If You Prefer Arms
Be Ready for Defeat
Arabs Chose to Fight;
Can they Write off a Licking?
By OBSERVER
Sheikh Mohammed Ali Jabary, Mayor of Hebron and president
of the Palestine Arab Conference at Jericho, read an open letter to King
Farouk of Egypt over the Ramallah radio:
Let the Arab Governments, including Egypt, raise their
censorship for one day only; let the press tell the people that during
six months of war the Arab armies occupied 10 small Jewish settlements
while the Zionist flag flies over 14 large Arab villages. If such news
got to the people, the masses would storm King Farouks palace, and
you would see a revolution on a scale unknown in these parts of the world.
On May 15 the Arab armies had hoped to defeat their
enemy. However, the bitter truth is that it was we who were beaten and
not the Jews. This is the sober truth: despite all official communiques
issued daily by the Arab armies, which spoke of fresh victories, we have
lost on all fronts and have been defeated on every single battlefront.
Thus spoke the president of the Palestine Arab Conference
at Jericho on Dec. 13. On the military front the Israelis emerged victors
over the vaster Arab countries.
* * *
When the United Nations session in Paris closed, it again
left the Palestine problem undecided.
It is regarded as a political victory for the Israelis that
the Bernadotte Plan, proposing the severance of the Negev from Jewish
Palestine, was not mentioned at all in the General Assembly resolution;
and as a political victory for the Arabs that the partition resolution
of Nov. 29, 1947, likewise was not referred to.
Actually, the second omission is also a political victory
for Israel. The partition plan of Nov. 29 was accepted by Israel under
duress, when the gates of the land were shut to the new immigrants desperately
needing to come in. Since this plan was not put into effect by the United
Nations and the Israelis had to defend themselves and go to war, there
can be no justification and no reason why the frontiers that Israel accepted
as a peaceful settlement should not be changed after the other party chose
war and lost.
* * *
The Israelis could easily capture the rest of Palestine
in a matter of a few weeks. When the Arabs realized this, they sought
protection of that same political body whose authority they flouted one
year ago by defying the will of the Unites Nations and rejecting partition.
The natural geographical division between the two parts
of Palestine is the river Jordan. On the other side of the Jordanin
Transjordanlie two-thirds of the land, and on this side of the Jordan,
one-third.
Thus, should the State of Israel occupy all the land west
of the Jordan, there would be a division marked by the land itself. If
the Israelis are willing to leave the Jenin-Tul-Kerem-Nablus triangle
west of the Jordan in Arab hands, they are generous enough.
* * *
You cannot wage a war with an insurance policy in your pocket.
You cannot invade a country and shell its cities, and then, when you are
thrown back and beaten, declare that the war was a trial on your part
and now you would like to have all the advantages of a compromise that
you rejected and violated by arms.
If you prefer arms, be prepared to accept defeat. Consequently,
the borders of Israel as delineated in the partition resolution of Nov,
29, 1947, cannot remain unchanged. Blood of the best sons and daughters
of Israel was spilled, and blood moves frontiers.
* * *
In the time of Hitler, under the then existing urgency,
the Jews of Palestine would have agreed to a state with standing room
only in order to save their brothers from annihilation. In 1947 they agreed
to the partition plan so that the survivors could come in; they would
have abided by this division. But the Arabs rejected partition and invaded
the country. Today the Israelis have the right, as well as the power,
to keep the land on which they were called to die in war.
By rejecting the partition resolution of Nov. 29, 1947,
the General Assembly of the United Nations at Paris destroyed the document
that served as an insurance policy for the Arabs when they declared war
on Israel.