[Published 3 October 2017]
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Secretary-General Saeb Erekat has managed to grab international headlines to promote yet another PLO canard regarding the 100 years old Jewish-Arab conflict.
Unabashedly and unashamedly Erekat has declared:
“Israel is internationally recognised as the occupying power over 100 percent of Palestine, including in and around occupied East Jerusalem”
Yet according to Article 2 of the PLO Charter - Jordan is the occupying power over 78% of Palestine.
“Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.”
The British Mandate for Palestine between 1920 and 1946 encompassed what is today called:
1. Israel (17%),The Hashemite dynasty has been the occupying power in Jordan since 25 May 1946 (having rebuffed the PLO’s attempt to overthrow it in 1970).
2. Jordan (78%),
3. Judea and Samaria (West Bank) (4%) and
4. Gaza (1%).
Hamas has occupied Gaza since 2007.
40% of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) was occupied by the Palestinian Authority between 1993 and 2013 until the Palestinian Authority was disbanded on 3 January 2013 by decree of Mahmoud Abbas - the PLO assuming occupation thereafter.
Erekat’s claim that Israel occupies 100% of Palestine is therefore utter rubbish.
Erekat has revived one of the greatest travesties perpetrated by the United Nations on the Jewish-Arab conflict in its publication “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestinian problem” (“publication”) – omitting any map of the British Mandate for Palestine.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations - Yehuda Blum – told the UN General Assembly on 30 November 1978:
“At the end of the first part of the publication, ostensibly dealing with the period of the Palestine Mandate, there appear a number of maps. The one map that is conspicuously absent is the official map of the Palestine Mandate which, until 1946, included Transjordan on the east bank of the Jordan River. This map was omitted because it does not fit into the PLO’s own scheme, as it would show too clearly that a Palestinian Arab state has already been in existence for 32 years on more than three quarters of the territory of mandated Palestine - that is, the state now called Jordan. That embarrassment is eliminated in this purportedly scholarly and impartial publication by the simple expedient of eliminating the map.”
Why then has Erekat chosen to follow the UN and delete Jordan from the map of former Palestine?
It has everything to do with the negotiations between Israel and the PLO – conducted with little success since 1993 and having been stalled since April 2014 – and the current concerted effort by President Trump to resolve this long-running conflict that has defied so many other American Presidents.
Jordan can help resolve that conflict – precisely because Jordan is historically, geographically and demographically 78% of Palestine.
Jordan remains the key to Trump ending the conflict between Jews and Arabs in former “Palestine”.
Whilst Jordan was part of the Mandate for Palestine between 1922 and 1946 - the League of Nations had under article 25 restricted the reconstitution of the Jewish National Home within just 22% of Palestine located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
Following Jordan’s independence in the remaining 78% of Palestine in 1946 - Jordan rejected international overtures under the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1982 Reagan Plan to enter into negotiations with Israel.
Erekat’s outburst signals concerns within the PLO that Trump may be looking to bring Jordan into negotiations with Israel to resolve competing Jewish and Arab claims in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) - whose last internationally recognised occupying power was Great Britain in 1948.
Trump won’t be swallowing Erekat's poison pill.
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