At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire collapsed and among its subject provinces, the region known as "Palestine" was assigned to the British, to govern temporarily as a mandate from the League of Nations. The restoration of the "desolate" land began in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century with the first Jewish pioneers. Their labors created newer and better conditions and opportunities, which in turn attracted migrant workers from many parts of the Middle East, including Arabs.The Balfour Declaration of 1917, confirmed by the League of Nations Mandate, committed the British Government to the principle that "His Majesty's government viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish National Home, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object." It was specified both that this area be open to "close Jewish settlement" and that the rights of all inhabitants already in the country be preserved and protected. Mandate Palestine originally included all of what is now Jordan, as well as all of what is now Israel, and the territories between them. However, when Great Britain's protégé Emir Abdullah was forced to leave the ancestral Hashemite domain in Arabia, the British created a realm for him that included all of the Mandate Palestine east of the Jordan River. There was no traditional or historic Arab name for this land, so it was called after the river: first Trans-Jordan and later Jordan. It has since become known as the first Palestinian State.
By this political act, that violated the conditions of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, the British cut more than 75 percent out of the Jewish National Home. No Jew has ever been permitted to reside in Trans-Jordan/Jordan. Less than 25 percent then remained of Mandate Palestine, and even in this remnant, the British violated the Balfour and Mandate requirements for a "Jewish National Home." Britain progressively restricted where Jews could buy land, where they could live, build, farm or work, until WWII.
During the period of the British Mandate, it was the Jewish population that was known as "Palestinians". British policy was to curtail their numbers and progressively limit Jewish immigration. By 1939, the White Paper virtually put an end to admission of Jews to Palestine. This policy was imposed the most stringently at the very time this Home was most desperately needed, after the rise of Nazi power in Europe. At the same time that the British slammed the gates on Jews, they permitted or ignored massive illegal immigration into Western Palestine from Arab countries Jordan, Syria, Egypt, North Africa.
By 1948, the Arabs had still not yet discovered the mythical ancient nation of Falastin. When they were offered half of Palestine west of the Jordan River for a state, the offer was violently rejected. Six Arab states launched a war of annihilation against the nascent State of Israel. Their purpose was not to establish an independent Falastin. Their aim was to partition western Palestine amongst themselves. They did not succeed in killing Israel, but Trans-Jordan succeeded in taking Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and East Jerusalem, killing or driving out all the Jews who had lived in those places, and banning Jews of all nations from Jewish holy places. Egypt succeeded in taking the Gaza Strip. These two Arab states held these lands until 1967. Then they launched another war of annihilation against Israel, and in consequence lost the lands they had taken by war in 1948. During those 19 years, 1948-1967, Jordan and Egypt never offered to surrender those lands to make up an independent state of Falastin. The "Palestinians" never sought it. Nobody in the world ever suggested it, much less demanded it.
It was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 that Israel was finally able to settle some small part of those “mandated” lands from which the Jews had been debarred by the British. Successive British governments and now world governments regularly condemn Israeli settlements as "illegal". In truth, denying Israel a right to settle the so-called “occupied territory” is tantamount to giving away the Allied victory in WWI, and denying the Christian Zionist movement that led Great Britain and America to oversee the birth of the Jewish Homeland in the first place!
But it was actually three years earlier, in 1964, that the Palestine Liberation Movement was founded. PLO co-founder Ahmed Shukairy, who less than 10 years earlier had denied the existence of Palestine, was its first chairman. Its charter proclaimed its sole purpose to be the destruction of Israel. To that end it helped to precipitate the Arab attack on Israel in 1967. Yasser Arafat emerged as the terrorist leader of this movement to destroy Israel, and yet the West invited him to participate in a new scheme to partition the Promised Land in 1991.
As Arafat and his terror thugs learned how to manipulate the media and use it for propaganda purposes, they discovered it sounded better for Western consumption to speak about the liberation of Falastin than of the destruction of Israel, which they had screamed so much about prior to 1967. Much of the world, governments, media and public opinion, accept virtually without question of serious analysis the new-sprung myth of an Arab nation of Falastin, whose territory is unlawfully occupied by the Jews. Even though since the end of World War I, the Arabs of the Middle East and North Africa have been given 22 independent states in 99.5 percent of the land they claimed, the Islamic-Arab world remains intent on destroying Israel. Lord Balfour once expressed his hope that when the Arabs had been given so much, (that would later be discovered to hold vast reserves of oil) they would "not begrudge" the Jews the "little notch" promised to them. But alas, the voice of demonic hatred of Israel that resides in the Arab psyche resonated recently in the words of the President of Iran, who vociferously announced what the whole Muslim world aspires to, “the end of Zionism and the annihilation of Israel from existence.”
