Betrayal in the Middle East

Are we seeing the end of the two-state solution?

Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln, January 1, 1863: “that all persons held as slaves within the rebellious states…shall be…forever free.”

13^th Amendment: “slavery…shall [not] exist within the United States….”

After World War I, the land of the defeated Ottoman Empire was carved up and given as “mandates” to the European powers (they wanted its oil).

After World War II, the U.N. adopted a two-state solution, dividing the British mandate into Israel and Palestine. People agreed, leadership did not (and Britain refused to implement it).

Since 1863, Black Americans have been waiting for the fulfillment of the language of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 14^thAmendment of the U.S. Constitution. The Palestinian people have long awaited their own “let my people go.”

The Western Powers of Europe and their allies recrafted and reshaped the Middle East after World War I, giving each European power a piece of the Middle East, called “mandates.”

The Palestinian Arabs, after World War I, became nomads, people wandering in the wilderness, pushed out of their homes by Western powers. At the 1919 conference was Chaim Weizmann, who along with fellow secular Zionist Jews sought a piece of the region called Palestine.

After World War II, the Zionists lobbied for a Jewish state, seeking a place to protect the migration of millions of Jews from the Ukraine, East Poland and Bella Ruse. It is all documented in the archives of history.

In 1947, the mandate areas were given full statehood, including the U.N. adopting a two-state solution for two new states from the British mandate: Israel and Palestine (see U.N. resolutions 181 and 182). Here, as in America, “leadership” interrupted. The Jewish and Palestinian people wanted it. The Jewish leaders reluctantly accepted it. The Palestinian leaders refused.

Palestinian leaders, claimed Israel had no right to exist as a state, despite some land bought and owned by the secular Zionist movement for that purpose. The parallel with the Palestinians and Arabs in the Middle East and to the African Americans in the USA: So-called “leadership” enriches themselves by blocking the freedom the majority of the people want (witness the lack of progress in our American inner cities and the Palestinian enclaves of the Middle East).

South Africa made it work. It can be so with Black Americans and Middle East Palestinians. Peace will not come until a formula for peace is both generated (and many have been) and implemented (so far leaders have refused).

Much continues to be written that twists and distorts history at the expense of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people continue to be told that the two-state solution would occur and there would be peace in their time. They still wait. Our inner cities still wait.

It is unfortunate that President Obama’s recent choice not to veto a U.N. resolution about Israel and Palestine is being interpreted as stabbing Israel in the back. At the peace conference in Paris, France in 1919, the decision-makers, with the exception of the Japanese who were an ally to U.S., France, and Britain in the First World War, were White Christian nations. Leadership on both sides know what they are doing, as they continue to betray the doctrines of trust and integrity.

We need to be concerned in America and the Black community as promises about greater opportunity and greater respect appear and then are again withdrawn. Many activities, many conferences, many conflicts and many lives have been lost over the past nearly 60 years, all in the name of peace.

Stay tuned.

 

For Ron’s hosted radio and TV show’s broadcast times, solutions papers, books, and archives, go to www.TheMinneapolisStory.com. To order his books, go to www.BeaconOnTheHillPress.com.