There Has Never Been a Sovereign Arab State in Palestine – The Area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea

Eli E. Hertz

A Palestinian state now has a good chance of becoming a rogue state – the kind of polity the United States is currently grappling with in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Iran and elsewhere

The artificiality of a Palestinian identity is reflected in the attitudes and actions of neighboring Arab nations who never established a Palestinian state themselves.

The rhetoric by Arab leaders on behalf of the Palestinians rings hollow. Arabs in neighboring states, who control 99.9 percent of the Middle East land, have never recognized a Palestinian entity. They have always considered Palestine and its inhabitants part of the great “Arab nation,” historically and politically as an integral part of Greater Syria – Suriyya al-Kubra – a designation that extended to both sides of the Jordan River. In the 1950s, Jordan simply annexed the West Bank since the population there was viewed as the brethren of the Jordanians.

The Arabs never established a Palestinian state when the UN in 1947 recommended to partition Palestine, and to establish “an Arab and a Jewish state” [not a Palestinian state, it should be noted]. Nor did the Arabs recognize or establish a Palestinian state during 19 years prior to the Six-Day War when Judea and Samaria known also as the West Bank were under Jordanian control and the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control; nor did the Palestinian Arabs themselves clamor for autonomy or independence during those years under Jordanian and Egyptian rule.

And as for Jerusalem: Only twice in the city’s history has it served as a national capital. First as the capital of the two Jewish Commonwealths during the First And Second Temple periods, as described in the Bible, reinforced by archaeological evidence and numerous ancient documents. And again in modern times as the capital of the State of Israel. It has never served as an Arab capital for the simple reason that there has never been a Palestinian Arab state.

According to investigative journalist Joan Peters, who spent seven years researching the origins of the Arab-Jewish conflict over Palestine (From Time Immemorial, 2001), the one identity that was never considered by local inhabitants prior to the 1967 war was “Arab Palestinian.”