Israel Viewpoint
The One-State solution
STEPHEN KRAMER Jewish Times Israel Correspondent

PART I

The Palestinian National Conference (PNC) of 1964 called for the total annihilation of Israel three years before the Six Day War of 1967. The first Israeli communities built beyond the Green Line, the so-called settlements, were constructed by the Labor Party after the Six Day War. So, when the Palestinians began to organize their terrorist war against Israel in 1964, there were no "Jewish settlements" beyond the 1949 Armistice Line, often called the Green Line. All Jewish communities were on the Israeli side of the Green Line. Connect the dots: the Palestinian agenda for a state is predominantly a plan to replace Israel, a plan which didn't result from settlements built on Arab land after 1967. For the majority of Muslims, all Jewish communities are on "Arab land."

Prior to 1964, "Palestinian" wasn't a common description the Arabs residing in the former British Mandate of Palestine used for themselves. More often than not, they rejected the term "Palestinian" and simply called themselves "Arabs."It was the Jews born in the Yishuv (pre- 1948 Israel) who called themselves Palestinian Jews. It was also the name of the most prominent Jewish Englishlanguage newspaper (the Palestinian Post, later the Jerusalem Post), the Anglo- Palestinian Bank (later Israel's largest bank, Bank Leumi), the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (which eventually transferred its land holdings to the Jewish National Fund and the State of Israel), etc.

It's clearly a propaganda coup for the Palestinians to be known by that name, since it implies that they are the age-old inhabitants of Palestine. Why couldn't the Jews have adopted the name for themselves in 1948? "The name Palestine refers to a region of the eastern Mediterranean coast from the sea to the Jordan valley and from the southern Negev desert to the Galilee lake region in the north. The word itself derives from 'Plesheth,' a name that appears frequently in the Bible and has come into English as 'Philistine.' Plesheth, (root palash) was a general term meaning rolling or migratory. This referred to the Philistine invasion and conquest of the coast from the sea. The Philistines were not Arabs nor even Semites, they were most closely related to the Greeks, originating from Asia Minor and Greek localities. They did not speak Arabic. They had no connection, ethnic, linguistic or historical with Arabia or Arabs."

[see:www.palestinefacts.org]

We Jews wouldn't want to identify ourselves with the Philistines, who are only a minuscule strand of our genetic and cultural makeup (and even less so for the Arabs). Later, the Greeks called the area Palestine- Syria. After the fall of Jerusalem, the Roman Emperor Hadrian changed the name from the Jewish Province to the Syria- Palestine Province, which was eventually shortened to Palestine by the British when they took on the Palestine Mandate.

The original goal of the Palestinian Arabs was to be part of one large Arab state spread across Arabia. This idea was in concert with a popular, widespread feeling of "Pan- Arabism," which was championed by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and had many adherents into the 1960s. After Nasser died, Pan-Arabism declined in prominence and the idea of a single democratic state for the Palestinians replacing Israel gained popularity. This was to be accomplished by a successful war against the Jews, with the Jewish survivors transferred out of the region - with the possible exception of those Jews who had been born in Palestine before 1917.

The rise of the two-state solution, which is now on its last legs despite the West's inability to recognize that fact, might be looked at as a compromise on the part of the Palestinians, because it is predicated on partitioning the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea with a truncated Jewish state. But because the idea of a Palestinian state alongside of Israel has always been seen as a way station on the road to Israel's destruction, it's not a compromise. The idea gained popularity with the Palestinians after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, even though it had been rejected numerous times, most famously in 1947, when all the Arabs flatly rejected the U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine (Resolution 181), which the Jews had accepted under David Ben- Gurion's leadership.

It was Israel's unilateral declaration of independence in 1948 - the re-founding of Jewish sovereignty dating back thousands of years - which triggered the Arab invasion of Jewish territory, graphically illustrating the total rejection by the Arabs of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine. Incidentally, the five armies that attacked Israel in 1948 didn't envision an independent state for the Arabs residing there. Instead, each of the aggressors hoped to carve out a section of Palestine/Israel for itself, especially Jordan and Egypt, which had the longest borders with Israel.

To put the battleground into perspective, it's necessary to review the history of the British Mandate for Palestine. In 1922, Britain received the Mandate from the League of Nations. But since the Arabs had oil fields and a huge population, while the Jews in Palestine were few in number and had no oil, Britain began to backpedal from Balfour's wartime assurances to the Jews just months after it received the Mandate. Britain created Transjordan on land it now excluded from Jewish settlement in Palestine - 78 percent of the total land - and installed a king, Abdullah, of the deposed Hashemite clan from Mecca and Medina. (Transjordan's name later became Jordan.) The creation of Transjordan left the Jews and the Arabs to fight over the 22 percent that remained of the Palestinian Mandate, which had been reduced to a sliver between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

NEXT WEEK: The Palestinian National Conference adapts the Plan of Stages to incorporate Israel into the State of Palestine.