President Biden needs to urgently answer three questions following these remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast:
... we are actively working for peace, security, dignity for the Israeli people and the Palestinian people. I'm engaged on this day and night and working, as many of you in this room are, to find the means to bring our hostages home, to ease the humanitarian crisis, and to bring peace to Gaza and Israel - an enduring peace with two states for two peoples.
1. Was President Biden's use of the term "the Israeli people" instead of "the Jewish people" a semantic gaffe or was it deliberate?
Advertisement
2. What does the President mean by the term "the Palestinian people"?
There is plenty of evidence to support the claim that no identifiable "Palestinian people" exists:
- The 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (Mandate) did not recognise the existence of a "Palestinian people" – referring to the Arabs then living in Palestine as comprising part of the "existing non-Jewish communities".
- United Nations Resolution 181(II) in 1947 partitioned Western Palestine into two states - one "Arab" (not "Palestinian") and one "Jewish"
- Palestinians" were first defined in the 1964 Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO Charter) - which denied the existence of any distinct national group under articles 1,6,7 and 24:
- After Israel captured the "West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan" and "Gaza Strip" in the 1967 Six Day War – a new PLO Charter was adopted in 1968 removing article 24 and replacing Articles 1, 6 and 7 to read:
Article 1. Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.
Article 5. The Palestinians are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or have stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father - whether inside Palestine or outside it - is also a Palestinian.
Article 6. The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians."
Jordanians and Palestinians are as similar as any people can be. They are Sunni Arabs from the same neighborhood. Merging them will not create any long-term ethnic or sectarian fault lines
Advertisement
3. Does President Biden's use of the term "two states for two peoples" mean: "the two-state solution proposed in UN Security Council Resolution 2334" that he and President Obama helped give birth to on 23 December 2016 when abstaining – rather than vetoing – as they were vacating the White House for President-elect Trump?
Resolution 2334 has been used as a club to unmercifully bash Israel into submission – but has achieved no tangible results in seven years - like its equally-failed two-state predecessor - the Saudi-inspired 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.
Are both these failed solutions ready to be consigned to the shredders?
Discuss in our Forums
See what other readers are saying about this article!
Click here to read & post comments.