The Danger Zone (DZ)

In my last programme I ended with the rather depressing note that the Jordanians, even though they‘d conquered a part of the lands that formed the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948 didn’t hand them over to the proud Muslim Palestinian people for their homeland. They clung onto those lands for 18 years until the Israelis retook them in the 1967 Six Day War. What’s more no voice was raised anywhere in protest by or on behalf of the Palestinian people to return this land to them. 

In fact the Jordanians stripped the West Bank bare of anything and everything that it had that was worth taking. When 18 years later the Israelis took it back in the 1967 Six Day War the entire Arab world, as if woken from a dream, realised that this was part of that precious ancient Muslim country of Palestine whose peoples were again being denied their birthright by those vile Jews.

I also mentioned that Egypt had conquered another sacred part of the country of Palestine, Gaza. I left you wondering whether the Egyptians had honourably given that land to the poor Muslim Palestinians as a down payment on their homeland. Well I ran out of time and couldn’t answer that for you – not then anyway.

To be honest I could have told you that the Egyptians clung tenaciously to it, just like the Jordanians had to the West Bank, and only parted with it when it was taken off them by the Israelis in the Six Day War. Again, as for the West Bank, the Palestinians didn’t mind that their sacred country, well a part of it, hadn’t been handed over to them. In fact the Palestinians Muslims don’t mind who else has their country unless they’re Jews. So this claim to a Palestinian state looks a bit dodgy to me.

While the Jordanians stripped the West Bank bare, the Egyptians certainly had their moment in their treatment of the Muslim Palestinians too. I’ll tell you about that and then I’m going to start on the investigation to find out where these Muslim Palestinians came from, if they hadn’t lived there from time immemorial as they all claim to have.

Tag words: British Mandate; Palestine; Muslim Palestinian; 1967 Six Day War; West Bank; Gaza; First Arab Israeli War; World War II; Nazism; Adolf Hitler; David Pryce-Jones; The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs; Grand Mufti; anti-semitism; Abed al-Kader al-Husseini; Fawzi Qawukji; Nazi Army; King Abdullah; Transjordan; Arab Conquest; Yasser Arafat; Gamal; Neil C Livingstone; David Halevy; Inside the PLO: Covert Units, Secrets Funds, and the War Against Israel and the United States; Conor Cruise O’Brien; Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism; Western Palestine; British Consul James Finn; Lord John Russell; Earl of Clarendon; AJ Sussnitzki; Ottoman Empire; Malcolm McDonald; Chamberlain-McDonald White Paper of 1939;

When did Muslim Palestinians, that we hear so much about today, come into existence?

The Arab Conquest of the Holy Land happened in 635AD. So maybe you’re thinking over 1300 years ago. You’d be wrong if you thought that. 

Muslims who call themselves Palestinians only began to happen after the Muslims, Egypt, Syria, Jordan were decisively defeated by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. Not because any Muslim before then had thought of themselves as Palestinians but for the reasons I’ll tell you about shortly. Up until 1967, if you made the mistake of calling a Muslim a Palestinian, you’d probably have been punched in the face. Up until then the only people called Palestinians, were the people whose land this had been going back to 1406 BC – the Jews. That should be the beginning and the ending of the argument that there was, or is now, such a thing as a Muslim Palestinian people. So let’s see what the Muslims had been saying up unril the Six Day War about who they were.

Tag words: Muslims; Palestinians; Arab Conquest; Holy Land; Six Day War; Allah; Emile Ghoury; Secretary of the Arab Higher Command; Musa Alami; Zuheir Muhsin; Palestinian Liberation Organisation; Paris Peace Conference; Arabs; Arab Conquests; Dennis Prager; British Palestinian Mandate; Ba’ath Party; Saddam Hussein; Umma; Greater Syria; Ottoman Empire; Fertile Crescent; George Antonius; Marie Syrkin; Palestinian Nationalism: Its Development and Goal; Haj Amin al-Husseini; President Assad; Sir George Adam Smith; The Historical Geography of the Holy Land; Yasser Arafat; Zionist Organization; Felix Frankfurter; San Remo Conference; Gaza Strip; the West Bank; Winston Churchill; Balfour Declaration; PJ Vatikiotis; Nasser and his Generation; Transjordan; King Hussein; Benjamin Netanyahu; A Durable Peace;

Now many of my listeners will not be religious Jews or Christians. So they may not believe anything that I’m about to say, but I promise you that at the very least I’m going to tell you a good yarn And the facts of what have happened must make even those doubters, doubt.

In 1995 the prime minister of Israel was Yitzak Rabin. On 5 October, he signed the Oslo Peace Agreement with the Palestinians. It gave up lands that made up part of the lands that God had promised to Abraham in Chapter 15:17 of the very first book of the Bible, the very first book of the Jewish Torah, that we know as the Book of Genesis.

Yitzak Rabin boldly pointed out at the time of signing the Peace Accords, contradicting God’s promise of the land that he gave to the Jews that:

The Bible is not Israel’s title deed.

On 4th November 1995 Rabin was assassinated. As fate would have it on that day, in accordance with Jewish tradition, in synagogues all over the world, read from the same verses in the Torah. The verse for that day was Genesis 15.

For the creation of modern day Israel, and the history of the British Mandate, it’s useful to look back at what God’s promise to Israel was about the Promised Land, because it seems to have been faithfully fulfilled in the history of Palestine so far – up to this very day.

Like everything in the Bible, God’s arrangements with the Jews were very specific. They are nothing like you would find in any other religion of the day. They had a number of very specific purposes and provisions. God told Moses what the deal was just before the Jews entered the Promised Land in about 1406BC. And now I’m going to tell you what He said.

Tag words: Yitzak Rabin; Oslo Peace Agreement; Abraham; Genesis 15:17; British Mandate; Moses; Promised Land; Leviticus 18:26-28; Torah; Exodus 29:46; Deuteronomy 7:6-8; Amos 3:2; Boney M; By the Rivers of Babylon; Deuteronomy 28:63-67; Ezekiel 33:28; Muslim; Dennis Prager; Arab Conquest;Muslims; Count Volney; James William Parkes; Whose Land? A History of the People of Palestine; Encyclopaedia Britannica;

The British Mandate over Palestine didn’t give England the same control as they had over one of their colonies or Dominions of the British Empire. The British, who had conquered the Middle East from the Ottoman Empire, and whose Lord Balfour had come up with the inspired idea of creating a homeland for the Jews in their traditional home, the Promised Land that God had given them, were put in charge of running Palestine. The Ottoman rulers were gone - forever. Someone had to run Palestine. That someone was the English.

They were put in charge of Palestine by the League of Nations. The job of the British was to make it easy for Jews to migrate there. To stop Muslims and other peoples from anywhere else in the world moving in there. The end-game was to see the Jews make up the majority of the people living in Palestine, and then to give them their independence.

Palestine, when England was given the Mandate, was mostly a run down uninhabited country. It was a wasteland. But that had begun to change from about the 1880s but only because Jewish immigrants had started to arrive and set up farming estates. These Jews were very successful in transforming the land. The Muslims were largely a nomadic people, looking for opportunities where they could make a living. The Muslims weren’t entrepreneurs they were just labourers. The Jews paid their farm workers really well. So the more Jews who arrived in Palestine and set up farms, the more Muslims came too.

Muslim countries entirely surrounded the British Mandate and every other country within cooee of Palestine was Muslim too. In these programmes I’ve used the word Muslim and not Arab. Arabs are a particular race and there aren’t that many of them in the area of Palestine. Of Muslims there are many, but they’re made up of all sorts of other races, including Persians in Iran and the Asiatic Turks in Turkey. Mostly everyone calls them Arabs, but that’s misleading.

So ideally Jews were supposed to be able to rock up to Palestine and walk straight in, and Muslims, who were not living in Palestine ideally might be allowed in temporarily to help with harvests etc, but then were supposed to return home. Most ideally of all no more Muslims from other countries should have been allowed into Palestine from the time the British mandate started in July 1922.

But that wasn’t how it was working out. Increasingly the British were dramatically slowing down legal Jewish immigration. Totally stopping illegal Jewish immigration. At the same time they did nothing to prevent all, except the most outrageous examples of Muslims entering Palestine from other countries, staying there. This has given the Muslims so much chance to cause so much trouble ever since making claims about having lived on the land from time immemorial – that aren’t true.

Generally far more Muslims entered Palestine illegally than Jews who entered legally or illegally. Since there were more Muslims there to start with than Jews, if this kept up there would never be a Jewish homeland. That actually seems to have been the goal of the British Middle East Department that had been given the job of bringing the Jewish state into existence. So I’d better talk about Colonel MacKereth because he should have been a giant of a figure in establishing the Jewish homeland – and that before World War 2. So many of the Jews who perished in the holocaust, would have been able to escape to Palestine if the British had done their job the way Colonel MacKereth was urging them to.

Tag words: British Mandate; Palestine; British Empire; Ottoman Empire; Lord Balfour; League of Nations; Muslims; Arabs; British Middle East Department; Colonel MacKereth; Anthony Eden; WD Battershill; Grand Mufti; George W Rendel; Head of the Eastern Department; Chaim Weizmann; Lord Ormsby-Gore; Palestine Royal Commission;

The Muslims who were willing to negotiate a settlement of their disputes were either dead or didn’t want to be dead so were never going to speak up in favour of a settlement with the Jews ever again. The Grand Mufti had done such a good job, that even today there are no so-called Palestinian Muslims that will speak up in favour of some amicable solution with the Jews over anything.

The British had appointed Earl Peel to investigate where the Jewish homeland was heading and how to deal with the angry Muslims who seemed to be constantly revolting after the latest revolt in 1921.

So what was the Grand Mufti’s position going to be when he appeared before the Peel Commission.

Tag words: Muslims; Arabs; Grand Mufti; Palestinian Muslims; Earl Peel; Peel Commission; Balfour Declaration; Jews; Adolf Hitler; Transjordan; Nashahsibis; Sheikh Kassab; Lewis Yelland Andrews;Colonial Secretary Ormsby-Gore; Round Table Conference of Middle Eastern leaders; Britain; Husseini clan; Ottoman Empire; British Mandate; Jewish immigration; League of Nations Mandate; anti-semitic; Jewish nation; Feisal; Felix Frankfurter; Zionist Organization; Churchill; Neville Chamberlain; Abdullah; Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen; Middle East Diary, 1917-1965; Herbert Samuel; Ronald Storrs; General W. N. Congreve; Ernest Richmond; Haj Amin al-Husseini;

When you hear Muslims, especially the new type of Muslims called Palestinians, speaking about Israel, all you ever hear is blind hatred directed at that nation and the Jews. Well the Zionists. In the last programme I told you about the subtle distinction that had grown up. It was supposedly not anti-semitic to say that you hated Zionists. It was anti-semitic to say that you hate Jews.

But since a Zionist is a person who wants a Jewish homeland, that doesn’t leave many Jews out. All of the problems that the Jews have suffered in the world since the conquest of their land by the Arabs in 635AD, could have been avoided to a great extent if they had had a separate country of their own to go to for sanctuary. The country that has been theirs 2500 years before the Arab Conquest armies arrived.

Largely since then, and especially from 1900 onwards, the Muslim regime and influential people, had been doing everything possible to stop Jews from other parts of the world going back to their homeland in Palestine. Anyone else could go there but not Jews. Because it was their homeland. I talked about this in Parts 9 and 10 of this series.

And as far as I can see, and have seen for the whole of my long life, is that all Muslims, with very few exceptions, feel exactly the same way about Israel and the Jews. They really want the nation of Israel wiped from the map and all of the Jews driven into the sea.

Except that isn’t actually how a lot of the Muslims feel, and when you think about it, that’s not surprising. There are always people of goodwill and who want to peaceably resolve differences, especially differences that end in war.

So why don’t we ever hear from those Muslims? Well the answer is disturbing. I’m going to look at what happened from the time of the British Mandate until the start of the Second World War.

Tag words: Muslims; Palestinians; Jews; Zionists; anti-semitic; Arab Conquest; British Mandate; Second World War; 1920 Easter Riots; Grand Mufti; Simon Sebag Montefiore; Jerusalem: A Bigoraphy; Haj Amin al-Husseini; World Islamic Conference; Temple Mount; Nashashibi family; Mayor Nashashibi; Dajanis family; Suleiman; Nabi Daoud; Khalidis family; Supreme Muslim Council; Adolf Hitler; Umma; völk; Nazi; Ba’thist; Saddam Hussein; Mein Kampf; Mussolini; Emil Ghouri; David Pryce-Jones; Closed Circle; Sir Arthur Wauchope; Higher Arab Committee; British Army; Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen; Peel Report; Joan Peters; From Time Immemorial; Sheikh Izzat al-Din al-Qassam; Ragheb Nashashibi; Abd al-Kadir-Husseini; Falchri Bey Nashashabi; Musa Kazem Husseini; Abu Musa; Palestine Arab Party; Green Hand militia; Wasif Jawhariyyeh; Ein Kerem; John the Baptist; Yasser Arafat; Neville Chamberlain; Earl Peel;

Thanks to the Muslim riots in April 1920, the Nabi Musa riots, the League of Nations quickly acted to confirm the appointment of Britain to be in charge of the Palestine Mandate, which had the duty to implement the provisions of the Balfour Agreement. I’ll talk about that in a moment. The fact that the riots did this was a first and only goal where Muslim resort to violence of this kind worked against them.

But this looked like the last hurrah for Britain’s pro-Zionist enthusiasm for creating a Jewish homeland. It seems to be the case that from this point forward, almost every step Britain took was calculated to prevent any Jewish homeland from ever happening – up until the point when the British unceremoniously bailed out of Palestine in 1948, when the last British High Commissioner, General Sir Alan Cunningham, at 8am on Friday 14 May, without completing Britain’s assignment under the League of Nations Mandate, handed the mess that they had created almost from the beginning, over to the UN to sort out. 

General Cunningham marched out of Government House in his full dress uniform. He reviewed a guard of honour. Then he mounted his armoured Daimler, and drove to inspect the troops at the King David Hotel. After that he then headed out to Kalandia Airport. Flew from Jerusalem to Haifa. From there, after midnight, he sailed for England. The British Mandate, the vital next step to the realisation of creating a home land for the Jews, had been so full of promise. Properly handled it would likely have significantly reduced the slaughter of the Jews in the Nazi holocaust – I’ll explain that at the end of the programme.

This unseemly British scramble to leave Palestine, leaving such chaos in its wake, led to the first of the many wars between the Jews and the Arabs.

What went so terribly wrong that led to this, in world historic terms, failures when the proper handling of the role of administering the British Mandate would have made for an enormous significantly less troubled world today. I’m an admirer of the British Empire – but this, this was unforgivable.

Tag words: Nabi Musa riots; League of Nations; Palestine Mandate; General Sir Alan Cunningham; Kalandia Airport; Nazi holocaust; Sir Eric Drummond; Balfour Declaration; King George V; Kingdom of Transjordania; Chaim Wiezmann; Winson Churchill; 1967 Six Day War; Sir Henry McMahon; Zionism; the McMahon Pledge; Lord Maugham; Historical Summary of Principal Political Events in Palestine Since the British Occupation in 1917; King Abdullah; Paris Peace Talks; Adolf Hitler; Easter Riots; anti-semitism; Sir Harold MacMichael; Palestine High Commissioner;

The last Turkish soldier left Jerusalem by St Stephen’s Gate at 7 am on 9 December 1917. By coincidence that was the first day of Jewish Hanukkah, the festival of lights. Hanukkah celebrated the liberation of Israel from the occupying forces of the Seleucid Empire, under Seleucus Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 134BC.

But then the Jewish rabbis say that there’s no such thing as a coincidence, the hand of God was clearly visible in this.

But now the real work of creating the Jewish homeland was to begin, with the country freed for the first time since 635AD when the Arab Conquest armies had first arrived – and that is a work in progress that has been continuing from that day in December 1917 to the present day.

Now we have to go back to San Remo in Italy in 1920 because that was where I left off the story.

Tag words: Turkish soldier; St Stephen’s Gate; Hanukkah; festival of lights; Seleucid Empire; Seleucus Antiochus IV Epiphanes; rabbis; God; Arab Conquest armies; British Mandate; World War I; League of Nations; Palestine; Woodrow Wilson; Balfour Declaration; Lawrence of Arabia; Great War; Lowell Thomas; Last Crusade; Buffalo Bill; Wild West; Annie Oakley; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; Simon Sebag Montefiore; Jerusalem: The Biography; Lord Balfour; British Foreign Office; Ottoman Empire; muftism; Winston Churchill; King Faisal; Sherif of Sherifs; Semiramis Hotel; Arab Revolt; Bedouin; Palestinian Mandate; Clementine Churchill; Muslims; Arabs; Lieutenant-General Louis J Bols; Ze’ev Jabotinsky; Pinkhas Rutenberg; Lord Herbert Samuel; Unholy Memories; Sherif of Sherifs; Emir of Mecca; Richard Waters-Taylor; Haj Amin-al Husseini; Hashemites; Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen; Middle East Diary; Easter Aaron Aronsohn; anti-Zionist; Storrs; Easter; Nabi Musa; Husseinis; Khalil Sakakini; Wasif Jawhariyyeh; Nehemia Rubitzov; Yitzhak Rabin; Aref el-Aref;

In a previous programme I talked about how Kaiser Wilhelm II, well before the Great War, has positively drooled at the thought of winning Jewish favour and support. The Kaiser was definitely anti-Semitic. He believed in the international Jewish conspiracy but vast amounts of money were waiting there to be tapped by a friend of the Jews – him for Germany. He had met with Sultan, Abdulhamed to plead the Jewish cause - but without success.

It was now 1917 and things had changed a lot since the Kaiser’s meeting before the war. The British were advancing towards Jerusalem. Not perhaps the best time to make the offer that Theodor Herzl had wanted back then, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Zionism, after all, had been born in Austria. The headquarters for the Zionist movement up to 1914 had been in Berlin.

With prodding from the Germans, in August 1917, Jemal Pasha, the tyrant of Jerusalem, visited Berlin. He met with German Zionists and the Ottoman Grand Vizier, Talaat Pasha. Jemal reluctantly agreed to promote ‘a Jewish national home’. A kind of chartered company was offered for German Zionists with a limited form of local self-government and right of immigration.

News of this reached the halls of power in London. They’d been thinking along the same lines, but they were now in a much better position to really do something, because General Allenby, with his army, was approaching Jerusalem.

The name most closely associated with the move that the British now decided to make was Lord Balfour – and its now time to tell you how the English came to think that it was a good idea to create a homeland for the Jews not on their traditional lands, but instead in Uganda.

Tag words: Kaiser Wilhelm II; Sultan Abdulhamed; Theodor Herzl; Zionism; Jemal Pasha; Talaat Pasha; General Allenby; Lord Balfour; Holy Lands; Yasser Arafat; Dr Chaim Weizmann; Sir George Buchanan; Lloyd George; Russian Revolution; Emperor Nicholas II; Lord Rothschild; Balfour Declaration; Muslims; Arabs; Arthur Toynbee; Sherif Hussein; Old Testament; Sherif of Mecca; World War I; Lawrence of Arabia; Arab Revolt; The Truth About the Peace Treaties; Lord Robert Cecil; Treaty of Versailles; Zionist Organization; Jewish National Home; Sokolow Nahum; League of Nations; Felix Frankfurter; Feisal; Woodrow Wilson; Palestinian Arabs; San Remo Conference; Uganda;