Reply To: Political Statements
At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was defeated, and like Austria-Hungary, it was divided into several parts. With the benefit of hindsight it’s clear that this was badly botched. The US played no direct role, as it was handled by the League of Nations, and American isolationists prevented the US from joining the League after war’s end. Basically, the predominantly Arab outlying provinces of the Ottoman empire were carved up between France and Britain, with the Turkish-dominated core of the empire becoming modern Turkey. The lines that were and weren’t drawn, not solely those involving Israel, are at the root of many current regional conflicts. In theory, France and Britain were not expected to retain those lands; rather they had mandates from the League to oversee their eventual independence. One of the resulting territories was the British Mandate of Palestine, which includes all of Israel and Jordan in addition to the West Bank and Gaza. The original Mandate called for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine; in practice, the British had made conflicting promises to both Jews and Arabs in order to garner their support during the war, and much of the current conflict is an effort to reconcile those conflicting claims. That portion of the British Mandate of Palestine that lay east of the Jordan river (the East Bank, or Transjordan) was quickly carved off for the Arabs. Britain kept a stronger hold on the remainder of the British Mandate of Palestine (sometimes described in the language of the day as the West Bank or Cisjordan). By the time Britain was prepared to grant independence to the remainder of the British Mandate of Palestine, the League had dissolved and had been largely supplanted by the United Nations, which proposed a two state solution in General Assembly Resolution 181. Bear in mind, one state, Transjordan, had already been formed from the original British Mandate of Palestine; this is the basis for the assertion sometimes heard from the Israeli right that “Jordan is Palestine.” It’s further worth noting that General Assembly resolutions are non-binding; they’re effectively suggestions on the part of the international community, passed by a simple majority. While the Jewish leaders of the incipient State of Israel accepted the proposed partition, it was rejected by Arab leaders, who pursued armed conflict both before and after formal independence. As a result of this rejection, the proposed Arab state in Palestine was never established, as its borders with Israel would imply recognition of Israeli sovereignty. Rather, the areas that remained under Arab control at the armistice came under the control of neighboring Arab nations. The cease-fire line from that conflict is often described as the Green Line, as it was drawn in green ink on maps that accompanied the armistice documents. Egypt thus controlled the Gaza Strip, and Transjordan unilaterally annexed the region west of the Jordan that is now often described as the West Bank and changed its name to Jordan (more formally, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan) to reflect the fact that it spanned the Jordan River. Since the term “West Bank” had previously described all of the British Mandate of Palestine west of the Jordan River, it is arguably ambiguous, and right-wing Israelis typically describe the region in question as Judea and Samaria.