Arab League formally rejects U.S. policy change on Israel's land

Photo: Screen Shot/Reuters/Mohamed Abd El Ghany

Cairo -- On Monday the Arab League formally rejected a U.S. decision to no longer consider Israeli territory as settlements in spite of the fact that the areas being referred to on the West Bank are legally Israel's as per the Mandates system established by the League of Nations when the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War One, and it was later agreed to by the United Nations once the former closed in 1946.

Several mandates were created exclusively for the Arabs but their appetite for land was, and still is, insatiable. France held the Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, while Great Britain held the Mandate for Iraq. The goal of the European powers was to guide the local populations to achieve independence.

It's not surprising that the Arab League would dispute history--they been doing it for decades, and while the Arab have managed to acquire 22 separate states, many more than any other people, but they still wanted the dismemberment of Israel and death to the Jews, and they treat non-Arab Muslims--the Kurds, Berbers, black Africans, with contempt or even violence and death.

The territory reserved for the Mandate for Palestine originally extended from the Golan in the north to the Gulf of Aqaba [in the south], and from an area east of the Jordan River “out into the desert” to the Mediterranean. The British then unilaterally decided that all the territory east of the Jordan — 78% of the original territory of the Mandate – would be closed to Jewish immigration, so that it would become part of the newly-created Emirate of Transjordan (later known as the Kingdom of Jordan).

The Palestine Mandate allowed the Jews 22% of the territory that was originally to have been included. A small sliver of the pie that ran from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, and the Golan to the Gulf of Aqaba. That Mandatory territory, that was to have formed part of the future Jewish state, included all of what became known as the West Bank, what the Arab League likes to call the "settlements," as if Israel has no rights to it.

In the 1948-49 war, at the end of hostilities the Arab Legion of Jordan held onto those parts of Judea and Samaria west of the Jordan that the Jordanians soon renamed the “West Bank.” 

In taking possession of the West Bank, Jordan did not establish a legal claim; it remained a military “occupier.” Israel had the legal claim to the West Bank but could do nothing about it until they won the Six-Day War.

According to judicial proceedings, the West Bank remained, as it had been under the Mandate, part of the Jewish National Home. After the Six Day War, in 1967, Israel did not establish a new legal claim, but merely became able, through force of arms, to enforce the claim it had always possessed. 

Israel won, Jordan lost.

When Arabs [and some Democratic presidential candidates] call for an “end to the occupation” by Israel, the Jewish state has been completely out of Gaza since 2005. Gaza is not under any “occupation” nor could the West Bank have ever been "occupied" by Israel in any legal sense since it was hers to begin with, not to mention recent archeological findings of ancient Jewish cities in Israel that existed long before Islam existed.

And the West Bank could never have been “occupied” by Israel in a legal sense; it was always part of the territory assigned to the Mandate for Palestine, to be incorporated into the future Jewish National Home.

The Arab League's claim that the U.S. position is legally null and void is simply illegal, and ahistorical nonsense.


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