UN should start focusing on the Jordan-Israel two-state solution

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres was at it again this week repeating the failed decades-old UN mantra supposed to end the 100 years old Jewish-Arab conflict:

I remain committed to supporting Palestinians and Israelis to resolve the conflict and end the occupation in line with relevant United Nations resolutions, international law and bilateral agreements in pursuit of achieving the vision of two States – Israel and an independent, democratic, contiguous, viable and sovereign Palestinian State – living side by side in peace and security within secure and recognized borders, on the basis of the pre-1967 lines, with Jerusalem as the capital of both States.

The Secretary-General's "vision of two States" – the creation of a new Arab State between Israel and Jordan for the first time in recorded history – is nothing but a mirage.

This UN backed solution is not based on historic, geographic or demographic foundations, but on a fiction invented in 1964 with the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

Article 24 of the PLO's founding Charter expressly denied any claims to such an independent state:

This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or the Himmah Area.

The PLO clearly had no interest in establishing an independent state in any area that had been occupied by another Arab state since 1948 which then included east Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

It was only after the 1967 Six Day War that the concept of an additional Arab State with Jerusalem as its capital was dreamt up by the PLO and promoted at the UN with the formation in 1975 of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, spewing out a fictitious narrative on the Arab-Jewish conflict.

Even worse the United Nations seeks to deny the Jewish People's right to reconstitute their National Home in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), legally granted to them by article 6 and article 25 of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, and preserved by article 80 of the United Nations Charter until today.

The Secretary-General looks on, without uttering one word in protest at this continuing flagrant breach by the United Nations of its own Charter and international law.

In referring to the "pre-existing 1967 lines" – the Secretary-General glosses over the fact that they are in fact the "the 1949 Armistice Demarcation Lines" - designated in agreements between:

• The government of Egypt and the government of Israel dated February 24, 1949; and
• the government of the Hashemite Jordan Kingdom and the government of Israel dated April 3, 1949

Those lines were not set in concrete but were agreed on without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines.

Secretary-General Guterres would do well to start focusing on the realistically-attainable Jordan-Israel two-state solution – so eloquently expressed by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the New York Times on 27 August 1972:

The Secretary-General should digest what former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Chaim Herzog wrote in the Wall Street Journal on 26 November 1980 [Ed: my underlining]:

The Jordan-Israel two-state solution requires two sets of negotiators – armed only with pencils and rubbers – to redraw the existing internationally-recognised boundary between Israel and Jordan to enable the allocation of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza between those two States.

Not one Jew or Arab would need to move from his present home. Jordanian citizenship would be restored to West Bank Arab residents – as existed between 1950 and 1988.

The UN's continuing pursuit of a third-state solution has reached a dead end and should be consigned to the diplomatic graveyard.