Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Elder of ZiyonI tweeted this fictional map on Monday, and it received a lot of attention.
If Israel had lost the 1948 war, there wouldn't be a Palestinian state in its place. The Arab countries would have divided up the area of British Mandate Palestine.
While it is an interesting exercise to guess who would have captured what part of Palestine...
...that isn't the point of the exercise.
If the Arabs had won, the area would have been picked apart by the Arab armies and there is zero chance they would have created a Palestinian state.
The tiny Palestinian national movement of 1948 would have also been stillborn, because Palestinian nationalism has from the start been a reaction to Zionism, not an organic movement of its own. Without Zionism, there was little to no desire for a Palestinian state.
Witness how little interest there was in a Palestinian state from 1949-1967, and how the 1964 PLO charter excluded areas under Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian control from its desired boundaries for a state - they coincided with what Jews controlled, no more and no less.
Can anyone seriously argue that there would have been a "Palestine" after 1948 if the Jews lost?
