Tag Archives: Balfour Declaration

This Is What Leadership Looks Like

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It is obvious to most Americans that the Biden administration has turned its back on Israel. That is a dangerous thing to do–look what happened to the British Empire after they reneged on the Balfour Declaration or Germany after they declared war on the Jews. The Bible makes it very clear that there is a price to be paid for the betrayal of God’s people. I truly fear for our nation.

On Thursday, The Jewish News Syndicate posted an article that included some of Israeli Prime Minister Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments at his May 5 speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem. This is what leadership looks like.

The article reports:

“Eighty years ago, in the Holocaust, the Jewish people were totally defenseless against those who sought our destruction,” Netanyahu says in the speech, which was delivered on the occasion of the first Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) since the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre.

“Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction,” the premier continues. “As the prime minister of Israel, the one and only Jewish state, I pledge here today, from Jerusalem, on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, if Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone.”

The article notes:

Israel’s War Cabinet, as well as the broader Security Cabinet, is set to meet on Thursday to discuss the latest developments in the relationship with the United States.

A source in Jerusalem told Israel Hayom that the Cabinet is united in its view that the IDF should expand its operation in Rafah and occupy the city.

“Israel must do this to show the Biden administration and the entire international community—and of course also Iran and Israel’s other enemies—that we are not an American protectorate, but rather an independent country,” the source said.

The article concludes:

At a Defense Ministry ceremony on Thursday ahead of Israel’s Memorial Day, which will be marked next week, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to achieve all war goals in the country’s north and south.

“I appeal to our enemies and our friends: It is impossible to subdue us,” said Gallant. “We will ensure Israel’s existence, whatever the cost may be, and keep clearly in mind the pledge we signed just a week ago at the Holocaust Day ceremony: Never again.”

Genesis 12:1-3 says:

12 The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.

2 “I will make you into a great nation,
    and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
    and you will be a blessing.[a]
3 I will bless those who bless you,
    and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
    will be blessed through you.”[b]

I am not willing to test God in that area. Unfortunately, the Biden administration is.

 

 

Know Your History

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In 1918, the Ottoman Empire fell in 1918. It was a caliphate. The caliphate was abolished on March 3, 1924 (since the early 16th century, the Ottoman sultans had laid claim to the title of caliph of the Muslims). From February to June 1926 the Swiss civil code, the Italian penal code, and the German commercial code were adopted wholesale. As a result, women’s emancipation was strengthened by the abolition of polygamy, marriage was made a civil contract, and divorce was recognized as a civil action.  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was the great leader of the National War of Independence who pioneered the revolutions and reforms that founded modern Turkey. In response to Turkey becoming a secular country, in1928 Hassan al Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood was to create a new caliphate by bringing all lands to the Caliph’s rule pursuant to shariah. When the Ottoman Empire was carved up after World War I, maps were drawn with little regard for ethnic groups or past history. That is part of the root of today’s Middle East wars.

During the First World War (in 1917), the British issued The Balfour Declaration, a public statement announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. Three years later, the League of Nations codified the boundaries set forth in the Balfour Declaration. (The name Palestine had been given to the region after the Romans conquered the Jews in 70 A.D. as an insult to the Jews. There was never a country of Palestine.) In 1919, a formal agreement on the  mandated Jewish homeland was signed in London. The agreement was signed by Emir Feisal ibn-Hussien, representing and acting on behalf of the Arab Kingdom of Hedjaz, and Chaim Weitzman, representing and acting on behalf of the Zionist Organization. The  boundaries of this land included all of Israel (including Gaza, Samaria, West Bank, etc.) and what is now Transjordan. It is telling that Emir Feisal had written a letter agreeing to exactly what the land division was and pledged that he and the Arab states would carry out this agreement. Jordan was supposed to be the modern Palestinian state. Unfortunately, in 1920, Britain began limiting the immigration of Jews into the Jewish state while the Arabs were freely allowed to immigrate. That was a major part of the tensions that would ensue when Israel became a nation.

There is much more to this history–Jordan became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Jordan had originally been part of the land promised for the Jewish nation, but Thomas Edward Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) made some promises to the Arabs in exchange for their support against the Turks. For a time, ‘Palestinian’ refugees were allowed to live in Jordan, but they were kicked out after they attempted to overthrow the government. To put it simply, there is enough Arab land to settle the ‘Palestinians’ anywhere in Arab land, but the Arabs do not want them. They are useful as a political tool to be used to ‘drive Israel into the sea,’ but they are an unruly people who tend to be violent.

That is a brief look into the background to the current mess in the Middle East.

The True Definition Of Chutzpah

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Jihad Watch posted an article today about three Palestinian NGOS who are suing Great Britain for the Balfour Declaration. This is not a joke. I guess the Palestinians are upset about being left out of the peace deals that are currently being brokered in the Middle East.

The article reports:

Actually the Balfour Declaration is the “historic precursor” to the Palestine Mandate (1922), which in turn is the real precursor of the Jewish state, setting out its territorial boundaries, and detailing the duties of Great Britain, as the holder of the Mandate, to further the establishment, through “encouraging Jewish immigration” and “close settlement by Jews on the land,” of the Jewish National Home.

In this document – the Mandate for Palestine — the League of Nations recognized the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and the “grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” Thus was acknowledged the 3500-year Jewish connection to this land, where Judaism, and the Jewish people, were both formed. This historic claim thus became a legal one, for the League of Nations’ system of mandates became part of international law.

If you look at the original boundaries for Israel laid forth in the Balfour Declaration, you see that Israel was intended to be much larger than it currently is. The original boundaries of Israel included Jordan, which was later separated from Israel to become a Palestinian state for the Arabs.

The article continues:

In 1917 there were no “Palestinians.” Or rather, the word “Palestinian” was used to describe the Jews, not the Arabs, then in “Palestine.” In that land, at the time of the Balfour Declaration, there were fewer than 600,000 Arabs, none of whom were considered in 1917, or in 1937, or in 1957, to constitute a separate “Palestinian people.” They were indistinguishable in religion, language, dress, cuisine, and customs, from Arabs in neighboring lands; in fact, many of the Arabs in “Palestine” in the first half of the 20th century had recently come from Syria, Egypt, and Iraq, attracted by the economic development that the arrival of the Zionist pioneers fostered.

The article notes:

The Jews, right up to the War of Independence in 1948, paid for every dunam of private land they settled on in Mandatory Palestine. The Mandate’s explicit provisions gave Jews the right to settle on “state and waste lands,” which they also did. After the 1948 war, in which the armies of five Arab countries tried to snuff out the young life of the nascent Jewish state, Jews did settle on land that had been abandoned by their Arab owners, rather than let it remain unused. Great Britain had nothing to do with that.

As for Mahmoud Abbas’ claim about the U.K. “signing away the Palestinians’ homeland,” the “Palestinians” came into existence as a separate — if entirely factitious — people only in the late 1960s, created for propaganda purposes, to turn inside-out the Arab gang-up on Israel, which could now be presented as the struggle of a tiny people — the “Palestinians” — against the mighty Israelis.

The article concludes:

It’s not the Palestinian Arabs who have a case to bring against Great Britain. It is, rather, the Jews whom the British repeatedly betrayed, both in Mandatory Palestine and in Europe, from where so many might have escaped the Holocaust and made it to Palestine, had the British not directly violated Article 6 of the Mandate, according to which the Mandatory “shall facilitate Jewish immigration” to Palestine. Were the U.K. government to pay any attention to this ludicrous lawsuit in Nablus, it should use the occasion to tell the world all they ways His Majesty’s Government betrayed the Jews of Palestine. The opening is there — provided by those Palestinian lawyers themselves — for those home truths to be told. It’s the perfect time to tell them.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is a history lesson most of us never got in school.

Do We Really Want To Create A Terrorist State?

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Yahoo News reported yesterday that the United States is not committed to a veto of the United Nations resolution to set a time frame for its withdrawal from territory Palestinians seek for a state. I don’t think there is anyone who believes that the Palestinian state would be a state that acknowledged the right of Israel to exist or that a Palestinian state would be committed to peace in the Middle East, so why would anyone encourage the existence of such a state?

The article reports:

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Rome on Monday to discuss various proposals for a Palestinian state that are circulating at the United Nations.

Later on Monday, Kerry will travel to Paris for talks with European counterparts and then on to London to meet Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and a delegation from the Arab League, who will urge the United States not to use its U.N. Security Council veto to block the proposals.

The hastily-arranged meetings suggested urgency in America’s drive to manage efforts among Security Council members to draft a new proposal before Israeli elections in March. Kerry said on Friday he wanted to defuse tensions during the talks.

Jordan has circulated a draft Palestinian resolution to the 15-member U.N. Security Council calling for Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory to end by November 2016, and the Palestinians said on Monday they could submit it in the coming days.

France, Britain and Germany are discussing another proposal, but a senior U.S. official said there was no consensus among them and the United States had not been asked to take a position.

The push for a Palestinian state is a total rewrite of history. There never has been a Palestinian state. As I have reported before, Walid Shoebat is quoted as saying, “One day during the 1960s I went to bed a Jordanian Muslim, and when I woke up the next morning, I was informed that I was now a Palestinian Muslim, and that I was no longer a Jordanian Muslim.” There was never a cry for a Palestinian state when Jordan controlled the land that is now in question.

This is the map of the land originally given to Israel in the December 1920 Franco-British Boundary Convention:

Later, the boundaries were modified as shown below:

Trans-Jordan was established to be the Palestinian state. However, when the Palestinians attempted to overthrow the government of Jordan, they were thrown out. Under the present government of Gaza, there is no way a Palestinian state can be established without creating a war (possibly nuclear) in the Middle East. The United Nations resolution is not a move toward peace, it is a move toward war.