PA distorts history, lying that Tel Aviv was once Palestinian “Tal Al-Rabia”
Excerpt of a column by Muwaffaq Matar, Fatah Revolutionary Council member and regular columnist for the official PA daily
Headline: “The international day for releasing the will of law and the international community”
“We must not forget that November 29 (i.e., the day the UN partition plan was issued in 1947, which became the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People) of every year is not an event to celebrate, but rather an opportunity to remind the international community – and especially the colonialist European states – of what they did to solve the Jewish problem at the expense of our existence, our history, and our historical and natural right to our homeland of Palestine…
When we give this day the attention it deserves, the reason for this is that our national liberation struggle has derived results and caused the world to recognize our inalienable rights. This is an attempt by the highest international institution to atone for the historical injusticethat it caused our people when it acceded to the colonialist state of Britain – which gave the Balfour Promise (i.e., Declaration) to the Zionist movement…
As a reminder, the UN General Assembly issued Resolution 181 on Nov. 29, 1947, in which it adopted the partition plan of Palestine. According to this plan, the British Mandate in Palestine would end, and its lands would be divided into an Arab state on a territory of 11,000 square kilometers, approximately 42.3% of historical and natural Palestine… and into another part that was called ‘a Jewish state,’ on a territory of approximately 15,000 square kilometers, in other words 57.7% of the territory of historical and natural Palestine. [This state] sits on the coastal plain, from Haifa to southern Tal Al-Rabia, which is known today as Tel Aviv (sic., there never was a “Tal Al-Rabia,” see note below).”
UN Resolution 181 (the UN partition plan for Palestine) was passed by the UN General Assembly in 1947. It called for the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem as a separate entity under the rule of a special international body. The Arab state was meant to be comprised of the western Galilee, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and the remaining territory of the Mandate west of the Jordan River would be the state of Israel - Jordan (known at the time as Transjordan) had already been established in what had been the part of the Mandate that was east of the Jordan River. The resolution was accepted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine, but Arab leaders and governments rejected it, and launched a war to destroy Israel.
The Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2, 1917 was a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Baron Rothschild stating that "His Majesty's government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." In 1922, the League of Nations adopted this and made the British Mandate "responsible for putting into effect the declaration," which led to the UN vote in favor of partitioning Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state in 1947. In response, Britain ended its mandate on May 15, 1948, and the Palestinian Jews, who accepted the Partition Plan, declared the independent State of Israel. The Palestinian Arabs rejected the plan and together with 7 Arab states attacked Israel, in what is now known as Israel's War of Independence.
Tal Al-Rabia is the Palestinians’ Arabic translation of Tel Aviv, to wrongly imply the existence of an Arab village of that name prior to Tel Aviv.