Zionism's Giant Jewish Caliphate of 1919

Emma Meconi is a relatively recent addition to The Australian's stable of opinion writers.

Billing herself as a Greens voter, her latest piece begins thus:

"As a Greens supporter I am generally opposed to war and strongly objected to the military engagement in Iraq that began a decade ago. But this time the circumstances have changed and the threat to human life has escalated. Careful consideration is required of the new facts and an appropriate response must be implemented quickly. I believe Tony Abbott has made the right call to support military intervention in Iraq." (Islamic State's evil onslaught demands a military response, 20/9/14)

Surprise, surprise, Meconi even goes on to argue for "a new military engagement" in  Syria.

She concludes her piece as follows:

"War will be effectively a restoration process, cleaning away the rot and enabling a thorough rebuilding process to take place in affected areas."  (ibid)

A Greens supporter? Right...

It was the following sentence though that really caught my attention:

"The Islamic State... seeks to establish a giant caliphate in the Middle East and recruit believers globally to make their delusions a reality." (ibid)

It got me thinking about the Middle East's original sectarian entity, the Jewish State, the Zionist movement which spawned it, and the Zionist leadership's delusions of grandeur, evidenced in their post-World War 1 bid for a far larger Jewish caliphate than the one we find ourselves with today.

The following reference to the giant caliphate of Zionist dreaming and scheming circa 1919 comes from one of the best current histories of the Palestine problem, Adel Safty's Might Over Right: How the Zionists Took Over Palestine (2009):

"Chaim Weizmann summed up both the Zionist demands and the strategy at the [Paris] Peace Conference in the following way: the Zionists' demands were that 'the whole administration of Palestine shall be so formed as to make of Palestine a Jewish Commonwealth under British trusteeship, and that the Jews shall so participate in the administration as to secure this object'. Furthermore, 'The Jewish population is to be allowed the widest practicable measure of self-government and to have extensive powers of expropriating the owners of the soil.' The Zionist delegation proposed boundaries for the Jewish Commonwealth, which included parts of Lebanon, Syria, the whole of Transjordan and most of the Egyptian Sinai.

"The Zionists wanted considerably more territories than British Prime Minister Lloyd George's biblical formula 'from Dan to Beersheba' suggested. It had been on the basis of Lloyd George's biblical notion about Palestine that boundaries were proposed for the Jewish National Home. Foreign Office aides used Sir George Adam Smith's atlas of Palestine in the time of David and Solomon circa 1,000 BC as the basis for, as a British historian put it, 'the geographical, the physical, and the political obliteration of the Arabs who now inhabited that area nearly three thousand years later. There was a very awkward moment during this surely utterly fantastic scene in Paris, when [French leader] Clemenceau asked Lloyd George to show him where Dan was on the map - and Lloyd George was unable to'." (41-2)