Middle East
Middle East
Back to the British Mandate
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| Mahmoud Dakwar, a 97-year-old Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, shows his passport issued in 1943 by the Palestinian government under the British Mandate, and currency issued by the Palestine Currency Board (Photo: Ramzi Haidar for AFP/Getty Images). |
Now is the time to hand the Palestinian territories over to a U.S. mandate. The role of the mandate wouldn’t be to separate Jews and Arabs, but to set up a caretaker regime that would seek to train the Palestinian nation to rule itself. —Yediot Aharonot
Pressure by the Americans, Israel's tacit agreement, the Egyptian intelligence service's role as an intermediary, and, it seems, the fear of death have propelled Hamas leaders to agree [in principal] to a cease-fire. Israel agrees but has its qualms and reserves the right to destroy “ticking time bombs.” This is a vague definition because the intensity of the ticking is defined by the level of sensitivity of the intelligence officer’s ear. The Palestinian Authority admits that it’s doubtful that it will succeed in exercising its power over territories that Israel will hand over to them. Our [Israel’s] claim is as follows: Take the risk of more casualties and please restrain yourselves, just to prove to [Hamas political leader] Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi and his comrades that the hudna, or cease-fire, pays off.
Such an arrangement can work only when a few incidents kill a small number of victims. It won’t work when a single terrorist sneaks by the security forces’ tight circle and kills dozens. Even a government led by [left-wing] Knesset Member Zahava Gal-On would never dare tells its citizens that they must die by the masses in order to sustain Abu Mazen [Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas]. But it’s doubtful that holding back will weaken the terrorists, or decrease the endless attacks, of Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, the Tanzim [a radical militia including members of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement], or other organizations that don’t follow the rules of the established leadership. It’s been proven that the more you fight the Palestinian struggle, the stronger and more widespread it gets. We’re stuck in a pathetic circle. Both sides are entangled and are unable to set themselves free.
Creative ideas that break existing paradigms come up when we’ve reached the end of the road. The idea has been brewing for a while, but only now have the conditions ripened to allow it to come to fruition. We’re talking about handing over responsibility for the Palestinian territories to the United States, or to a group of nations under U.S. leadership. Opponents of the idea have been quick to point out its weaknesses: The U.S. mandate won’t stop terrorism anymore than we can, but it will prevent us from acting against it. The mandate itself will become the victim of terrorism and will quickly tire of its position. These explanations don’t accurately describe the role that will be attributed to the representative of the mandate. His role wouldn’t be to separate the Jews from the Arabs. Rather, his goal would be to establish a caretaker regime that would seek to educate the Palestinian nation on how to rule itself. The use of force would be indispensable, but the main goal would be to restore order and implement the rule of law and republican values.
The most well-known example of such a mandate is the mission that the League of Nations assigned to the British at the San Remo summit in 1920. History, as it is taught in our schools, shows the British as the enemy of the Jewish liberation movement and makes us forget our debt to the progressive British Mandate. The British inherited a territory from the Turks that was mired in the Middle Ages. In the course of a year, they managed to build up the transportation, communications, and energy infrastructure; they established a complex body of laws and 30 institutions to operate the national and local government. The Jews managed to take advantage of the situation and make the best of what the Mandate offered, while the Palestinians didn’t benefit from it and later destroyed everything, thereby delaying their independence for generations.
The proposal may seem like a regression to the colonial period when the world powers pretended to civilize the natives. On the other hand, the proposal might bring about an improvement to the current situation. It would represent a sincere effort to fix the situation the exhausted British created when they left the Jews and the Arabs on their own, just as they had their hands around each other’s throats.
