Captain Allen
@CptAllenHistory · Pro-Israel advocacy & explainers
Captain Allen is a pseudonymous lawyer and educator focused on Jewish history and identity.
Here's the full legal & historical analysis of the "West Bank" that Britain would like you to ignore. They're sanctioning Jews for living in the Land where they were required to "encourage ... close settlement by Jews" via the Mandate for Palestine, unanimously granted via international treaty by the League of Nations. The Land has been Judea and Samaria for three millennia. The term "West Bank" does not appear in any documents anywhere until 1950. When it was under Arab control for 19 years, it was illegally annexed by Jordan. There has never been a Palestinian Arab state in the history of planet earth. The only reason no Jews were living there after 1948 is because they were ethnically cleansed (literally, every one of them killed or expelled) by the British-officer-led and British-armed Jordanian Arab Legion. That's just a taste. Want to know the real history along with a complete legal analysis? Read my article below.
Back when the “West Bank” and Gaza were under full Arab control, the first chairman of the PLO said the quiet part out loud. One week before the 1967 War, Ahmed Shukairy explained what “victory” meant as nearly 500,000 Arab troops massed on Israel’s thin borders: “If war breaks out with Israel, few Jews will survive.” Any Jews who remained would be “shipped” out of the country. But, Shukairy said, “It is my estimation that none of them will survive.” The Troy Record, June 2, 1967 It was never about borders. It was never about settlements. It has always been about eliminating Jews from the Land.
On this day—September 9, 1970 A fourth hijacked passenger plane landed in the Jordanian desert. Then the Palestinian gunmen started separating the Jews from the rest. Three days earlier, the PFLP had already seized an American TWA jet and a Swissair jet and parked them on a dirt strip they named a “revolutionary airport.” They tried an Israeli El Al flight out of Amsterdam, but a sky marshal shot one hijacker dead. The two men El Al had turned away walked onto an American Pan Am 747 with explosives taped totheir bodies, flew it to Beirut, loaded more, and blew the empty jumbo jet in Cairo after the passengers ran. The El Al hijacker who lived was Leila Khaled. Britain locked her up and then traded her. On the 9th, they took a British BOAC jet out of Bahrain and pointed it at the same strip. Four airlines from the U.S., Switzerland, and Britain. The Security Council told them to let the people go. They kept the 56 Jews and all the crews and let everyone else go. The price was seven prisoners in Swiss, German, and British cells. On the 12th, they emptied the aircraft and blew the TWA, the Swissair, and the BOAC on camera. Meanwhile, by 1970, the PLO and PFLP had created a heavily armed state within a state. They were running their own checkpoints at gunpoint across the country. King Hussein used the hijacking mess as an opportunity to rid his country of the Palestinian terror groups. He wouldn't go directly to the Israelis. Instead, he asked Britain to ask Israel for an air strike. Then he sent the Jordanian army into Amman. The fighting that followed is called Black September. Several weeks of urban warfare during which Jordanian troops killed thousands of Palestinian fighters and civilians. By the end, Jordan drove the PLO out of the country and into Lebanon — the next country the arch terrorists would ruin.
Iranian proxy Houthis are sending child soldiers to war high on khat. This will not lead a Western broadcast. You will see no UN sessions. There will be no campus encampments. We all know why.
On this day—September 9, 1940 One year into WWII, Italian bombers spent three minutes over Tel Aviv and killed 137 people. In the clear summer sky came five Savoia-Marchettis that dropped 62 bombs on the city. Not a single military site was hit, only civilian structures and streets. By morning, the bodies were in the yard of the Balfour Municipal School. 53 of the dead were children. The funerals ran almost seven hours. The British High Commissioner came. Churchill sent a wire. Recruitment posters for a Jewish unit went up next to the death notices. Rome told its public it had hit the port of Jaffa. The harbor was untouched. Tel Aviv had no anti-aircraft guns. Britain still would not let the Jews arm.
Eden in 1941: “I prefer Arabs to Jews.” UK today: announces a trade ban on Jews living in their historic heartland that was part of the Mandate Britain once held. It’s the same preference, the same appeasement, and the same policy that’s been updated for 2026.
Sources: Bludan, Syria, September 8-9, 1937. Pan-Arab conference. Speech titled “Islam and the Jews,” read in Amin al-Husseini’s absence. Delegates named him honorary president. German-language edition printed in Berlin, 1938. Arabic edition circulated across the Arab world. Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti. Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World: al-Husseini’s Arabic radio for the Reich, 1941–45. OSS memorandum, June 1945: Arab governments unlikely to try Axis collaborators; popular attitude “sympathy with rather than condemnation.” Otto Dietrich, Reich Press Chief: convicted at a Nuremberg successor trial for antisemitic propaganda. Al-Husseini was not indicted by the United States, Britain, France, or Yugoslavia.
On this day—September 8, 1937 In Bludan, Syria, Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, defined Islam as a war against the Jews. This was four years before he reached Hitler’s Berlin. He was in hiding from the British after launching the 1936 Revolt. The 400 delegates made him honorary president. The speech was titled “Islam and the Jews.” “The battle between Jews and Islam began when Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina … In those days the Jewish methods were exactly the same as they are today. Then as now, slander was their weapon … They tried to annihilate the Muslims. Just as the Jews were able to betray Mohammed, so they will betray the Muslims today … the verses of the Koran and the Hadith assert that the Jews were Islam’s most bitter enemy and moreover try to destroy it.” Al-Husseini would become infamous for his Nazi collaboration. But this was not a Nazi script. The Reich had not yet hired him. Instead, the Mufti claimed it was the religious duty of every Muslim to fight the Jews. In 1938, German press printed the Mufti’s speech in Berlin. An Arabic edition was sent throughout the Middle East. From 1941 to 1945, al-Husseini poured the same hateful religious-based propaganda into Nazi Arabic radio that reached from North Africa to Baghdad. After the war, Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich was put on trial in Nuremberg for his antisemitic propaganda and incitement. Husseini’s Arabic operation was the exact same crime in another language. But the American OSS reported Arab governments would never try him; and Britain, France, Yugoslavia, and the United States left him out of the dock. Al-Husseini was never tried for inciting the murder of Jews. So his hateful sermon became a founding text instead of an exhibit. The Mufti’s Jew hatred long preceded his arrival in Berlin. But it was Berlin that put a far-reaching microphone on Bludan.
A Jew wants to sell land to a Palestinian? No problem. A Palestinian wants to sell land to a Jew? The penalty is death. In April 2009, a Palestinian Authority military court sentenced Anwar Brigith, 59, to death by hanging. His crime? Selling land to Jews. Three PA security-officer judges used laws that forbid sale to “the enemy.” The decision was unanimous with no option to appeal. The property was confiscated, and the sentence needed Mahmoud Abbas’s signature. The PA’s chief Islamic judge had just issued another fatwa banning sale of land or houses to Jews. Hatem Abdel Kader, a Fatah legislator from Jerusalem, told the Jerusalem Post he fully supported the death sentence against “traitors” who sell land to Jews and wanted more of them. Official hangings have been rare. The usual enforcement is quieter: kidnapping, torture, and murder. The sentence is the point: any Jewish title anywhere in the Land is treated as an existential crime. Jews spent a century buying land, often at inflated prices, from willing Arab sellers. The Palestinian Authority made the transaction itself a capital offense. A movement that kills its own people for a bill of sale is not arguing about a border. It is enforcing a principle against any Jewish land ownership.
On this day—September 7, 2016 The New York Times reported the Mitrokhin Archive lists Mahmoud Abbas as a KGB agent in Damascus. Code name: Krotov (“Mole”). The entry is two lines, dated to the early 1980s: “Abbas, Mahmoud, born 1935, Fatah/PLO executive committee, Damascus — KGB agent.” Vasili Mitrokhin copied it by hand inside the KGB archive. Cambridge’s Churchill Archives treated the file as authentic. Palestinian officials called it a smear and said the PLO merely “collaborated with Moscow.” Yea, that “collaboration” was the job. In those same years, Abbas was in Moscow at the Institute of Oriental Studies producing a dissertation of disinformation: “The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement, 1933–1945.” The book version put the Jewish dead under a million, questioned the gas chambers, and repeated the Soviet line that Zionists and Nazis were partners. The same Soviet services that ran agents in Damascus armed and coached Fatah and the PFLP. The same Moscow that drove “Zionism is racism” through the UN. Abbas ran the “Palestinian-Soviet Friendship Association.” That’s the “moderate” so many in the West are eager to recognize as the leader of a “Palestinian state.”
Japan can be Japanese. Ireland can be Irish. Armenia can have a Law of Return. The second the Jews do the same thing, it becomes an “ethnostate.” That’s not a double standard. It’s an Israel standard.
On this day—September 6, 2023 Paris took back the medal it had given the man who said Hitler killed Jews for being bankers. That man? The “moderate” Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Anne Hidalgo revoked Abbas’s Grand Vermeil — the honor that had made him an honorary citizen of the city where French officials and police officers rounded up Jewish children at the Vél d’Hiv for the Nazis in 1942. The cause of this revocation? The speech he had just given to Fatah. Hitler, he told his own party, did not murder Jews because they were Jews. “Not true.” He then went on a diatribe of antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories. Europe fought them for their “social role.” Usury. Money. Sabotage. Ashkenazi Jews “are not Semites.” They were "Khazars." Therefore they could not be victims of antisemitism. That is The Protocols. His bile was also on brand for him. Abbas’ dissertation at his Soviet university (dubbed “KGB University”) promoted Holocaust denial. In 2018, he said the same thing: Hitler killed Jews because of banks, not blood. Then in 2022, while standing next to the German chancellor, Abbas disgracefully claimed Israel had committed “50 Holocausts.” Each time, Abbas gave an apology. In English. Each time, the Arabic file remained unchanged. Hidalgo said the Holocaust is part of the history of Paris. She told him he could no longer hold its highest honor. She also said Paris would keep partnering with Bethlehem, Jericho, and Jenin. The medal came off. The theology stayed. This is the “moderate” the West keeps flying to Geneva.
The “expansionist” or “Greater Israel” charge is pure ahistorical silliness. With a willing peace partner, Israel gave up the entire Sinai to Egypt — a peninsula three times the size of Israel. Without a willing peace partner, Israel simply withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. Land for a peace treaty has held. Land handed over to those who seek first and foremost to destroy Israel has led to the Iranian entrenchment via Hezbollah, two wars in the north, tens of thousands of rockets, and October 7. Israel is not “expansionist.” It cannot make peace with people whose first principle is that the Jewish state cannot exist in any borders.
They’ll remember the “Israel genocide” people the way they remember flat-earthers.
On this day—September 5, 1978 Camp David opened. Sadat put two demands on the table. Give Egypt the Sinai. Give the PLO a state on the 1949 armistice lines. Israel did the first. It refused the second. The slogan now is that Israel is “expansionist” and chasing “Greater Israel.” The file from that room says the opposite. Sinai is three times the size of Israel and contains vast oil fields. It had been the war road in 1967 and 1973. Begin agreed to give all of it back. Every “settlement.” Full Egyptian sovereignty. In return: a peace treaty, an open Strait of Tiran, and the largest Arab army taken out of the business of annihilating Israel. The Knesset voted 84–19 in favor. The peace has been cold. But Egypt and Israel have not fought a war since. Judea, Samaria, and Gaza were the other demand. The PLO had been founded in Cairo and was armed and coached by the KGB. In 1978, it was not pretending to be anything other than a terror organization whose charter was Israel’s destruction. There was no Palestinian Sadat. There still has never been one. Begin would talk autonomy for the Arabs who lived there. He would not manufacture a sovereign launchpad on Israel’s nine-mile-wide waist and call it peace. Decades of Palestinian leaders refusing a state in the “West Bank” and Gaza in favor of terrorism proved him right. Land for peace with a state that wanted peace held. Land handed to people who wanted Israel gone is Gaza. They did not build a state. They built the world’s most fortified terror fortress and carried out October 7. Israel traded a massive peninsula for a peace treaty and a quiet border. Israel will not commit suicide because a faculty lounge has been working day and night to revise history.
On this day—September 5, 1973 One year to the day after they slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Palestinian terrorists from Black September tried to blow an El Al jumbo jet out of the sky over Rome. Five men with two Soviet SA-7 surface to air missiles were in a house in Ostia waiting for the jet. One missile would have done the trick. The second was just in case the first one missed. This time, massacre was averted. On an Israeli intelligence tip, Italian police hit the apartment and found the five with their missiles. Italy let them go. They made a twisted bargain called the Lodo Moro: Palestinian terrorists could move through Italy freely as long as Italian targets were spared. Jewish and Israeli targets did not count as Italian. Munich’s three surviving terrorists had already gone home a similar way. Their comrades hijacked Lufthansa Flight 615. Bonn capitulated and released the killers who were given a hero’s welcome in Libya. Rome did not even wait for the next hijacking. Three months later, on December 17, 1973, five other Palestinian terrorists opened fire in the terminal at Fiumicino Airport in Rome. Then they threw phosphorus bombs and grenades into Pan Am Flight 110. First class was entirely wiped out — burned or suffocated. Flight attendants got one emergency door open for passengers to escape. 32 innocents were murdered. Italy was not alone in making under-the-table deals with Palestinian terrorists. West Germany traded Munich’s killers. France later arrested Abu Daoud, a planner of Munich, only to release him days later. Switzerland cut a quiet arrangement with the PLO after attacks on its soil: spare us, and we will give you diplomatic cover and help you look like a government. They were not trying to help end the war on Jews. They were just trying to move that war off their runways.
On this day—September 5, 1972 Palestinian terrorists climbed a fence into the Olympic Village in Munich and started murdering Jews in their beds. 27 years after the Holocaust, Jews were being killed in Germany again. Eight men from Fatah’s Black September unit forced their way into the Israeli rooms before dawn. Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg fought them with a fruit knife. They shot him and threw his body into the street. Weightlifter Yossef Romano attacked them too. They shot him and left his body at the feet of the men they had tied to the beds. Nine hostages remained: Yossef Gutfreund, Kehat Shorr, Amitzur Shapira, Andre Spitzer, Yakov Springer, Eliezer Halfin, Mark Slavin, David Berger, and Ze’ev Friedman. The terrorists’ price was hundreds of imprisoned comrades and a plane out. Israel’s answer was no. These were meant to be the “Carefree Games,” West Germany’s answer to Hitler’s 1936 Olympics. Light security. A new Germany. No rifles on the fence. Some athletes even helped the killers over the wire, thinking they were late-night guests. Israel offered to send special forces that had already rescued Jewish hostages from terror attacks. Bonn said no. German soil, German operation. Germany moved the terrorists and the bound Israelis to an airfield after dark and tried to spring an ambush. But their preparation was woefully inadequate. They had too few shooters and no clear picture of how many terrorists there were. After midnight, with the nine Israelis still tied inside the helicopters and unable to run, the Palestinian terrorists turned their weapons on the hostages. They shot them in the aircraft. They threw a grenade into one helicopter and burned the men inside. Gutfreund, Shorr, Shapira, Spitzer, Springer, Halfin, Slavin, Berger, and Friedman were murdered there. A German policeman was killed. Three of the eight terrorists were taken alive. For hours, the world was told the opposite: the hostages were safe, the terrorists were dead or caught. Then the correction came. Jim McKay, live: “They’re all gone.” Eleven Israelis murdered: two in the rooms and nine on the tarmac. Six weeks later, another Palestinian crew hijacked a Lufthansa jet. Bonn traded the three Munich killers for the passengers. Libya gave them a hero’s welcome with crowds, cameras, and honors for the men who had just slaughtered a country’s Olympic team. With the Israeli team wiped out, the Olympics barely stopped. An entire national team had been slaughtered for being Jews, and that was not enough to end the Games. The gesture was flags at half-staff. All but the flags of the 10 Arab countries who refused. They would not lower a flag for Jews murdered at the Games. 27 years after Jews were liberated from the camps, Jews were killed in Germany, this time by Palestinian terrorists. And the Games kept going as if nothing had happened.
“First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.” Jews were first. Now it’s the Christians. The Jews of the Arab world were driven out. Time is running out for the Christians. A century ago, Christians were about 13% of the Middle East. Today, about 3%. Iraq: 1.5 million before 2003, less than 250,000 now. Syria: nearly 2 million before the war, a remnant after. Bethlehem: 86% Christian in 1950, about 10% under the PA. Gaza: 1,000 left under Hamas before the recent war. Lebanon is emptying. In Egypt, Copts have been beaten and their churches burned. In Saudi Arabia, public Christian worship remains illegal. Only one country in the region has a Christian population that is growing, free, and not fleeing. Israel. 184,000 Christians living as equal citizens. Their numbers are rising. Their churches are open. Their holy sites are reachable. Arab Christians sit in the Knesset. Western churches write papers on Jerusalem and stay quiet as their own people are erased from the map in the region where the faith began. The Saturday people were expelled. The Sunday people are next. Everywhere in the Middle East except the Jewish state where they can and do grow and thrive.
On this day—September 4, 1990 Palestinian terrorist Abul Abbas threatened every American target. He sat on the PLO Executive Committee. He ran the Achille Lauro hijacking during which his men shot Leon Klinghoffer (a 69-year-old American Jew in a wheelchair) and threw him overboard. To Reuters that day, he said if the United States attacked Iraq, “any American target will become vulnerable.” His own faction had already sent Palestinians into occupied Kuwait to help Iraqi troops. Arafat, on that same date, called American troops in Saudi Arabia a “new crusade.” The PLO, he said, could “only be in the trench hostile to Zionism and its imperialist allies.” Saddam had taken Kuwait. Egypt, Syria, and the Gulf went against him. The PLO stood by him in lockstep. Arafat flew to Baghdad and smiled next to him for the cameras. Abbas was later captured in Baghdad during the Second Iraq War in 2003. He died in American custody the following year.
The so-called “67 borders” are indefensible. Reagan said it to the country in 1982. Begin said it to Carter’s face in 1977. On those lines, Tel Aviv is a tank column away. Abba Eban called them the “Auschwitz lines.” Begin’s oath was clear: in the Holocaust, Jewish men had to deliver their women and children to their executioners. Never again. The 1949 armistice lines did not get wider. Not in 1977. Not in 1982. Not today.
On this day—September 3, 1939 Britain declared war on Germany. The Jews of Mandate Palestine volunteered to fight. Britain kept the gates locked to Jews looking to escape the Nazis anyway. That morning, the Jewish Agency Executive met in Jerusalem. The put together a declaration: this is our war. The White Paper was an unforgivable blow. They would still fight Hitler alongside the British. They meant it. 26,000 Jews from the Yishuv put on a British uniform. A million and a half Jews worldwide served in the armies that destroyed the Reich. The day before, a British cutter had shot two Jewish refugees off Tel Aviv for reaching the beach. Immigration certificates were severely rationed. Jewish refugees were “illegal.” They fought the country murdering their families. The empire they fought for still treated their home as a quota.
On this day—September 2, 1935 80,000 Jews filled Jerusalem for one funeral. Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the Mandate, had died hte day before. He blessed the pioneers, and called Jewish return the beginning of their redemption. A quarter of the entire Yishuv walked. Laborites and Hasidim. Farmers and yeshiva students. People who argued with him in life would not stay away when it came time to honor him in death. There was no state yet. No army. And the Mufti was busy organizing the next violent anti-Jewish riot. Still, one out of every four Jews in the Land stopped the city to bury a rabbi who told them rebuilding the homeland was holy.
On this day—September 2, 1939 Britain fired its first shots of World War II … and it was at Jews. They fired on the Tiger Hill ship filled with 1,400 Jewish refugees from Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. They were trying to reach their internationally recognized homeland, the one place on earth they were still wanted. But the British had slammed the gates shut months earlier with the illegal White Paper. A British cutter opened fire. Zvi Binder was killed. Dr. Robert Schneider was killed. The ship was run onto a Tel Aviv beach. Jews on the sand pulled the living out of the sea. Two hundred managed to melt into the crowd. The British marched the other 1,200 to Sarafand detention center and locked them up. The British certainly did not build the camps. But they did shoot people trying to reach their last lifeline.
On this day—September 1, 1982 Reagan said the thing later peace plans tried to unsay. “In the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely ten miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel’s population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.” That waist is Netanya to the old line. A tank column does not need a campaign. It needs an afternoon. One thrust and the country is two stumps: Haifa cut from Tel Aviv, the coast cut from Jerusalem, the sea at your back and a gun on the ridge. Abba Eban called those the “Auschwitz lines.” A border you can spit across while holding the high ground and having Israeli cities already in the bag. You can argue “settlements.” You can argue maps. You cannot argue less than ten miles. Anyone who treats the 1949 armistice lines as sacred is asking Israel to stack its children on a beach and call it peace. Reagan declined. The land did not get wider.
On this day—September 1, 1951 Everyone understands Hormuz. A chokepoint is a hand on a country’s throat. Egypt already had its hand on Israel’s. It closed the Suez Canal to Israeli-bound ships in 1949, after the armistice. On this day, the Security Council ordered Cairo to open it. Resolution 95. Eight votes. Zero against. Israel was three. There was no “occupied Sinai.” Egypt said no. This is not a hymn to the UN. The Assembly later became a machine for obsessively targeting the Jewish state. In 1951, the Council was not that machine. It told Cairo you do not choke a canal after a cease-fire and call it self-defense. Cairo kept the hand on the throat. The next five years were the same Egyptian policy with a gun. Armed fedayeen terrorists came out of Gaza and Sinai and murdered Israeli civilians on the roads. In 1956, Nasser nationalized the Canal and kept the blockade. The slogan says Israel “started” 1956 because Britain and France joined the attack. The file starts here: Egypt closed a waterway, ignored the order to open it, and spent six years sending killers across a cease-fire line.