Three things of significance happened during Secretary Pompeo’s visit to Israel.
First, he went to a settlement in Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the “West Bank”), Psagot, where he visited the winery that Israeli farmers and oenologists have managed to create in what was during Jordanian rule a wasteland. He is the first American Secretary of State to visit the “West Bank,” providing a clear demonstration of the Trump Administration’s view that Israel has every right to build settlements throughout that territory (though it is a right it may choose not to exercise everywhere), based on the Mandate for Palestine maps that assigned to the future Jewish state all the land from the Golan in the north to the Red Sea in the south, and from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean in the west. This visit reinforces the decision last year by Secretary Pompeo to reverse a 1978 State Department ruling, the so-called “Hansell Memorandum,” which failed to mention either the Mandate for Palestine or U.N. Resolution 242, and declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be “illegal.”
Second, before visiting Psagot and its famed winery, Secretary Pompeo announced a policy shift on the labeling of goods produced in the West Bank, wherever Israel exercises the relevant authority, notably in Area C, where Israel retains full civilian and military control, and which constitutes 60% of that territory. From now on these goods, for American consumers, will read “Israel” or “Made in Israel” or “Product of Israel.” This new labeling should make it easier for the producers to expand their market, as their products will no longer be identified as coming from what BDSers want us to think of as “occupied” Palestinian land, and therefore, they claim, should be boycotted.
Third, Secretary Pompeo visited the Golan Heights, which was won by Israel in the Six-Day War and annexed in 1981, with near-total domestic support, as a permanent part of Israel. The Trump Administration already recognized the Golan as part of Israel in September, 2019. Pompeo’s visit reinforced that recognition. By standing on the Golan Heights, from exactly where the Syrians for nearly two decades had intermittently shelled Israeli farmers in the Hula Valley far below, Pompeo delivered a history lesson to the assembled media: Here is where the Syrian artillery once stood, and way down there were the Israeli farmers on their tractors, whom the Syrians fired on. That’s all over now. And it would be madness – “just look at how the Golan looms over that valley” – for Israel to ever give it up. That’s why the Golan was so soon annexed, without any domestic dissent, by Israel. And that’s why the United States, rejecting the poorly-argued Hansell Memorandum of 1978, and following both the Mandate for Palestine, which assigned the Golan to the future Jewish state, and also U.N. Resolution 242, which entitles Israel to hold onto any territory that it won in the Six-Day War that it needs in order to have “secure [i.e. defensible] and recognized boundaries,” chose to recognize the Golan as an integral part of Israel. Pompeo’s visit was a visible reinforcement of that new policy, and a piquant reminder of how the Golan meant only one thing for Syria – a place from which to shell Israeli farmers in the Hula Valley below – while under the Israelis, the Golan has flourished, both with its farms, and as a tourist destination, while the population of Druze and Jews has grown, as both groups have prospered. And there is no longer any Syrian shelling to disrupt the work of Israeli farmers down below.
Pompeo’s visit has enraged the Palestinians. How dare Pompeo visit an “illegal” settlement at Psagot? The rants continue, from the enraged rais in Ramallah, to the Palestinians venting on social media. You can imagine what they say; their messages are all variants on this:
“Don’t tell us about the so-called Mandate for Palestine. That was long ago. It meant nothing. It had nothing to do with us, the Palestinians, living in our land for at least two thousand years. It was a colonial-settler scheme that Zionist Jews in Britain thought up, and got Mr. Balfour to endorse. How much do you think that Lord Rothschild paid him to write that famous letter, the one where he goes on about how ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’? Who gave the British the right to help establish a ‘national home for the Jewish people’? Pompeo, it’s obvious, is planning to run for president in 2024; he wants the evangelical vote. And the Zionist money, of course. What better way to get both than to visit an illegal West Bank settlement and declare it legal? His visit to our stolen land in occupied Palestine will forever be a stain on American diplomacy.
“As for his visit to the Golan, that is sacred Druze land. Pompeo can’t change that. Now the Zionists use that land to threaten peaceful Syrian farmers down below. He is hoping to legitimize Israel’s so-called ‘annexation’ of the Golan forty years ago. No one else in the world recognizes that land theft. Not even the U.S. did, until the Trump people came along. There have been six presidents since that Israeli claim to annex the Golan. Five of them refused to recognize it. Trump, only Trump, told the Israelis they could keep the Golan. But now he’s going back to his hotels and his golf courses. Good riddance. No one will miss him. And if the Israelis truly want peace, as they claim, they will return the Golan that they snatched from our Syrian brothers.”
Words, meretricious words, more or less to that effect. Meanwhile, Pompeo has done a good deed or rather, three good deeds, during his trip to Israel. First, he visited the settlement of Psagot on the West Bank, demonstrating that the Trump Administration does not think such settlements are illegal. Second, he gave a great boost to the West Bank economy, by changing the labeling on products made in the settlements for export to the American market to read “Made in Israel” or “Product of Israel.” This has made for much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth among the BDSers. Third, Secretary Pompeo visited the Golan, telling the world that “the Golan belongs to Israel,” and reminding the media accompanying him of how the Syrians only used that area to rain fire down on Israeli farmers, and letting them see for themselves how the Israeli farmers now use the Golan, to cultivate their dairies, their nurseries, their orchards, their vineyards.
mortimer says
The West Bank is certainly part of ‘Western Palestine’ as so designated by the Colonial Office in 1923 as a result of a conference in Cairo at which Winston Churchill made the decision to partition Mandatory Palestine as a pay-off to an Arabian tribal chieftain. There is no question that Great Britain assigned ‘Western Palestine’ (as they then called it) to serve as the future independent Jewish National Home.
Trans-Jordan, now Jordan, is a 20th-century British invention, dreamed up in the 1920s, for the Hashemite family (formerly the Custodians of Mecca and Medina) to whom Britain owed a favor. Britain without authorization from the League of Nations, illegally hived off 75% of Mandatory Palestine in 1923 and handed it to the emir. The British announced that this was a “temporary” measure, which they quietly and quickly made “permanent.”
b.a. freeman says
the only reason that balfour et al. in the UK government came up with the mandate for a jewish homeland was because WWI was dragging on and on, and they hoped to encourage the cooperation of the “worldwide jewish cabal” which “controlled all the money of the world” so that with the additional support, the british could finally buy a win over the germans.
the UKistani elites were as racist, hateful, and antisemitic in 1917 as they are today. the more things change, the more racist, fascist f***ers stay the same.
juleonly says
Pompeo is a National Treasure. I fear a day he were not to be on the job.
Clive Delmonte says
How I shall mourn the passing of Mr Trump and Mr Pompeo if the Republicans really do “lose” the recent rigged “elections” !
Infidel says
If that happens, I don’t think we’ll see another Republican leader again. Dominion machines will flip ballots everywhere, and make even places like Mississippi and North Dakota blue, filling and sending mail-in ballots will become a major line of work in and of itself, and so on. If Trump’s ‘defeat’ is allowed to stand, don’t expect Perdue and Loeffler to get elected, and what’s more, in 2022, watch for a Democrat landslide nationwide, thanks to these techniques
somehistory says
Mr. Daniel Greenfield wrote an excellent article about that very subject…the stealing of elections, calling ones they lose “illegitimate” and complaining when their “wins” are called illegitimate for the same “reasons” they accuse the other party of engaging in. They want complete power, not a balance.
b.a. freeman says
+1
Infidel says
That cliché – to err is human, but to really foul things up, you need a computer – really fits like a jigsaw in this case
The Political Oracle says
I just finished a paper called A Cradle to Grave Secure Federal Ballot System that addresses all of this. You are part of that system.
Robert says
The same way you would want others to mourn your passing. Makes sense.
b.a. freeman says
we really will lose, Clive. the NAZIcrats have been stealing elections since the 19th century (see tammany hall in NYC), and they have no intention of stopping now. we will shortly become the USSA, after which the ummah, whom the NAZIcrats will encourage to come in, will conquer them, and our children and grandchildren will grow up as toothless, illiterate, hateful muslim peasants, and a couple of generations after them, nobody will know *anything* about us.
with God’s help, perhaps civilization will arise again in 20 000 or 30 000 years.
Tom says
I read a line recently that struck me as the shortest, truest, and broadest expression of realpolitik I’ve ever seen: “No land is ever stolen, it can only be won or lost.”
Islam has historically played that game extremely well for 1,400 years. They need not be so indignant that others know how to play it.
Cornelius says
HUGH: While I agree en toto with your thinking on this issue, I was wondering about this statement….
>and following both the Mandate for Palestine, which assigned the Golan to the future Jewish state,
Could you source this please? Thanks.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
Cornelius –
At the outset, the original Mandate for Palestine was supposed to have included the Golan , just as it was supposed to have included all of Palestine east of the Jordan, and even more territory out to the desert. Here’s what I found on-line, which says it better than I could: “Claims on the territory [the Golan] include the fact that an area in the northwestern [part] of the Golan region, delineated by a rough triangle formed by the towns of Banias, Quneitra and the northern tip of the Sea of Galilee, was part of the British Palestine Mandate in which the establishment of a Jewish national home had been promised. In 1923, this triangle in northwestern Golan was ceded to the French Mandate in Syria,
What I ought to have written was that the original northwestern border of the Mandate for Palestine included the Golan Heights, but in1923 the British, unilaterally, ceded that area so that it became part of the French Mandate in Syria. I don’t think the Zionists were pleased by this, though they were much more displeased t by Great Britain’s unilateral lopping off of 78% of the territory that was originally have become part of the Mandate for Palestine, and turning it into the Emirate of Transjordan, a consolation prize for the Hashemite Emir Abdullah (who was jealous of his younger brother, Feisal, whom the British made King of Iraq). In both cases, the Zionists were helpless to oppose the Mandatory. I don’t think they made a fuss about the northern border, but many were enraged about the loss of Eastern Palestine.
In fact, Jabotinsky was not only.a political leader and head of the Revisionists, but also a brilliant writer -a feuilletonist, writing in Italian under the pseudonym “Altalena”),a translator (of both Dante and Poe), a spellbinding orator in Russian –Nabokov’s uncle, Konstantin Dmitrievich Nabokov, then the Russian ambassador to Great Britain, heard Jabotinsky speak to a Russian crowd in London and said Jabotinsky was the “greatest orator” he had ever heard, a novelist (James Joyce admired his novel “Samson the Nazirite” and gave it as a present to the Irish tenor John McCormack, who had once — I think in 1904 –won a singing competition in which Joyce came in second). Jabotinsky was infuriated that the British disposed so cavalierly with Eastern Palestine for their own ends. He wrote a poem in Hebrew that contains these famous lines: “Shtei g’dot la Yarden/Zu shelanu, zu gam ken.” This means: “Two banks has the Jordan/This one is ours, and that one is ours.”
In the late 1930s, Jabotinsky spoke to a huge gathering of Polish Jews on Tisha B’Av in Warsaw. He told them that they had to “get out” at once — he understood where the Nazis were going to end up, and he was warning the Jews of Eastern Europe to just leave. Unfortunately, he was not heeded.
His secretary at one point was Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Israel’s current prime minister.
Sorry, Cornelius. Forgive me my digressions.
Jonty Dee says
The right of Jewish in-habitation of all Mandated territory is a matter of settled and ratified US and International law. The Anglo-American Convention of 1924 brings US recognition of the League Mandate to Great Britain even though the US was not a League Member. BY 1923 the UK had already violated Article 5 of the Mandate.
James Lincoln says
Hugh Fitzgerald,
You perked my interest in Benzion Netanyahu, an outstanding Israeli historian. He had three outstanding sons:
Yonatan (1946–76), former commander of Sayeret Matkal – killed in action leading Operation Entebbe.
Iddo (b. 1952), an Israeli physician, author and playwright.
And as you had mentioned:
Benjamin, (b. 1949), Israeli Prime Minister (1996–99, 2009–present).
But you knew that already – posted for the benefit of Jihad Watch readers…