What if…

The New English Review’s Iconoclast posted my article US agrees settlements are “not illegal” under a different title. Hugh Fitzgerald, who writes for them and for Jihad Watch and for whom I have great respect, commented as follows:

What if, in June 1967, Israel had, a few weeks after the end of the Six-Day War, simply annexed the entire “West Bank”? And in doing so, it explained that it was only taking what, by the express provisions and exclusive intent of the Mandate for Palestine, it had a right to do? It would have explained that, had it managed to take those territories through force of arms in the 1948-49 conflict, it would have had every right to consider them part of Israel, and that the fact that Ben Gurion had called a halt to the Haganah’s advance, and that the Jordanians had held on to those same territories –then renaming them, absurdly, but for obvious political purposes, the “West Bank” — no one in the non-Muslim civilized world would have objected. The passage of 18 years, from 1949 to 1967, did not diminish Israel’s legal claim. And the passage, from 1949 to 2012, does not diminish the justice of Israel’s claim. The only thing that has changed is that the world is suffering from an overdose of Arab and Muslim propganda, that has made it overlook, forget, pretend never to have known, that those territories have a juridical history.

We are all supposed to — and many do — forget what the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations was doing, what the Great Powers thought they were doing at San Remo. And what they thought, and rightly, that they were doing, was correcting a historical injustice, in the case of the Jews, but not only the Jews. They intended there to be an independent Kurdish state — which then, when Turkey recovered a bit from its defeat, had the kibosh put on it. They assumed — they did not say but assumed — that in Syria and Lebanon, or Syria/Lebanon, the Christians (Maronites) would remain dominant in Lebanon, and Maronites and other minorities — Alawis, Kurds, Armenians, Christians who were both Maronites and Orthodox — would be kept save from Sunni Muslim domination. In Egypt, where the administration of Lord Cromer was on the way out, but British influence remained paramount, few could conceive that the Jews, Italians, Greeks would all one day have their property seized and be booted out (as happened under Nasser), and that the Copts, who comprised so many of the educated and the professionals in Egypt, would be permanently made to live in a state again of permanent insecurity, as Islam, and Muslims, reasserted themselves.

Had the Israelis done what made sense to do, and which they had every right to do, back in the summer of 1967, the Muslims would not have been pleased. But they would very likely have adjusted to that reality, and in any case, Israel would have had been able, far more than it has, to lay claim, and to settle, the land which by rights belongs to it, and not to the local Arabs, a great many of whom arrived, attracted by the economic boom, such as it was, caused by the Jewish resurrection of the land, from about 1910 to 1940. The local Arabs can live there, and do, and may be granted not independence, with all that they would do with that independence — not build a state but, rather, attempt to subvert, in every way, the legitimacy and security of the Jewish state nexty doo — but something else: a local autonomy consonant with Israeli security. That, and nothing more. And that is great deal more than the Muslim Arabs grant to non-Arabs (Kurds, Berbers, African blacks) or to non-Muslims (Copts, Maronites, Assyrians, Chaldeans, black African Christians, etc.) anywhere, in the twenty-two states, and 14 million square miles — more than a thousand times the land area of tiny Israel, even with the “West Bank,” — that comprise that sinister organization, the Arab League.