THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION

Ordinarily, I suggest that you forward my articles to any friends whom you think would appreciate them — but this is an exception. I’m going to ask you, as a TTP member, to keep this to yourself.

There is talk in certain, shall we say, “corridors of power” here in Washington about an “Ultimate Solution” to the whole Arab-Israel Gordian Knot that is so breathtaking and mind-blowing that I’d just like to keep it between ourselves for now.

Here’s the background and the outline.

We start with how the countries of the Middle East were created out of the shards of the broken-up Ottoman Empire after World War I. The Brits were trying to colonize as many pieces as they could by installing various sheikhs of the Hashem family as their rulers.

The family claimed descent from Mohammed himself (via a daughter as he had no sons), and were thus in charge of maintaining Islam’s holiest shrine, the Kaaba mosque at Mecca. An obscure British junior officer, T.E. Lawrence (made famous by the dispatches of journalist Lowell Thomas who dubbed him “Lawrence of Arabia”), promised the family’s leader, the Sharif of Mecca, kingdoms for his sons if they led an Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks.

The holy Moslem cities of Mecca and Medina were in a region of the west coast of the Arabian Peninsula called the Hejaz. Thus the Sharif’s eldest son was anointed by the British as King Ali of the Hashemite Kingdom of Hejaz in the wake of WWI, while another became King Faisal of the Hashemite Kingdom of Syria.

The French, however, thought Syria was theirs, so they organized a revolt against Faisal. A third son of the Sharif, Abdullah, raised an army and started off from Mecca to rescue his brother. By the time he got to the end of the Red Sea’s Gulf of Aqaba, Faisal had been thrown out of Damascus and the Brits were on their way to giving him the consolation prize of a Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq.

Abdullah was now in the territory between Hejaz and Syria designated by the British, in accordance with the Balfour Declaration, as the Jewish National Homeland. All the focus here was on Jerusalem and west of the Jordan. No one was paying any attention to the desert wastelands east of the Jordan. Noticing this and having nothing else to do with his army, Abdullah exclaimed the Arabic equivalent of carpe diem, and announced that he was now the ruler of the Jewish National Homeland east of the Jordan River.

The British, of course, should have sent a military detachment and sent Abdullah hightailing it back to Mecca. But they didn’t. And so the country of Jordan came into being, first as the Emirate of Trans-Jordan, then the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which it is to this day. Its current ruler, Abdullah II, is the great-grandson of Abdullah Hashem.

But what happened to the Hashemite Kingdom of Hejaz? It was conquered by the Saudis. The Saudi patriarch, Abdul Azizz Ibn Saud, and his army, swept out of the sands of central Arabia in 1924, kicked the Hashemites out, and annexed the Hejaz together with the holy cities of Mecca and Medina as part of Ibn Saud’s private kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The bottom line to focus on at this point is the bottomless depths to which the Hashem family, led now by Abdullah II of Jordan, hates the Saudis’ guts.

That’s background fact #1. Here’s #2. Only the ruling elite of Jordan’s population is Hashemite. 70 to 80% of Jordan’s people are Palestinians. In all the clamor for a “Palestinian State” ripped out of Israel, what is never discussed is that there already is a State of Palestine. It’s called Jordan.

With these two facts in mind, let’s concentrate on Saudi Arabia, the world’s primary sponsor of Moslem terrorism, the world’s worst religious dictatorship, the world’s worst violator of women’s rights, the world’s largest supplier of the world’s most important resource — oil — which is run by the world’s most corrupt family composed of 40,000 Royal Leeches (called “Princes”) driving it into complete financial ruin.

Saudi Arabia is a time bomb. Its people could explode in rage against the Royals when there isn’t enough money to placate them any longer.

Keep all three of these descriptions in mind simultaneously, start thinking out of the box, and the Ultimate Solution suddenly emerges.

This is one way it would come down. An emissary of the President pays a visit to Abdullah II in Amman, Jordan’s capital, to ask: “How would you like to get the Hejaz back? Have your family rule Mecca and Medina as they did for so many centuries, and reap the vast revenues that come from overseeing the Hadj (the annual pilgrimage millions of Moslems make to Mecca every year)? More to the point: How would you like to exchange Jordan for the Hejaz?“

It would be an offer the Hashemites couldn’t refuse. Yet Abdullah II would ask in return: But what happens to Jordan? The answer is: It becomes Palestine. All the Palestinians living in Jordan would have their own country. All the Palestinians living in the “West Bank” and Gaza of Israel, all the Palestinians living in the squalid refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon, they get to move to their own country.

Israel remains whole, in one intact piece, peacefully depopulated of Palestinians. Israel is left to the Israelis, and the Palestinian Arabs now get to have a country almost 15 times the size of the entire West Bank and Gaza combined. Meanwhile, the Hashemites are back in their ancestral homeland where they have always dreamed of returning, where they would be welcomed as an uncorrupt sacred family to protect Islam’s holy of holies.

Now for the “Ah, excuse me…” moment. Just how exactly do we get the Saudi Royals to buy into the dismembering of their country, you’re asking, right? The answer is: They get to keep the rest as the alternative is losing it all.

The future of the Saudi Royal Family right now is bleak. They are either going to lose their country or their lives and quite possibly both. The civilized world cannot afford to have Saudi Arabia collapse into chaos — and it cannot hold off the forces driving it into collapse for very much longer.

Radical solutions are going to be necessary and soon. So you might as well go for one that also solves the other monster problem — Israelis vs. Palestinians — at the same time.

At the very least, just the consideration of the Ultimate Solution can be used as an intensely persuasive threat to force the Saudis to stop their financing of terrorist training camps in the Medressas of Pakistan, spreading their Wahhabi fanaticism everywhere including 80% of the mosques and Moslem schools in America, allowing saboteurs to infiltrate into Iraq, and start giving more freedom to their own people.

Remember, let’s keep this between ourselves for now. This is the most exciting proposal for solving seemingly intractable problems in the Middle East for many decades. I’ll keep you posted on its prospects.