Only a Beginning… Charles Malik’s vision of an emergent Pax Judaica
In August 1949, three months after Israel joined the United Nations, Lebanon’s envoy in Washington sent his government a long report. Charles Malik, no firebrand, had signed the UN Charter and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His Report on the Present Situation lay largely unread until Dar An-Nahar printed it in 2002.
The Arabic text is online; the translations below are mine, with the book’s page numbers.
Malik calls Palestine “the gravest Arab question of all”, whose outcome “is the outcome of the whole Arab world” (p. 24). Then he warns:
“Everything that has happened so far in Palestine and concerning Palestine is only a beginning. As for the end, it may be either the crushing of the Arab world and its colonisation by the Jews, or its rising anew as a modern, respected world, sharing with the living civilisations in creating values and preserving them. Whatever happens, the near future will be darker than the present and more dangerous than the past.” (p. 27)
A word on Malik’s language. He writes “the Jews” where we would now write the Zionist entity and the organised bodies abroad that back it: the Zionist movement and the vast bulk of organised Jewry. The movement named itself that way: a Jewish Agency, a Jewish National Fund, a Jewish state. In the Levant, the conquest of Palestine was experienced as an attack by Jews. That describes a political project and its institutions. It is not a racial term, and it says nothing about Jews as a people, some of whom opposed Zionism then and oppose it now. Malik’s target is the movement and the state it had just built:
“… the Jews’ triumph in seizing the greater part of Palestine and building their state, … and Israel’s entry as a member of the United Nations: all this is not an act at which the ambitions of the Jews stop and with which their danger ends. The State of Israel, in its present condition and borders, is not a resting place for the invading Jewish force, but a centre where it gathers, a soil in which it grows, and a point from which it sets out across its borders and springs upon the Arab countries, the adjacent and then the distant: politically, economically and socially, and, if need be, militarily. And I think it will need to.” (pp. 27–28)
The core of the report follows:
“The Zionists have succeeded in all this. But they will not be content with this partial success, nor satisfied with this measure of victory, because their ambitions do not end at the patch of Palestine they have seized, nor stop at the borders the world has recognised for them. … Zionist policy is, at its core, an ambitious expansionist policy. The whole of Palestine is not enough for the needs of the Jews, nor does it sate the appetite of their leaders. … Israel wants to dominate the Arab world; it wants to be the heir of all its previous eras. Just as it was once known, in whole or in part, as the Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Turkish or Mandate era, so Zionism wants it to be known in its coming era as the Israeli era. The Arab world is Zionism’s vital space.” (pp. 40–41)
Malik then looks further ahead:
“… They will succeed in persuading the West, and in persuading some of our own politicians and thinkers, that they are the intermediary between the West and the Near East, in economics and development, in culture and thought, and in politics, and that they are the ones fit to represent the Near East, its interests, its will and its forces, to the West. … A day will come, if it has not already come, when all economic and development projects and all rescue plans … rest at bottom on the Jewish will, aimed in their motives at numbing the Arabs and distracting them from the shame of Israel’s establishment in their midst, and in their end at forcing them to recognise it and cooperate with it. These projects will be built so as, first and foremost, to entrench Israel’s foundations and make it the cornerstone of the economic structure and the pillar of development in the Near East.” (pp. 43–44)
Now Benjamin Netanyahu. At the UN in 2023, he hailed a “visionary corridor that will stretch across the Arabian Peninsula and Israel” to “connect India to Europe”, and said: “Israel can become a bridge of peace and prosperity between these continents.” “Israel must be a power,” he told a Mossad gathering in 2015. “Not just a regional power, but in some spheres, a world power.” In December 2025, two years into the genocide in Gaza, he declared in the Knesset that Israel “is the strongest power in the Middle East, and in certain fields, it is a global power.”
A page earlier, Malik had described what such a position would mean:
“For a day will come — and it may be near, if it is not already here — when nothing in the Arab world is loosed or bound except with the consent of the Jews. Then governments, regimes and individuals will be upheld or overturned according to the Jews’ approval or anger: a head of state or a head of government will rise or fall because Tel Aviv, and behind it world Jewry concentrated in New York and other Western capitals, wanted him to rise or to fall.” (pp. 42–43)
He adds, from his own diplomatic experience:
“I have repeatedly been given to understand that very important matters, such as development projects, international loans, and treaties and agreements for security in the Middle East, were left undecided or set aside because those with the power to decide on them had first consulted the Jews about them.” (p. 43)
The same line applies: Malik’s “world Jewry” is the organised Zionist movement in Western capitals, standing “behind” Tel Aviv. Read that way, the passage is prescient, as Israel’s record in Lebanon shows. Who today can say that this is far from the mark on the reality of contemporary political life?
Malik’s “partial success” is the key. Zionist leaders always claimed more than they accepted at any moment. Acceptance was tactical.
At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Zionist Organization proposed a northern border starting “south of Sidon” and an eastern line “close to and west of the Hedjaz Railway”, well east of the Jordan.
When the Peel Commission offered a small state in 1937, David Ben-Gurion told his son Amos why he would take it: “A partial Jewish state is not the end, but only the beginning … I am certain that we will not be prevented from settling in other parts of the country, either by mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or by some other means.”
In June 1938, the historian Nur Masalha shows from the Jewish Agency Executive’s minutes, Ben-Gurion accepted part of the country “on the basis of the assumption that after we build up a strong force following the establishment of the state – we will abolish the partition of the country and we will expand to the whole Land of Israel.”
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, had already spelled out the method in 1923: colonisation “must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population”, behind “an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach”.
Menachem Begin’s Irgun answered the UN partition vote of November 1947, as he recorded in The Revolt: “The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. … Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for ever.”
Malik’s sharpest fear was for Lebanon. He warned of “a secret agreement between Israel and some short-sighted Lebanese”, who would then “carry out a coup loyal to Israel”. It “would not be counted as aggression by Israel, but as a mere internal movement”, leaving the West no room to act. Yet such a coup “would inevitably lead to chaos, then Syrian Arab intervention, then Israeli intervention, and so to a new war, and Lebanon will not be the winner in it at all” (pp. 145–146).
He did not know what Ben-Gurion had written on 24 May 1948, in a diary now published by the Ben-Gurion Archive: “Lebanon is the weak link in the Arab coalition. The Muslim government is artificial and easy to destabilize. A Christian state should be established with the Litani [River] as its southern border. We’ll form an alliance with it.”
In May 1955, according to Moshe Sharett’s diary as translated by Livia Rokach, Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan said Israel need only “find an officer, even just a Major”, then “create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel” and annex “the territory from the Litani southward”. It is almost exactly Malik’s plot.
In March 1949, US records show, Malik had asked Dean Acheson for a declaration “that no further expansion on the part of Israel would be permitted.” None came.
Malik’s answer was Arab renewal. Without it, he wrote, “I am certain that our future is colonisation and enslavement by the Jews. And I am certain of more than that: I am certain that in that case no one will grieve over our enslavement” (p. 42).
Against the genocide in Gaza, the wars on Lebanon and the seizures of Syrian territory, the report reads as description. In August 2025 Netanyahu said he felt “very much” connected to the vision of Greater Israel. Malik would not have been surprised. The ambition was never dropped, only deferred until the force existed to pursue it.
Arabic original: Charles Malik, شارل مالك، إسرائيل… أميركا… والعرب: تنبؤات من نصف قرن – تقرير في الوضع الحاضر، 5 آب 1949 (Israel… America… and the Arabs: Prophecies from Half a Century – Report on the Present Situation, 5 August 1949), preface by Ghassan Tueni (Beirut: Dar An-Nahar, first edition August 2002; scan of the third printing, March 2003). Read it on archive.org or download the PDF.
November 12, 2026 -
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Palestine, Zionism
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