations and limitations, is a good, moral, intelligent and virtuous place to start looking for civilized solutions.