Queen Rania of Jordan wants the world to know that whatever Hamas may have done was an understandable response to a long history of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians: “Jordan’s Queen Rania: Israel had one October 7, the Palestinians have had 156,” Jerusalem Post, March 13, 2024:
Queen Rania touted the aid Jordan is providing to Gaza. She sat for the interview in a warehouse with boxes of humanitarian aid behind her plastered with Jordanian flags. She said that although they are providing as much aid as possible, it is still insufficient for the people of Gaza, as reports from the UN indicate that the entire population of Gaza is going hungry.
By the UN’s own account, only 25% of the Gazan population is suffering food insecurity. Yet here is another report from the UN now claiming that the “entire population of Gaza is going hungry.” Which report should we believe? And why is it that the UN has not uttered a syllable of protest at Hamas for seizing so much of the aid coming in for its own operatives and their extended families? Why has the UN not reported on Hamas’ practice of reselling, at prices as high as ten times their actual worth, some of that donated food aid?
When the Jordanian Queen was pressed on October 7 by Amanpour, she said, “As devastating and as traumatic as October 7 was, it doesn’t give Israel license to commit atrocity after atrocity. Israel experienced one October 7, since then, the Palestinians have experienced 156 October 7’s.”
Several times throughout the interview, she discussed “history” behind October 7, and argued that the “occupation” is to blame for the conflict.
What “occupation” in Gaza is that? Until October 7, there had not been a single Israeli, military or civilian, in Gaza since 2005.
And as for her claim that “the Palestinians have experienced 156 October 7’s,” the IDF is not engaged in the torture, rape, mutilation, and deliberate murder of Gazans. It does not practice sexual sadism, it does not behead babies or burn children to death. It does not gouge out eyes, or slice off the breasts of women, or cut the genitalia off men. Queen Rania’s equating of how the IDF behaves in Gaza to how Hamas behaved on October 7 in Israel is grotesque. In fact, the IDF does everything it can to minimize civilian deaths, especially through its long-established practice of warning civilians to leave areas, and buildings – schools, apartments, mosques — that the IDF is about to target. It does this through leafleting, messaging, telephoning, and use of the “knock-on-the-roof” technique. It is this practice that led British Colonel Richard Kemp to describe Israel as “the most moral army in the world,” and West Point professor of urban warfare John Spencer to maintain that “Israel has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other nation in history.”
She said, “I think a lot of people need to know more about this conflict to really understand the intricacies of it, to understand that this is one of the greatest historical Injustices, to understand what the root cause of this issue is, to understand that this conflict did not begin on October 7, that that it was a result of years of occupation, of settlement expansion, of human rights abuses, of disregard for international law, and this is what led us to this point.”
Yes, people do need to learn much more about this conflict, but not in the way that Queen Rania wants them to. They need to know that the League of Nations created the Mandate for Palestine which, it was hoped and expected, would in time lead to the establishment of a Jewish state, just as the League created several other mandates for the Arabs, in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. By the terms of the Mandate, Article 6, the holder of the Mandate — Great Britain — was obligated to “facilitate Jewish immigration” and “close settlement by Jews on the land.” What land? All the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And even before the Palestine Mandate was created, and ever since, right up until today, the Arabs have tried to deny the Jews a state of their own. Since the 1948 war, when five Arab armies tried to snuff out the young life of the Jewish state, the Israelis have had to fight three more wars for their very survival, in 1967, 1983, and the war going on in Gaza today. In addition, Israel has had to fight a half-dozen campaigns against various terror groups — the PLO, Hamas, and Hezbollah. The unending war against Israel is a classic jihad, designed to eradicate the Jewish state, whose existence cannot be accepted, for it rests on land that was once Islamic, and thus, in the Muslim view, must forever belong to the Muslims as part of Dar al-Islam. And that is the “root cause” of the conflict that Queen Rania hopes you will never discover.
martin walden says
So why isn’t Queen Rania offering the Palestinians respite in her country Jordan. Could it be that the last time Jordan did they tried to take over Jordan and killed their Prime Minister.
Jim says
But that land was promised to by God, conquered by His chosen people from the Canaanites, Hittites, Jebusites, etc.long before the time of the formation of the Islamic “religion”. And God’s chosen were promised “from the river of Egypt(the Nile) to the Euphrates. That is more than “from the river to the sea”!
Linda says
Why are Palestinians living in Refugee camps forever and generation after generation. Jordanians don’t care about the Palestinians. They don’t want them. Like Douglas Murray says :: They just hate Jews and want them destroyed.
Nathaniel Winterson says
I agree of course with Hugh’s assessment here, but, it should be noted that anti-Zionists would dismiss this at once by stating that The League of Nations simply had no right to parcel out territory to people other than the natives after the breakup of the Turkish Empire. Whatever the international community’s view may have been of justice in Palestine, the Arab and anti-Zionist view is that the Jewish state which is there now was created at the expense of the people who had lived in the region for more than a millennium, and whose right to become a nation there was passed over for the sake of another people.
That Great Britain proposed a partition in 1937 which would have provided for the creation of an Arab country in 80% of the land, which as I understand it was about 30% more of the region than Arabs even inhabited when the British Mandate was established, would be brushed aside as high handed foreign interference which the locals had every right to reject using violence. The same thing would be said of the United Nations’ partition proposal ten years later, in which the land allocations were lopsided, granting 55% of the territory to 30% of the population, and 45% to the other 70%.
The facts Hugh gives us are correct, but, unless the objections, which are by now wearyingly familiar, are answered his point is not made. Two things to keep readers reminded of: by 1947 when the United Nations was given the task of making decisions about the region, every one of the Jewish settlers (i.e. farmers, as opposed to town and city dwellers) in Palestine was living on land they owned legally because they had bought it from an Arab or Turkish landlord who was willing to sell it; and, by that year, more than half of the Arabs living in the region were as recent immigrants to it as most of the Jews were.
The British kept very good population figures.
ploome says
Could you please post sources so I can see this information?
“..more than half of the Arabs living in the region were as recent immigrants to it as most of the Jews were.
The British kept very good population figures.”
Rick Olsha says
The Queen is totally correct.
AM ISRAEL CHAI !!!!