Myth of 'Arab' Jerusalem: a Dagger Aimed at Israel
The King of Jordan, an American aligned Arab country that has made peace with Israel, has raised the issue of Jerusalem in a most aggressive way. Israel's liberation of the city, he insists, is the root cause of Islamist hatred--from Iran to Pakistan to Allah-Knows-Where.
The King is a weak man, frightened that the Palestinian majority over which he rules--undemocratically--will one day rise up and drive him from his palace. Like his late father, Hussein, Abdullah II dreads ending up like Iran's Shah--a wandering, exiled monarch, in constant danger--or, even worse, like Egypt's President Anwar Sadat, who was murdered by Muslim Brotherhood Islamists, including Al Qaeda's second-in-command, following his signing of a peace treaty with Israel.
For the record....
Jews have been living in Jerusalem continuously for nearly two millennia, constituting the largest single group of inhabitants there since the 1840s. Jerusalem contains the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism.
Jerusalem was never the capital of any Arab entity. In fact, it was a backwater for most of Arab history. Jerusalem never served as a provincial capital under Muslim rule nor was it ever a Muslim cultural center. Muslims revere a site--the Dome of the Rock--not the city. For Jews, however, the entire city is sacred.
Jordan controlled Jerusalem's eastern part from 1949 to 1967, when King Hussein cynically and stupidly ignored Israeli pleas to stay out of the June Middle East war. Instead, the King attacked Israel, believing he could share in the spoils of an Egyptian-Syrian victory. Their aim was to annihilate Israel. But they lost the war; and Jordan lost control over East Jerusalem and the Jordanian-occupied areas west of the Jordan River.
For Jews and Christians, Israel's miraculous victory meant that the long nightmare of Jordan's occupation of Jerusalem had finally come to an end. In violation of the 1949 Armistice Agreement, Jordan denied Israelis access to the Western Wall and to the cemetery on the Mount of Olives, where Jews have buried their dead for more than 2,500 years.
Under paragraph eight of the agreement, Jordan and Israel had agreed to establish committees to arrange the resumption of the normal functioning of cultural and humanitarian institutions on Mt. Scopus, and free access to that area; use of the cemetery on the Mount of Olives, and free access to holy places and cultural institutions.
Under Jordanian rule, "Israeli Christians were subjected to various restrictions during their seasonal pilgrimages to their holy places" in Jerusalem, according to Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek. "Only limited numbers were grudgingly permitted to briefly visit the Old City and Bethlehem at Christmas and Easter."
In 1955 and 1964, Jordan passed laws imposing strict government control on Christian schools, including restrictions on the opening of new schools, state control over school finances and appointment of teachers and the requirements that the Koran be taught. In 1953 and 1965, Jordan adopted laws abrogating the right of Christian religious and charitable institutions to acquire real estate in Jerusalem.
In 1958, police seized the Armenian Patriarch-elect and deported him from Jordan, paving the way for the election of a patriarch supported by King Hussein's government. Because of these repressive policies, many Christians emigrated from Jerusalem. Their numbers declined from 25,000 in 1949 to less than 13,000 in June 1967.
Israel abolished the discriminatory laws after the city was reunited in 1967.
When America's ally, supposedly moderate Jordan, controlled Jerusalem, the Jordanians systematically desecrated Jewish holy places as a matter of state policy. King Hussein, for example, permitted the construction of a road to the Intercontinental Hotel across the Mount of Olives cemetery. Hundreds of Jewish graves were deliberately destroyed by a highway that could have easily been built elsewhere. The gravestones, honoring the memory of rabbis and sages, were used by the engineer corps of the Jordanian Arab Legion as pavement and latrines in army camps (inscriptions on the stones were still visible when Israel liberated the city).
The ancient Jewish Quarter of the Old City was ravaged; 58 Jerusalem synagogues, some centuries old, were destroyed or ruined. Others were turned into stables and chicken coops. Slum dwellings were built abutting the Western Wall.
Jordanian snipers shot at Jews across the border--poor Sephardic Jewish immigrants who could not afford to live in safer neighborhoods.
The King also neglected Jerusalem, following the example of previous Muslim rulers. After the capture of the Old City in 1967, the scope of his disregard became clear when Israel discovered that much of the city lacked even the most basic municipal services, such as a steady water supply, plumbing and electricity. As a result of reunification, these and other badly needed municipal services were extended to Arab homes and businesses in East Jerusalem.
Israeli authorities found that hundreds of squatters had made their homes in the Jewish Quarter. Israeli civil engineers cleared the ruins to rebuild the quarter, but only after offering compensation or alternate housing to the squatters.
Is Jordan Palestine?
Jordan's King Abdullah II on Sunday repeatedly blamed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the Islamist threat--from Iran to Pakistan. It all comes back to the Palestinian issue and Jerusalem, he said several times in an interview on NBC-TV's Meet the Press program.
His host, David Gregory, did not ask the Jordanian King the obvious questions: Assuming Israel were to return the disputed West Bank territories, including East Jerusalem, which Jordan lost when it attacked Israel in the Six-Day War of June 1967, to Jordan or to a new Palestinian state, would that stop the Taliban and Al Qaeda from continuing their conquest of Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan? Would Israel's territorial sacrifice satisfy Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, or would the Islamist axis press ahead with plans to destroy Israel, drive the United States from the Middle East, and dominate the region?
The answer to both questions, of course, is that the dismemberment of Israel is likely to lead to its destruction, that Iran and its Islamist allies intend to overthrow the status quo, regionally and globally. Just as appeasement didn't stop the Nazis, appeasement won't stop the Islamists.
The Jordanian King is simply trying to save his own skin. Increasingly menaced by Islamists at home, he wants to keep the international/Islamist focus on Israel.
His comments are a reminder that two Israeli leaders--Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir--may have been right about Jordan. It is the Palestinian state, and the world would have long ago recognized it as such if not for the Hashemite monarchy.
In other words, contrary to conventional thinking, the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict has already been implemented. More than 75% of the original Palestine mandate--the land east of the Jordan River, formerly known as Trans-Jordan and now known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan--is an independent Arab state. It contains a majority of Palestinian Arabs in its army as well as its population. Logically, Palestine's Arab state and Jewish State, called Israel, should be able to negotiate the future of disputed areas.Logically....In October 1981, Sharon told Time Magazine: “I believe that the starting point for a solution is to establish a Palestinian state in that part of Palestine that was separated from what was to become Israel in 1922 and which is now Jordan.... The only strangers are the members of the Hashemite Kingdom ruled by King Hussein.... I don’t mind who takes over Jordan.”
In 1982, Shamir wrote that, "reduced to its true proportions, the problem is clearly not the lack of a homeland for the Palestinian Arabs. That homeland is Trans-Jordan, or Eastern Palestine.... A second Palestinian state to the west of the River is a prescription for anarchy."
Jordan is a River
Sharon and Shamir were basically echoing the view of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist wing of the Zionist movement, which gave birth to the Irgun and Lehi underground organizations from which isarael's right-of-center Herut party and subsequent Likud bloc emerged. In the 1920s, Jabotinsky asserted that Palestine is a territory whose "chief geographical feature" is that "the Jordan River does not delineate its frontiers but flows through its center."
The present Jordanian ruler's father, King Hussein, seemed to agree with that analysis when he said in 1981 that "Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan." Seven years later, Hussein gave in to international pressure and relinquished his claim to sovereignty over the West Bank.
His move was a victory for the PLO, which had long argued that it, not the foreign Hashemite family, was the legitimate heir to rulership of both banks of Palestine.
Following the Six-Day War, the PLO established a de facto state-within-a-sate inside Jordan. Armed, uniformed Palestinians set up checkpoints, collected taxes, and refused to travel with Jordanian license plates on their cars. In the country's southern zone, bordering Israel, they demanded and seized autonomous control, rejecting the King's authority. Operating from bases in Jordanian territory, the PLO carried out a series of deadly attacks against Israel.
In the 1971 revolt known as Black September, the PLO declared parts of Jordan as "liberated Palestine" and attempted to assassinate and overthrow King Hussein. He put down the revolt, killing an estimated 10,000 Palestinians over the course of about 10 days, and expelled the PLO from his country.
Fearing an attack from the PLO's ally, Syria, which had begun to mobilize its forces, the King appealed to Israel for help. Its air force deterred the Syrians from invading Jordan.
Years later, Sharon and Shamir were known to have regretted the Israeli intervention on the King's behalf, believing it would have been better for Israel to have allowed him to fall.
POSTSCRIPT: The State of Israel is roughly the size of the American state of New Jersey or the state of Massachusetts. The disputed West Bank areas are about as big as one or two American counties. In this context, there is something fundamentally irrational about the so-called international community's obsession with the creation of another Arab state in Palestine. In fact, Gaza, which is ruled by the Iranian-backed terrorist organization, Hamas, is already a de facto state; so the so-called two-state solution is really a four-state solution--three Arab states, Gaza, Jordan, and the West Bank, plus Israel (pending a final onslaught by its enemies behind Iran's nuclear shield).
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