The Foreign Service Journal, May 2003

Declaration. Israel Is Born After World War II, Jewish groups in and out of Palestine attempted to persuade the British to establish the promised Jewish state, to no avail. This led some to resort to violence and terrorism against the British. Menachim Begin, later to become the prime minister who negotiated a peace treaty with Egypt, was among them. In 1948, the United Nations declared that a Jewish national homeland should be established and legally recognized by the interna- tional community alongside an Arab Palestinian entity. Mr. Arnold con- spicuously omits this reference. Egypt, Jordan, Syria and the other Arab countries in the area refused to accept the U.N. decision to recognize Israel as a new state, and instead mobilized their armies and invaded against it. Contrary to Mr. Arnold’s version of events, it was this war, not Jewish terrorism, that forced a U.N.-estimated 470,000 Arab refugees to flee their homes, hoping to return following an Arab military victory. After Israel miraculously sur- vived that war, an armistice line gave Jordan control of the area west of the Jordan River, now known as the West Bank, while Israel established its sovereignty between that line and the Mediterranean. Jordan did not move to establish a separate Palestinian state. Indeed, in 1950, it unilaterally asserted its own sover- eignty over the territory. The Palestinian Arabs during this period, furthermore, did not call for the establishment of a state of their own in the West Bank then occupied by Jordan, which proceeded to oust all Jews from the West Bank and to desecrate Jewish cemeteries and other holy places. Meanwhile, the surrounding Arab states continued to reject Israel’s legitimacy and continued to wage war against it. Arab countries during this period expelled or encouraged the departure of more than 500,000 Jews living within their borders, who fled to Israel and were integrated into Israeli political and economic life. The fact that the Arab nations refused to absorb their Palestinian Arab cousins, and instead put them into refugee camps in the belief that frustration and anger would motivate them to destroy Israel, has contributed immensely to the serious human problem that still exists today in those camps. In 1967, defending itself against yet another attempt by its neighbors to destroy it, Israel won the Six-Day War and gained possession of Gaza and the West Bank, captured by the Arabs during their 1949 invasion. United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 called for negotiations to resolve the dispute based on safe and secure boundary lines. There was no call by the U.N. to establish a new Palestinian state. Arab efforts to have the U.N. S P E A K I N G O U T 16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 0 3 Until the Israeli- Palestinian dispute is resolved, Israeli settlements in the West Bank have every right to be there.