Beginning in November 1967, when the Security Council passed Resolution 242 formulating the principle of exchanging territory gained in war for peace in the Arab-Israeli dispute, the Western powers have pushed a policy based on self-deception.
The principle of exchanging land for peace within the former British Mandate of Palestine rested on the premise that Palestinian-Arabs are prepared to accept two states – one Jewish and one Arab—as required by the UN partition resolution of November 1947.
This principle worked, and could only work, between established states as it did with Egypt and Israel swapping land for peace in the Camp David Agreement of 1978.
It worked between Jordan and Israel signing the 1994 peace agreement, though no exchange of land for peace was involved in this instance as Jordanian rulers gave up their claims on the West Bank they occupied until the June 1967 war.
But it has not and will not work within historic Palestine, for here Arabs designated as Palestinians since 1967—though there was no mention in Resolution 242 of Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza as “Palestinian”—do not, and likely will not on their own, accept the legitimacy of Israel while remaining ideologically committed to its annihilation.
Since Arthur James Balfour’s letter of November 1917 announcing the British government policy of establishing Jewish homeland in Palestine, the dominant Arab response has been to reverse it. It did not matter that Britain and France carved out of Ottoman-held territories in the Middle East more than a half-dozen Arab states.
For Haj Amin al-Husayni—appointed the Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 by Herbert Samuel, a Jew and Britain’s High Commissioner in Mandated Palestine—and his supporters the one fixed goal to which all politics got subordinated was denying Jews homeland in Palestine. In this effort the Mufti joined forces with Hitler and the German Nazis, and his Jew hatred has been the lodestar of Palestinian-Arab politics ever since.
Yasser Arafat, as the Mufti’s successor, excelled in the politics of mendacity to dupe Western powers of his willingness to negotiate peace with Israel based on Resolution 242 once he accepted it, while pursuing the Mufti’s goal through terrorism. Arafat’s successors have not disowned the Mufti’s ambition and his rotten legacy is now exploding in the civil war in Gaza.
Just as the Mufti chose Hitler as an ally, Arafat went around seeking alliance with tyrants and murderers of his age among Arab rulers and elsewhere to pursue the goal set by the Mufti. Hence, the politics of Palestinian “statehood” has lent itself to any ruthless dictator or regime—as now it makes common cause with Iranian clerics—that arms and finances the war against Israel.
The Gaza civil war should disabuse the Western powers that Palestinians on their own will abandon the Mufti’s goal and settle with the Israelis.
Efforts in appeasing Palestinians and funding them with expectations that reason will prevail over bigotry have had contrary effects as they murder each other, and wage their mindless war against Israel.
The grand mistake of the Western powers was to have the UN partition Palestine.
A partial undoing of that mistake would be to stipulate as final settlement the boundaries of the Arab state in Palestine with Israeli co-operation and recognizing unequivocally the present status of Jerusalem as the Jewish capital, then indicating to Palestinians their non-acceptance of the arrangement would mean forfeiting claim to statehood within the territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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