Op-Ed: A New Assault on the Law of Nations
Israel's right to be a state is due to its fulfilling qualifications for sovereignty. The PA seems to be looking for other means.
Wallace Edward Brand, JD
The “constitutive theory” on recognition of states seems to be raising its head as a complete substitute for the "declaratory theory". Is this because the attempted formation of a so called "Palestinian State" doesn't fit very well into the parameters of statehood under the “declaratory “theory?
It is not clear that the Palestinian Authority has unified control of a defined territory. First, the unified status of control over both the 'West Bank' and Gaza changes from day to day. Second, the permanent population of the putative state as listed in the PLO Charter changed from only those Arabs within the Green Line in 1964 to those within Palestine but not including those in Jordan in 1968, to those in Palestine not including both those in Jordan and those within the Green Line now.
There are two theories under which states are recognized. These are under the “constitutive” method, a subjective method based on the discretion of existing states through their recognition of other states. Then there is, the "declaratory" method that looks to the proposed state’s assertion of its qualifications for sovereignty within the defined territory it exclusively controls and its permanent population.
Under the declaratory theory, recognition is almost irrelevant. Under that theory, states have little or no discretion in determining whether an entity constitutes a state. Its status is wholly dependent on fact, not on individual state discretion. These standards were developed following the Peace of Westphalia and contributed to a new world order. They are restated in the 1933 Montevideo Convention.
Constitutive discretion in the recognition of a state must be carefully examined to determine whether it is a complete substitute for the declaratory formulation or only additive to it and whether or not it has been limited by a previous exercise of state discretion. Any previous exercise can be enforced by the legal doctrine of estoppel. Under the doctrine of "acquired rights", those who have approved recognition of a state cannot arbitrarily withdraw it.
In the case of Palestine, many states signed voluntarily onto the Palestine Mandate in 1922. That was a Trust Agreement providing for Jewish settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan commencing in 1922 and placing in trust for the Jewish People, the collective political rights to Palestine until such time as:
1. they attained a population majority in the area where they would rule, and
2. had the capability to exercise sovereignty under the declaratory method.
Once a state’s discretion in selecting an entity it is willing to recognize as a state has been exercised, under the legal doctrine of acquired rights, (now codified in the Vienna Convention on Treaties, Article 70 (1) (b)), it cannot be withdrawn except for cause. An action in estoppel is the approved way of asserting one’s acquired rights.
In 1922, fifty-two states asserted their approval of the Palestine Mandate which placed in trust the national or collective political rights to all Palestine west of the Jordan. The trust agreement they approved gave to the Jewish People the immediate right of close settlement on the land west of the Jordan River but delayed their statehood until such time as they attained a population majority in the area they would rule and had the necessary elements to qualify for sovereignty under the declaratory method.
In 1948 they met both standards within the Green Line and that territory vested. Britain had abandoned its trusteeship in May and no longer exercised legal dominion. In 1967 by obtaining unified control over the remaining territories of Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem, the remainder of the territory that had been in trust vested in the Jewish People and they received legal dominion over it as well.
There were 52 states that approved the trust agreement for the Jewish people in 1922. I sincerely doubt that those not signing the former treaty – likely those colonies that have now received independence – would be sufficiently weighty to establish Palestinian statehood by the constitutive method.
One author says that the majority of contemporary scholars and commentators favor the declaratory theory and there is considerable support for the argument that recognition is irrelevant for whether a state exists as such or not. However, he adds that while the “declaratory” view currently is in prominence, it might possibly be just beginning its decline in favor of the “constitutive” view. (William Worster, Universities of the Hague and Missouri-Kansas City,February 2010). The Montevideo Convention of 1933 states: “The political existence of the state is independent of recognition by other states". See: Worster, Sovereignty: Two competing theories of State Recognition.
Those who claim that the "Palestinian People" should have equal collective rights, ignore that there is no "Palestinian People".
The Jewish People’s state has always been intended to be a Jewish Democratic state. The only concession made to the Arab People was to put the collective political rights recognized as belonging to the Jews, in trust so that the Jews could not establish a state until they comprised at least a majority in the area to be ruled. They also had to be capable of exercising sovereignty over the territory.
There are two theories under which states are recognized. These are under the “constitutive” method, a subjective method based on the discretion of existing states through their recognition of other states. Then there is, the "declaratory" method that looks to the proposed state’s assertion of its qualifications for sovereignty within the defined territory it exclusively controls and its permanent population.
Under the declaratory theory, recognition is almost irrelevant. Under that theory, states have little or no discretion in determining whether an entity constitutes a state. Its status is wholly dependent on fact, not on individual state discretion. These standards were developed following the Peace of Westphalia and contributed to a new world order. They are restated in the 1933 Montevideo Convention.
Constitutive discretion in the recognition of a state must be carefully examined to determine whether it is a complete substitute for the declaratory formulation or only additive to it and whether or not it has been limited by a previous exercise of state discretion. Any previous exercise can be enforced by the legal doctrine of estoppel. Under the doctrine of "acquired rights", those who have approved recognition of a state cannot arbitrarily withdraw it.
In the case of Palestine, many states signed voluntarily onto the Palestine Mandate in 1922. That was a Trust Agreement providing for Jewish settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan commencing in 1922 and placing in trust for the Jewish People, the collective political rights to Palestine until such time as:
1. they attained a population majority in the area where they would rule, and
2. had the capability to exercise sovereignty under the declaratory method.
Once a state’s discretion in selecting an entity it is willing to recognize as a state has been exercised, under the legal doctrine of acquired rights, (now codified in the Vienna Convention on Treaties, Article 70 (1) (b)), it cannot be withdrawn except for cause. An action in estoppel is the approved way of asserting one’s acquired rights.
In 1922, fifty-two states asserted their approval of the Palestine Mandate which placed in trust the national or collective political rights to all Palestine west of the Jordan. The trust agreement they approved gave to the Jewish People the immediate right of close settlement on the land west of the Jordan River but delayed their statehood until such time as they attained a population majority in the area they would rule and had the necessary elements to qualify for sovereignty under the declaratory method.
In 1948 they met both standards within the Green Line and that territory vested. Britain had abandoned its trusteeship in May and no longer exercised legal dominion. In 1967 by obtaining unified control over the remaining territories of Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem, the remainder of the territory that had been in trust vested in the Jewish People and they received legal dominion over it as well.
There were 52 states that approved the trust agreement for the Jewish people in 1922. I sincerely doubt that those not signing the former treaty – likely those colonies that have now received independence – would be sufficiently weighty to establish Palestinian statehood by the constitutive method.
One author says that the majority of contemporary scholars and commentators favor the declaratory theory and there is considerable support for the argument that recognition is irrelevant for whether a state exists as such or not. However, he adds that while the “declaratory” view currently is in prominence, it might possibly be just beginning its decline in favor of the “constitutive” view. (William Worster, Universities of the Hague and Missouri-Kansas City,February 2010). The Montevideo Convention of 1933 states: “The political existence of the state is independent of recognition by other states". See: Worster, Sovereignty: Two competing theories of State Recognition.
Op-Ed: Is the Jewish State Bill Necessary or is it Redundant?
What is proposed is, in fact, a restatement.
Published: Tuesday, November 18, 2014 6:55 AM
In my legal opinion, new legislation is unnecessary, not for the reasons stated by those Knesset members who are opposed to the law, but because it would be redundant.
From the time of the Balfour Policy, adopted word for word at San Remo, the Jewish People were intended to have the sole collective political rights to Palestine and the Arabs were intended to have only individual political rights -- sometimes referred to as included in "civil rights" , i.e. one vote for each citizen. of the state.
Those who claim that the "Palestinian People" should have equal collective rights, ignore that there is no "Palestinian People".
The Jewish People’s state has always been intended to be a Jewish Democratic state. The only concession made to the Arab People was to put the collective political rights recognized as belonging to the Jews, in trust so that the Jews could not establish a state until they comprised at least a majority in the area to be ruled. They also had to be capable of exercising sovereignty over the territory.
The reason for the British policy is shown in a memorandum of the British Foreign Office written by Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier [Sept. 19, 1917] replying to those opposing the Balfour Policy because the Jews in 1917 only had a 10% population minority in all of Palestine and a Jewish State would therefore be antidemocratic. The BFO replied that they agreed that the immediate rule of the Jewish People would be antidemocratic, but the political rights were intended to be placed in trust until the Jews had a population majority where they would rule so the "antidemocratic" charge was "imaginary".
The briefing documents of the US Diplomats carried to the Paris Peace talks confirmed this intent of the Settlors of the Palestine Mandate trust. At the Paris Peace Talks the Arabs and Jews had filed competingapplications for the collective political rights to Palestine. The Allied Principal War Powers recognized the Jewish People as entitled to self-determination in Palestine and agreed to put the collective political rights in a trust, later entitled the Palestine Mandate when they reconvened the next year in San Remo.
Some 52 states including the US approved that trust in 1922. The trust res vested partially in 1948 when the Jews had achieved a population majority and Britain had abdicated the legal dominion it had over those political rights as the trustee.
The Jews gained the remainder in 1967 when they gained control over the territory and became capable of exercising sovereignty over it.
Why? The US Commission of Inquiry established by President Wilson in 1919 to implement his policy on "self-determination" to establish a world map of those entitled to self-determination found that Palestine: was "the cradle and home of their [the Jewish people's] vital race", the basis of the Jewish spiritual contribution, and the Jews were "THE ONLY PEOPLE WHOSE ONLY HOME WAS IN PALESTINE"…[emphasis added]
Those who claim that the "Palestinian People" should have equal collective rights, ignore that there is no "Palestinian People".
"The Palestinian People do not exist", admitted Zahir Muhsein, a member of the executive board of the PLO in a 1977 interview by the Dutch newspaper Trouw. "The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism.
A fictional Palestinian Arab “People” was invented by the Soviet dezinformatsiya in 1964. You will see it in the preamble of the PLO Charter drafted in Moscow. At the same time Soviet Diplomats were promoting the dignifying of the natural law "right of a people to self-determination"to the status of a right under international law.
Read more here.
Even if such a “people” actually existed, the rule under International Law is that where there is a tension between the right of a people to self-determination and the right of an existing sovereign state to territorial integrity, the right of the state is paramount. The inviolability of state boundaries has been the sine qua non of world order ever since the Peace of Westphalia and was reinforced by the UN Charter and two Conventions on the rights of a people to self-determination under International Law effective in 1976. One of these is the International Covenant on the Civil and Political Rights of a people.
The ownership of the sole collective political rights in Palestine is not unfair to the relatively few Arabs in Palestine because the Arab people have 22 states in which the Arabs exercise the sole collective political rights compared to only one for the Jews. The Arab territory comprises almost 500 times the area of the territory of Israel.
Can anything be said in favor of such a law? Yes. Looking back almost 100 years to find the intent behind the 1920 San Remo Agreement and the Palestine Mandate requires sifting through the sands of time where that intent is buried. Some, Israeli citizens who are Arabs or some on the left might not agree with the interpretation I have placed on it. A fresh restatement might show that it is an interpretation agreed to by the Government of Israel — but it would be helpful to note that what is pronounced is, in fact, a restatement.
A new law could show that the authority for issuing the pronouncement includes the authority of the Supreme Council of Allied Principal War Powers under International Law to enter into a treaty with the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I and does not rest solely on the authority of the Israeli Knesset. The Treaty of Sevres in which the Ottomans ceded sovereignty over Palestine to the Mandatory Power was never ratified, however, the treaty of Lausanne shows the release by the OttomanEmpire of its sovereignty over Palestine leaving its final disposition to the parties involved. By that time, July 24,1923, Palestine’s fate had been decided at San Remo and approved by the League of Nations and in the United States
Op-Ed: Is Israel a Jewish State?
Mr. White wants an alternative to present-day israel.
Published: Tuesday, October 21, 2014 10:19 PM
Al Jazeera recently carried an op-ed by Ben White, a graduate of Cambridge University, entitled "Israel's Definition as a 'Jewish State’".
According to Mr. White, "The alternative to Israel as a 'Jewish state' is not a Palestinian Arab state, but a state where all have equal rights.” However, he ignored that even if the Arabs residing in Palestine qualified as a people, the question was res judicata, having been decided in 1920 at San Remo and calling the Arabs in Palestine the “Palestinian People” does not add much to his case..
I wanted to comment on his view which differs quite a lot from my own, but for some reason, Disquis (a comment system) balks at sending me the comments to articles in Al Jazeera and receiving my comments. The question is an important one and should not go unanswered.. So I am sending you my comment to publish if you think it will interest your readers.
Mr. Ben White appears to be a very learned fellow and I might have accepted his comment but for the fact that I am familiar with the history of the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Resolution, and the Palestine Mandate.
It was Woodrow Wilson who was opposed to large European Countries dominating the colonial territories captured by the Allies in WWI. He knew that under natural law as declared by John Locke, a people should have self-determination. That was America’s view in our War of Independence. But he was not deciding the general question of whether that would apply to secession as well as decolonization. The US had balked at the attempted secession of the South at great cost to itself, still in the memory of many in 1917.
Looking forward to the end of hostilities in WWI, he appointed a Committee of Inquiry that dedicated its efforts to determining the “people” in each area of the world that should be recognized as having the right of self-determination. The late Julius Stone, a world recognized International Lawyer found "That the provision for a Jewish national home in Palestine was an application of the principle of self-determination is manifest from the earliest seminal beginning of the principle.
The Enquiry Commission, established by President Wilson in order to drafta map of the world based on the Fourteen Points, affirmed the right of the Jewish people that Palestine should become a Jewish State clearly on this ground. Palestine, the Commission said, was "the cradle and home of their vital race", the basis of the Jewish spiritual contribution, and the Jews were "the only people whose only home was in Palestine”
In 1919 the question of who should get the political rights to Palestine came up in the Paris Peace Talks, but was not resolved at that time. However the American diplomats carried with them briefing documents on that question. I have copied them at length in my legal opinion archived at SSRN.com/abstract=2385304. You will note the same language used in the report of the 1917 Committee of Inquiry and the briefing documents of the American diplomats to the Paris Peace Talks.
In 1920 the Allied War Powers reconvened in San Remo and adopted the British Balfour policy of recognizing the Jewish People as the cestui que trust of the political rights to Palestine and rejecting the Arab People’s application.
In 1964 the Soviet dezinformatsiya apparently seized on this as a way to erect a barrier to Jewish sovereignty over Palestine which formed a barrier to its quest for domination of the Middle East as a way to extend its hegemony over Western Europe. They invented a “Palestinian People”, inserting this term in the preamble of the 1964 PLO Charter drafted in Moscow and corroborated only by the first 432 members of the Palestine National Council, each hand-picked by the KGB.
A member of the PLO executive board agreed with me, stating to the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 1977 that there was no Palestinian People, that the term was just used for political purposes. And indeed there is no good evidence of Arab nationalism in Palestine before 1964, only national anti-Semitism. They separated from Syria because the Syrians were not anti-Semitic enough for Haj Amin-al Husseini. They didn’t want to rely on one another — but would prefer that to rule by the Jewish People.
During WWI none of the Arabs in Palestine or Syria had fought on the side of the Allies even though they claim they were promised independence by the British if they did so.and many Arabs had fought for the Ottomans
And in the diary of Count Folke Bernadotte, who investigated this question for UNSCOP, the UN Committee on Palestine that was looking to see what to do upon Britain’s abdication as Mandatory Power or trustee of the Political Rights placed in their trust, Count Bernadotte noted that there was no evidence of Palestinian Arab Nationalism. In fact Zahir Muhsein has said that when the Jews had been annihilated, the PLO would merge with Jordan. He said that the term Arab Palestinian People was a pollitical ploy. So when the Soviet dezinformatsia invented the Palestinian People in Moscow, Soviet Diplomats at the UN were pushing to dignify the right of a “people” to self-determination as not only natural law but also international law.
But in my legal opinion at SSRN.com/abstract=2385304 I show why that would not have worked even if the Palestinians were a genuine people. When the right of a people to self-determination is in tension with the right of a sovereign state to territorial integrity, the right of a people is subordinate. It is necessary to maintain world order that state boundaries be inviolable.
In any event, what the Allied Principal War Powers at San Remo did was to adopt the formulation of the British Balfour policy. It did not recognize the right of self-determination of the Jews in Palestine, it recognized World Jewry, the Jewish People as the cestui que trust of the political rights to Palestine. These are group rights, they are the collective political rights, the right to form a government and then to administer it. The individual political right to one vote for each citizen is frequently discussed as a civil right. The civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities were saved in the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Resolution and the Palestine Mandate that stated in detail how the League of Nations were to expect the Balfour and San Remo policy to be carried out. The French tried to add “political rights” to the savings clause for civil and religious rights but the others would not accept that amendment.
The Balfour Policy was to be carried out in two stages. In the first would be a Jewish National Home, permitting Jews to settle "as a matter of right" anywhere in Palestine. This was cut down to Palestine west of the Jordan in 1922 when the policy was approved by 52 countries. However, when the Jewish population increased to a majority, the Jews would get not only the right to settle, but also to rule. It must also, before ruling, exhibit the capability of exercising sovereignty. Then it would become a Jewish Commonwealth without being an anti-democratic government.
So Ben White was looking at the wrong formulation. It was the Jewish People and the Arab People who filed competing applications at the Paris Peace Talks. It was the Jewish People who was the cestui que trust of the Political Rights to Palestine and who obtained legal dominion over them under the law of trusts in 1948 when the Jewish People became a majority within the Green Line and had control over the people in that area and the rights for that territory vested.
The remainder of the rights vested in 1967 when the Jewish People took control over Judea,Samaria and East Jerusalem. Israel has not as yet asserted control over the first two territories. But it has over East Jerusalem. So if Mr. White is correct, any group without even calling itself a “people” could empower the UN to redraw the boundaries of a sovereign state. That is pretty far-fetched, even for one not a student of International Law.
In conclusion, knowing this history, it is hard for me to conclude that what under international law is the state of the Jewish People is anything but a democratic Jewish State.
The San Remo Agreement provided: "The High Contracting Parties agree to ENTRUST… the administration of Palestine . . .
Trust law for non-lawyers.
After finding an intention to set up a trust, look for:
1. The "settlor", the person or entity setting it up. He contributes the trust res.
2. The cestui que trust or “beneficiary” of the trust.
3. The trustee.
4. The trust res or the thing placed in trust.
5. The purpose of the trust.
6. The term of the trust.
These are the vital elements of a trust. Some are express; others may be inferred. For example if you place a delicate Ming dynasty bowl in trust for your daughter aged 5, others may infer that the purpose of the trust that is to vest when she is 30 is to preserve and protect it until she is capable of doing that herself.
The 1920 San Remo agreement of the Allied Principal War Powers contained the British Balfour Declaration of Policy word-for-word. The 1922 Palestine Mandate approved by 51 countries that were members of the League of Nations, and also by the United States, filled in the detailsneeded to apply the Balfour Policy.
One. At San Remo, the settlor of the trust was the Supreme Council of the Allied Principal War Powers in WWI. They defeated Germany who commenced the war and the Ottoman Empire who joined Germany in making war on the Allies. Under customary International Law, the victors in a defensive war may negotiate with the vanquished to establish new boundaries for it and keep all the territory outside the new boundary. In this way the Ottoman Empire was reduced to Turkey. The remaining Turkish territory in Europe was allocated by the Supreme Council at the 1919 Paris Peace Talks. Claims for territory in the Middle East – Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine -- were resolved at the reconvening of the group at San Remo, the following year. At the Paris Peace talks the Allies set up the League of Nations including Article 22 of its Covenant that provided for “mandates”. These were combination trusts and guardianships for countries that had been colonies of Turkey for 400 years. The Mandatory was to provide stability and tutelage for their political development to become independent representative governments over time.
Two. The cestui que trust is the beneficiary. The beneficiary has no right to go to a "law court" to protect his rights. That is only the right of the trustee. He has legal dominion over the trust res. For a tangible piece of property, such as a Ming dynasty bowl, only the trustee has the right of possession. If it is stolen, only the trustee can go into a court of law to reclaim it. The beneficiary is limited to protecting his rights against abuse by the trustee. He is entitled to go into a court of equity. The beneficiary here was the Jewish People or World Jewry. It was the Jewish people and the Arab people who had submitted competing claims for collective political rights to Palestine at the Paris Peace talks. Woodrow Wilson's Commission of Inquiry in searching for those throughout the world having the right of self-determination had said of the Jews that Palestine was "the cradle and home of their vital race" and noted that the Jews were the only people that had no other land.
An express term of the trust made the World Zionist Association the formal advisor to the mandate government. Another term required the trustee to facilitate only Jewish immigration so the Jews could become a majority.
Three. The mandate was based on English law concepts of trusts and guardianships. Britain volunteered to be trustee or “mandatory” and was selected.
Four. The thing placed in trust, the trust res, was an intangible, the collective right of a group to establish a government and provide for its administration. This is referred to as "group political rights”. An individual political right, sometimes referred to as included in "civil rights", is the rightto one vote for each citizen.
Five. The purpose of the trust was, in the case of most of the mandates, providing a stable government until such time as the majority of the people in the territory of the state developed politically and could represent themselves - there having been no opportunity in the last 400 years for the inhabitants of the former Turkish colonies to do that. It was also, in the case of the Palestine Mandate, to avoid an antidemocratic Jewish government. At the time the Jews were in the minority in the entireterritory of Palestine and if they had legal dominion over the political rights, an antidemocratic government would be in power. One purpose of the Palestine Mandate was to delay representative self-government until the Jews were in the majority within the area to be ruled.
Six. The term of the trust -- it was to end when the Jewish population in the area to be ruled was in the majority and the Jews had the capability, just as any European Government to exercise sovereignty. That would avoid an antidemocratic government such as later was founded in Syria by the French, of a minority of Alawites that under Hafez Assad and Bashir Assad has caused so much misery and destruction.
Historical note
In 1948 the Jewish population within the Armistice Line in Palestine became the majority. The trust res partially vested. In 1967 it became completely vested. Coincidentally, the UN Partition Resolution 181 was enacted in November 1947, not long before Israel proclaimed its independence. That is why many people believe that Resolution 181 is the root of Israel’s sovereignty. But the Arabs rejected this Resolution. By law it was only a recommendation that must be approved by all involved before becoming international law. It died at birth when rejected by the Arabs.
In 1964 the PLO charter was drafted in Moscow. It posited that there was a “Palestinian Arab People”. In the ‘60s also the Soviet Diplomats at the UN promoted two International Conventions dignifying the right of any “people” to have the right of political self-determination not just under natural law, but also under international law. These became effective in 1976. But the drafters at the UN made sure that these rights under international law were subordinate to the right of a preexisting state to territorial integrity because since the new world order was established after the Peace of Westphalia, national boundaries of sovereign states have been inviolable.
So ends the Palestine Mandate in a Nutshell. For the unshelled version see SSRN.com/abstract=2385304
According to Mr. White, "The alternative to Israel as a 'Jewish state' is not a Palestinian Arab state, but a state where all have equal rights.” However, he ignored that even if the Arabs residing in Palestine qualified as a people, the question was res judicata, having been decided in 1920 at San Remo and calling the Arabs in Palestine the “Palestinian People” does not add much to his case..
I wanted to comment on his view which differs quite a lot from my own, but for some reason, Disquis (a comment system) balks at sending me the comments to articles in Al Jazeera and receiving my comments. The question is an important one and should not go unanswered.. So I am sending you my comment to publish if you think it will interest your readers.
Mr. Ben White appears to be a very learned fellow and I might have accepted his comment but for the fact that I am familiar with the history of the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Resolution, and the Palestine Mandate.
It was Woodrow Wilson who was opposed to large European Countries dominating the colonial territories captured by the Allies in WWI. He knew that under natural law as declared by John Locke, a people should have self-determination. That was America’s view in our War of Independence. But he was not deciding the general question of whether that would apply to secession as well as decolonization. The US had balked at the attempted secession of the South at great cost to itself, still in the memory of many in 1917.
Looking forward to the end of hostilities in WWI, he appointed a Committee of Inquiry that dedicated its efforts to determining the “people” in each area of the world that should be recognized as having the right of self-determination. The late Julius Stone, a world recognized International Lawyer found "That the provision for a Jewish national home in Palestine was an application of the principle of self-determination is manifest from the earliest seminal beginning of the principle.
The Enquiry Commission, established by President Wilson in order to drafta map of the world based on the Fourteen Points, affirmed the right of the Jewish people that Palestine should become a Jewish State clearly on this ground. Palestine, the Commission said, was "the cradle and home of their vital race", the basis of the Jewish spiritual contribution, and the Jews were "the only people whose only home was in Palestine”
In 1919 the question of who should get the political rights to Palestine came up in the Paris Peace Talks, but was not resolved at that time. However the American diplomats carried with them briefing documents on that question. I have copied them at length in my legal opinion archived at SSRN.com/abstract=2385304. You will note the same language used in the report of the 1917 Committee of Inquiry and the briefing documents of the American diplomats to the Paris Peace Talks.
In 1920 the Allied War Powers reconvened in San Remo and adopted the British Balfour policy of recognizing the Jewish People as the cestui que trust of the political rights to Palestine and rejecting the Arab People’s application.
In 1964 the Soviet dezinformatsiya apparently seized on this as a way to erect a barrier to Jewish sovereignty over Palestine which formed a barrier to its quest for domination of the Middle East as a way to extend its hegemony over Western Europe. They invented a “Palestinian People”, inserting this term in the preamble of the 1964 PLO Charter drafted in Moscow and corroborated only by the first 432 members of the Palestine National Council, each hand-picked by the KGB.
A member of the PLO executive board agreed with me, stating to the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 1977 that there was no Palestinian People, that the term was just used for political purposes. And indeed there is no good evidence of Arab nationalism in Palestine before 1964, only national anti-Semitism. They separated from Syria because the Syrians were not anti-Semitic enough for Haj Amin-al Husseini. They didn’t want to rely on one another — but would prefer that to rule by the Jewish People.
During WWI none of the Arabs in Palestine or Syria had fought on the side of the Allies even though they claim they were promised independence by the British if they did so.and many Arabs had fought for the Ottomans
And in the diary of Count Folke Bernadotte, who investigated this question for UNSCOP, the UN Committee on Palestine that was looking to see what to do upon Britain’s abdication as Mandatory Power or trustee of the Political Rights placed in their trust, Count Bernadotte noted that there was no evidence of Palestinian Arab Nationalism. In fact Zahir Muhsein has said that when the Jews had been annihilated, the PLO would merge with Jordan. He said that the term Arab Palestinian People was a pollitical ploy. So when the Soviet dezinformatsia invented the Palestinian People in Moscow, Soviet Diplomats at the UN were pushing to dignify the right of a “people” to self-determination as not only natural law but also international law.
But in my legal opinion at SSRN.com/abstract=2385304 I show why that would not have worked even if the Palestinians were a genuine people. When the right of a people to self-determination is in tension with the right of a sovereign state to territorial integrity, the right of a people is subordinate. It is necessary to maintain world order that state boundaries be inviolable.
In any event, what the Allied Principal War Powers at San Remo did was to adopt the formulation of the British Balfour policy. It did not recognize the right of self-determination of the Jews in Palestine, it recognized World Jewry, the Jewish People as the cestui que trust of the political rights to Palestine. These are group rights, they are the collective political rights, the right to form a government and then to administer it. The individual political right to one vote for each citizen is frequently discussed as a civil right. The civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities were saved in the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Resolution and the Palestine Mandate that stated in detail how the League of Nations were to expect the Balfour and San Remo policy to be carried out. The French tried to add “political rights” to the savings clause for civil and religious rights but the others would not accept that amendment.
The Balfour Policy was to be carried out in two stages. In the first would be a Jewish National Home, permitting Jews to settle "as a matter of right" anywhere in Palestine. This was cut down to Palestine west of the Jordan in 1922 when the policy was approved by 52 countries. However, when the Jewish population increased to a majority, the Jews would get not only the right to settle, but also to rule. It must also, before ruling, exhibit the capability of exercising sovereignty. Then it would become a Jewish Commonwealth without being an anti-democratic government.
So Ben White was looking at the wrong formulation. It was the Jewish People and the Arab People who filed competing applications at the Paris Peace Talks. It was the Jewish People who was the cestui que trust of the Political Rights to Palestine and who obtained legal dominion over them under the law of trusts in 1948 when the Jewish People became a majority within the Green Line and had control over the people in that area and the rights for that territory vested.
The remainder of the rights vested in 1967 when the Jewish People took control over Judea,Samaria and East Jerusalem. Israel has not as yet asserted control over the first two territories. But it has over East Jerusalem. So if Mr. White is correct, any group without even calling itself a “people” could empower the UN to redraw the boundaries of a sovereign state. That is pretty far-fetched, even for one not a student of International Law.
In conclusion, knowing this history, it is hard for me to conclude that what under international law is the state of the Jewish People is anything but a democratic Jewish State.
Op-Ed: The Palestine Mandate in a Nutshell
The 1920 San Remo agreement explained for non-lawyers.
Published: Sunday, September 21, 2014 8:26 AM
The San Remo Agreement provided: "The High Contracting Parties agree to ENTRUST… the administration of Palestine . . .
Trust law for non-lawyers.
After finding an intention to set up a trust, look for:
1. The "settlor", the person or entity setting it up. He contributes the trust res.
2. The cestui que trust or “beneficiary” of the trust.
3. The trustee.
4. The trust res or the thing placed in trust.
5. The purpose of the trust.
6. The term of the trust.
These are the vital elements of a trust. Some are express; others may be inferred. For example if you place a delicate Ming dynasty bowl in trust for your daughter aged 5, others may infer that the purpose of the trust that is to vest when she is 30 is to preserve and protect it until she is capable of doing that herself.
The 1920 San Remo agreement of the Allied Principal War Powers contained the British Balfour Declaration of Policy word-for-word. The 1922 Palestine Mandate approved by 51 countries that were members of the League of Nations, and also by the United States, filled in the detailsneeded to apply the Balfour Policy.
One. At San Remo, the settlor of the trust was the Supreme Council of the Allied Principal War Powers in WWI. They defeated Germany who commenced the war and the Ottoman Empire who joined Germany in making war on the Allies. Under customary International Law, the victors in a defensive war may negotiate with the vanquished to establish new boundaries for it and keep all the territory outside the new boundary. In this way the Ottoman Empire was reduced to Turkey. The remaining Turkish territory in Europe was allocated by the Supreme Council at the 1919 Paris Peace Talks. Claims for territory in the Middle East – Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine -- were resolved at the reconvening of the group at San Remo, the following year. At the Paris Peace talks the Allies set up the League of Nations including Article 22 of its Covenant that provided for “mandates”. These were combination trusts and guardianships for countries that had been colonies of Turkey for 400 years. The Mandatory was to provide stability and tutelage for their political development to become independent representative governments over time.
Two. The cestui que trust is the beneficiary. The beneficiary has no right to go to a "law court" to protect his rights. That is only the right of the trustee. He has legal dominion over the trust res. For a tangible piece of property, such as a Ming dynasty bowl, only the trustee has the right of possession. If it is stolen, only the trustee can go into a court of law to reclaim it. The beneficiary is limited to protecting his rights against abuse by the trustee. He is entitled to go into a court of equity. The beneficiary here was the Jewish People or World Jewry. It was the Jewish people and the Arab people who had submitted competing claims for collective political rights to Palestine at the Paris Peace talks. Woodrow Wilson's Commission of Inquiry in searching for those throughout the world having the right of self-determination had said of the Jews that Palestine was "the cradle and home of their vital race" and noted that the Jews were the only people that had no other land.
An express term of the trust made the World Zionist Association the formal advisor to the mandate government. Another term required the trustee to facilitate only Jewish immigration so the Jews could become a majority.
Three. The mandate was based on English law concepts of trusts and guardianships. Britain volunteered to be trustee or “mandatory” and was selected.
Four. The thing placed in trust, the trust res, was an intangible, the collective right of a group to establish a government and provide for its administration. This is referred to as "group political rights”. An individual political right, sometimes referred to as included in "civil rights", is the rightto one vote for each citizen.
Five. The purpose of the trust was, in the case of most of the mandates, providing a stable government until such time as the majority of the people in the territory of the state developed politically and could represent themselves - there having been no opportunity in the last 400 years for the inhabitants of the former Turkish colonies to do that. It was also, in the case of the Palestine Mandate, to avoid an antidemocratic Jewish government. At the time the Jews were in the minority in the entireterritory of Palestine and if they had legal dominion over the political rights, an antidemocratic government would be in power. One purpose of the Palestine Mandate was to delay representative self-government until the Jews were in the majority within the area to be ruled.
Six. The term of the trust -- it was to end when the Jewish population in the area to be ruled was in the majority and the Jews had the capability, just as any European Government to exercise sovereignty. That would avoid an antidemocratic government such as later was founded in Syria by the French, of a minority of Alawites that under Hafez Assad and Bashir Assad has caused so much misery and destruction.
Historical note
In 1948 the Jewish population within the Armistice Line in Palestine became the majority. The trust res partially vested. In 1967 it became completely vested. Coincidentally, the UN Partition Resolution 181 was enacted in November 1947, not long before Israel proclaimed its independence. That is why many people believe that Resolution 181 is the root of Israel’s sovereignty. But the Arabs rejected this Resolution. By law it was only a recommendation that must be approved by all involved before becoming international law. It died at birth when rejected by the Arabs.
In 1964 the PLO charter was drafted in Moscow. It posited that there was a “Palestinian Arab People”. In the ‘60s also the Soviet Diplomats at the UN promoted two International Conventions dignifying the right of any “people” to have the right of political self-determination not just under natural law, but also under international law. These became effective in 1976. But the drafters at the UN made sure that these rights under international law were subordinate to the right of a preexisting state to territorial integrity because since the new world order was established after the Peace of Westphalia, national boundaries of sovereign states have been inviolable.
So ends the Palestine Mandate in a Nutshell. For the unshelled version see SSRN.com/abstract=2385304
Op-Ed: PA Demands are an Assault on the Law of Nations
People assumed that when the UN General Assembly enacted a resolution, it became a part of international law. That is not so. UN General Assembly resolutions are only recommendations.
Published: Thursday, March 06, 2014 1:47 PM
Most people don’t understand that Palestine, or at least the alleged “Palestinian People” has no right to be sovereign even though as they read the UN charter it appears to say any “people” has the right to self-determination. They haven’t obeyed the scholar’s imperative “read on” - in this case, to where the Charter provides for “sovereign equality”. These are the legal code words guaranteeing the territorial integrity of sovereign states.
Most people also think that the basis for Israel’s sovereignty was the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 181, the Partition Resolution, not the 1920 San Remo Resolution and the Palestine Mandate. The latter was a treaty approved by 52 League of Nations members in 1922 and by the US. This Mandate provided detail for the Balfour Declaration policy adopted by the Allies word-for-word at San Remo. It ultimately gave the Jews the political rights to all of Palestine west of the Jordan River — "from the River to the Sea", as the Arabs put it, referring to theiraspirations to rid the world of the Jewish state.
People were persuaded as above because the UN said so in Resolution 3236 and the later Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, dominated by Arabs and Africans, got a law professor at George Washington University, W.T. Mallison (and his wife Sally), to write a legal opinion to the effect that the 'occupation' of Judea and Samaria was illegal under international law.
The Committee published it in pamphlet form in 1979. It was entitled “An International Law Analysis of the Major United Nations Resolutions Concerning the Palestine Question". How many people on the street know anything at all about international law? Most people reading it assumed that the UN General Assembly was like the Congress. The Mallisons did nothing to disabuse them of this belief. People assumed that when the UN General Assembly enacted a resolution, it became a part of international law. That is not so.
These UN General Assembly resolutions are only recommendations. If they are accepted by all parties to a dispute, the parties enter into a treaty and that becomes a part of international law. See e.g. The Effect of Resolutions of the U.N. General Assembly on Customary International Law by Stephen M. Schwebel, deputy legal advisor to the US Department of State in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law), Vol. 73(APRIL 26 - 28, 1979), pp. 301-309.
He said:
"It is trite but no less true that the General Assembly of the United Nations lacks legislative powers. Its resolutions are not, generally speaking, binding on the States Members of the United Nations or binding in international law at large. It could hardly be otherwise. We do not have a world legislature. If we had one, hopefully it would not be composed as is the General Assembly on the basis of the unrepresentative principle of the sovereign equality of states, states which in turn are represented by governments so many of which are themselves not representative of their peoples.
As the [United States] Secretary of State recently put it:
"In considering the decision making process in the United Nations, it is important to bear in mind that while the one-state, one-vote procedure for expressing the sense of the General Assembly is from many points of view unsatisfactory, the incorporation of this principle in the Charter was balanced by giving the Assembly only recommendatory powers."
Schwebel went on to say there were some International Lawyers that tried to fit recurring statements in UN Resolutions into the category of long-standing custom or practice between or among states.
The Mallison legal opinion assumed that the UN Partition Resolution was a part of International Law. The Resolution divided Palestine west of the Jordan River into three parts. One part went to the Jews, one part to the Arabs, and one part was to become, at least initially, a “corpus separatum” to be ruled by a Committee of the UN. That was the Jerusalem area -- containing many religious sites that were holy for all three major religions.
That the legal opinion was a gross distortion of international law outraged Julius Stone, an Australian world-recognized international lawyer. In response he wrote a book published in 1981 entitled "Israel Palestine: Assault on the Law of Nations". In it he showed that the Major UN General Assembly Resolutions were not international law because Resolution 181, the Partition Resolution, although accepted by the Jews was not accepted by the Arabs and therefore it died at birth. For that reason the Jews were not limited to the territory they were assigned in Resolution 181.
Also, the Jews were not illegally in the Jerusalem area because the corpus separatum also died at birth along with Resolution 181.
Mallison’s legal opinion also opined that Arabs residing in Palestine had, under international law, a right to self-determination. But that right has never been awarded under international law in the case of attempted secession where its application would have empowered the UN to redraw the boundaries of a sovereign state. It has only been applied to cases of decolonization.
Mallison ignored that all of Palestine west of the Jordan River was recognized by some 53 states in 1922 as being owned by the Jews when they approved the Palestine Mandate. Some 52 were members of the League of Nations that approved it as a treaty and the United States, that wasn’t a member of the League, approved it by a Joint Resolution of Congress in 1922 and in a separate treaty, the Anglo-American Convention of 1924.
The chronology is as follows:
At the Paris Peace Talks in 1919, claims to the European and Middle East territories that the Allies had won in WWI, for them a defensive war, were the subject of claims by European parties and also by the Arab people and the Jewish People.
The Arabs, through King Hussein, claimed Syria, Iraq and Palestine — the Jews, through the World Zionist Organization, claimed only Palestine, both east and west of the Jordan River.
The Allies disposed of the claims to European territories at Versailles, but did not resolve the claims to the Middle East territories until they had reconvened at San Remo in 1920. There they placed the political rights to Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in trust for the Arab people who were in the majority in those areas for when the Arabs were capable of exercising sovereignty and placed the political rights to Palestine in trustfor the Jews in the light of their historic association with Palestine.
Why in trust? At the time the Jewish population in all of Palestine was only about 10% of the total, even though the Jews had enjoyed a majority population in the Jerusalem area since 1863 and a plurality since 1845. The British, in their Balfour policy framed in November, 1917, had decided to handle this by placing the political rights in trust, not only until the people in the territory were capable of exercising sovereignty, but also not until the Jews had attained a population majority.
This would be achieved by their hard work to bring back to Palestine Jews from the diaspora to get a population majority. This would avoid an “anti-democratic” government, rule by a minority — like the later French recognition of the Alawites as sovereign over Syria that has resulted in so much death and destruction.
To award the Jewish People only the equitable ownership of the political rights to Palestine — the rights to self-determination, they would place these political rights in trust, not to vest until the Jews had both a population majority as well as the capability of exercising sovereignty, and would require the trustee to facilitate Jewish immigration.
However, between 1920 and 1922, events in Syria and in trans-Jordan, Palestine east of the Jordan River had made it better for Britain to limit the area placed in trust for the Jews to the territory of Palestine west of the Jordan. The Palestine Mandate was drafted to specify in detail the new British Policy in Article 25, a limitation on Jewish settlement east of the Jordan.
In 1947 the British decided to abdicate their responsibilities as trustee of the political rights to Palestine.
In 1950, the political rights of the Jews matured when the Jews attained a population majority in the area within the Armistice boundary. Instead of only an equitable interest, now, without formal acclamation, the Jews now had a legal interest in the political rights and the Jewish National Home had matured into a Jewish reconstituted Commowealth as originally conceived in the framing of the Balfour Declaration.
If those Arab people residing in Palestine west of the Jordan had any right to self-determination, the UN would have to redraw the boundary of the sovereign state of Israel to exclude at least East Jerusalem from the sovereign State of Israel, and also to exclude Judea and Samaria, to which Israel was entitled, but to which Israel had not as yet asserted its rights. This would violate Israel’s territorial integrity as guaranteed by the UN Charter. My legal opinion to that effect can be found at SSRN.com/abstract=2385304. The detailed opinion can be downloaded from that URL.
International Law is derived principally from treaties between or among states, but also can be derived from long standing custom between or among states. In 1984 those pushing Palestinian statehood financed the publication of a scholarly appearing journal entitled "Palestinian Yearbook of International Law", responding to Professor Stone’s treatise. In it, in an article entitled “The Juridical Basis of Palestinian Self-Determination”, the Mallisons attempted to resurrect their legal opinion by trying to fit the UN’s Partition Resolution, that had died at birth, into the category of a long-standing custom or practice of many states.
That is hard to accept, because the Arab states that were a major part of the group that dominated the UN and its Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, at the time of the Partition Resolution had not accepted the Resolution as international law, but instead had rejected it so violently they had gone to war.
The canard has since been pushed a lot through PR paid for by Soviet and Arab petrodollars, so now it is generally accepted as a "poetic truth", even by many Israelis on the left. As a poetic truth it can’t be dented by facts, reason or logic, any more than another widespread poetic truth, "The Perpetual Victimhood of the Palestinian People".
Most people also think that the basis for Israel’s sovereignty was the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 181, the Partition Resolution, not the 1920 San Remo Resolution and the Palestine Mandate. The latter was a treaty approved by 52 League of Nations members in 1922 and by the US. This Mandate provided detail for the Balfour Declaration policy adopted by the Allies word-for-word at San Remo. It ultimately gave the Jews the political rights to all of Palestine west of the Jordan River — "from the River to the Sea", as the Arabs put it, referring to theiraspirations to rid the world of the Jewish state.
People were persuaded as above because the UN said so in Resolution 3236 and the later Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, dominated by Arabs and Africans, got a law professor at George Washington University, W.T. Mallison (and his wife Sally), to write a legal opinion to the effect that the 'occupation' of Judea and Samaria was illegal under international law.
The Committee published it in pamphlet form in 1979. It was entitled “An International Law Analysis of the Major United Nations Resolutions Concerning the Palestine Question". How many people on the street know anything at all about international law? Most people reading it assumed that the UN General Assembly was like the Congress. The Mallisons did nothing to disabuse them of this belief. People assumed that when the UN General Assembly enacted a resolution, it became a part of international law. That is not so.
These UN General Assembly resolutions are only recommendations. If they are accepted by all parties to a dispute, the parties enter into a treaty and that becomes a part of international law. See e.g. The Effect of Resolutions of the U.N. General Assembly on Customary International Law by Stephen M. Schwebel, deputy legal advisor to the US Department of State in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law), Vol. 73(APRIL 26 - 28, 1979), pp. 301-309.
He said:
"It is trite but no less true that the General Assembly of the United Nations lacks legislative powers. Its resolutions are not, generally speaking, binding on the States Members of the United Nations or binding in international law at large. It could hardly be otherwise. We do not have a world legislature. If we had one, hopefully it would not be composed as is the General Assembly on the basis of the unrepresentative principle of the sovereign equality of states, states which in turn are represented by governments so many of which are themselves not representative of their peoples.
As the [United States] Secretary of State recently put it:
"In considering the decision making process in the United Nations, it is important to bear in mind that while the one-state, one-vote procedure for expressing the sense of the General Assembly is from many points of view unsatisfactory, the incorporation of this principle in the Charter was balanced by giving the Assembly only recommendatory powers."
Schwebel went on to say there were some International Lawyers that tried to fit recurring statements in UN Resolutions into the category of long-standing custom or practice between or among states.
The Mallison legal opinion assumed that the UN Partition Resolution was a part of International Law. The Resolution divided Palestine west of the Jordan River into three parts. One part went to the Jews, one part to the Arabs, and one part was to become, at least initially, a “corpus separatum” to be ruled by a Committee of the UN. That was the Jerusalem area -- containing many religious sites that were holy for all three major religions.
That the legal opinion was a gross distortion of international law outraged Julius Stone, an Australian world-recognized international lawyer. In response he wrote a book published in 1981 entitled "Israel Palestine: Assault on the Law of Nations". In it he showed that the Major UN General Assembly Resolutions were not international law because Resolution 181, the Partition Resolution, although accepted by the Jews was not accepted by the Arabs and therefore it died at birth. For that reason the Jews were not limited to the territory they were assigned in Resolution 181.
Also, the Jews were not illegally in the Jerusalem area because the corpus separatum also died at birth along with Resolution 181.
Mallison’s legal opinion also opined that Arabs residing in Palestine had, under international law, a right to self-determination. But that right has never been awarded under international law in the case of attempted secession where its application would have empowered the UN to redraw the boundaries of a sovereign state. It has only been applied to cases of decolonization.
Mallison ignored that all of Palestine west of the Jordan River was recognized by some 53 states in 1922 as being owned by the Jews when they approved the Palestine Mandate. Some 52 were members of the League of Nations that approved it as a treaty and the United States, that wasn’t a member of the League, approved it by a Joint Resolution of Congress in 1922 and in a separate treaty, the Anglo-American Convention of 1924.
The chronology is as follows:
At the Paris Peace Talks in 1919, claims to the European and Middle East territories that the Allies had won in WWI, for them a defensive war, were the subject of claims by European parties and also by the Arab people and the Jewish People.
The Arabs, through King Hussein, claimed Syria, Iraq and Palestine — the Jews, through the World Zionist Organization, claimed only Palestine, both east and west of the Jordan River.
The Allies disposed of the claims to European territories at Versailles, but did not resolve the claims to the Middle East territories until they had reconvened at San Remo in 1920. There they placed the political rights to Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in trust for the Arab people who were in the majority in those areas for when the Arabs were capable of exercising sovereignty and placed the political rights to Palestine in trustfor the Jews in the light of their historic association with Palestine.
Why in trust? At the time the Jewish population in all of Palestine was only about 10% of the total, even though the Jews had enjoyed a majority population in the Jerusalem area since 1863 and a plurality since 1845. The British, in their Balfour policy framed in November, 1917, had decided to handle this by placing the political rights in trust, not only until the people in the territory were capable of exercising sovereignty, but also not until the Jews had attained a population majority.
This would be achieved by their hard work to bring back to Palestine Jews from the diaspora to get a population majority. This would avoid an “anti-democratic” government, rule by a minority — like the later French recognition of the Alawites as sovereign over Syria that has resulted in so much death and destruction.
To award the Jewish People only the equitable ownership of the political rights to Palestine — the rights to self-determination, they would place these political rights in trust, not to vest until the Jews had both a population majority as well as the capability of exercising sovereignty, and would require the trustee to facilitate Jewish immigration.
However, between 1920 and 1922, events in Syria and in trans-Jordan, Palestine east of the Jordan River had made it better for Britain to limit the area placed in trust for the Jews to the territory of Palestine west of the Jordan. The Palestine Mandate was drafted to specify in detail the new British Policy in Article 25, a limitation on Jewish settlement east of the Jordan.
In 1947 the British decided to abdicate their responsibilities as trustee of the political rights to Palestine.
In 1950, the political rights of the Jews matured when the Jews attained a population majority in the area within the Armistice boundary. Instead of only an equitable interest, now, without formal acclamation, the Jews now had a legal interest in the political rights and the Jewish National Home had matured into a Jewish reconstituted Commowealth as originally conceived in the framing of the Balfour Declaration.
If those Arab people residing in Palestine west of the Jordan had any right to self-determination, the UN would have to redraw the boundary of the sovereign state of Israel to exclude at least East Jerusalem from the sovereign State of Israel, and also to exclude Judea and Samaria, to which Israel was entitled, but to which Israel had not as yet asserted its rights. This would violate Israel’s territorial integrity as guaranteed by the UN Charter. My legal opinion to that effect can be found at SSRN.com/abstract=2385304. The detailed opinion can be downloaded from that URL.
International Law is derived principally from treaties between or among states, but also can be derived from long standing custom between or among states. In 1984 those pushing Palestinian statehood financed the publication of a scholarly appearing journal entitled "Palestinian Yearbook of International Law", responding to Professor Stone’s treatise. In it, in an article entitled “The Juridical Basis of Palestinian Self-Determination”, the Mallisons attempted to resurrect their legal opinion by trying to fit the UN’s Partition Resolution, that had died at birth, into the category of a long-standing custom or practice of many states.
That is hard to accept, because the Arab states that were a major part of the group that dominated the UN and its Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, at the time of the Partition Resolution had not accepted the Resolution as international law, but instead had rejected it so violently they had gone to war.
This is how it started, how the Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria, and its 'occupation' of East Jerusalem began to be incorrectly characterized as “illegal under International Law”.
Op-Ed: My Ad in the Harvard Crimson:1 State West of the Jordan
Harvard wouldn't let the writer speak at their One State West of the Jordan Conference because his state was the Jewish one, so he purchased an ad in their newspaper for Israel's birthday. Kudos to a proud Zionist Harvard alumnus.
Published: Friday, April 27, 2012 3:06 PM
This ad appears in the Harvard Crimsontoday:
Students at Harvard should know that there are actually three solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
First there is a "one [Arab majority] state" solution, in which the Jewish Israelis would become unwelcome guests in their own National Home, and the Jews in the Diaspora, such as in Toulouse, lose the only place on earth they could go to and not be in a minority.
The second is a "two state [temporary] solution" in which the interim solution would result in the loss of much Jewish and Christian heritage and in the long run would end up as the one [Arab majority] state solution.
The third is one lawful Jewish state based on the San Remo Agreement of 1920 that established the British Mandate for Palestine. It granted the Jews exclusive collective political rights to Palestine, in trust, to vest when the Jews had attained a population majority.
These three solutions are outlined at: http://israelagainstterror.blogspot.com/2012/03/salubrius-three-possible.html
The details of the San Remo agreement are also on line in a two part op ed that can be seen at:
Part 1: /Articles/Article.aspx/11408
Part 2: /Articles/Article.aspx/11412
Debunking the Palestine Lie" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ByJb7QQ9U
It is likely that HLS Professor Alan Dershowitz will sponsor a conference at Harvard on a two state temporary solution. Will he permit discussion of the third option at his conference?
The three solutions are like the three legs of a stool. With only the first two, it will appear that you will get strong arguments in favor of both, but not much balance. Here is a critical review of the two state temporary solution: http://israelagainstterror.blogspot.com/2012/03/remember-quraysh.html
Also, it would be helpful to look at what Dr. Daniel Pipes has uncovered about Yassir Arafat and the treaty of Hudibyah, a two-tribe solution that went sour. http://www.danielpipes.org/316/al-hudaybiya-and-lessons-from-the-prophet-muhammads and
http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/1999/09/arafat-and-the-treaty-of-hudaybiya-updates
If Harvard is a free and open marketplace of ideas, demand a conference where all three solutions are discussed by genuine proponents and opponents.
Wallace Edward Brand, HLS '57 webrand@cox.net
Students at Harvard should know that there are actually three solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
First there is a "one [Arab majority] state" solution, in which the Jewish Israelis would become unwelcome guests in their own National Home, and the Jews in the Diaspora, such as in Toulouse, lose the only place on earth they could go to and not be in a minority.
The second is a "two state [temporary] solution" in which the interim solution would result in the loss of much Jewish and Christian heritage and in the long run would end up as the one [Arab majority] state solution.
The third is one lawful Jewish state based on the San Remo Agreement of 1920 that established the British Mandate for Palestine. It granted the Jews exclusive collective political rights to Palestine, in trust, to vest when the Jews had attained a population majority.
These three solutions are outlined at: http://israelagainstterror.blogspot.com/2012/03/salubrius-three-possible.html
The details of the San Remo agreement are also on line in a two part op ed that can be seen at:
Part 1: /Articles/Article.aspx/11408
Part 2: /Articles/Article.aspx/11412
Debunking the Palestine Lie" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ByJb7QQ9U
It is likely that HLS Professor Alan Dershowitz will sponsor a conference at Harvard on a two state temporary solution. Will he permit discussion of the third option at his conference?
The three solutions are like the three legs of a stool. With only the first two, it will appear that you will get strong arguments in favor of both, but not much balance. Here is a critical review of the two state temporary solution: http://israelagainstterror.blogspot.com/2012/03/remember-quraysh.html
Also, it would be helpful to look at what Dr. Daniel Pipes has uncovered about Yassir Arafat and the treaty of Hudibyah, a two-tribe solution that went sour. http://www.danielpipes.org/316/al-hudaybiya-and-lessons-from-the-prophet-muhammads and
http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/1999/09/arafat-and-the-treaty-of-hudaybiya-updates
If Harvard is a free and open marketplace of ideas, demand a conference where all three solutions are discussed by genuine proponents and opponents.
Wallace Edward Brand, HLS '57 webrand@cox.net
Op-Ed: What Harvard Didn't Want to Hear: Part I
Arutz Sheva comes to the aid of free speech. A succinct exposition of facts and law in support of Israel's lawful exercise of sovereignty over East Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria that Harvard and UCLA don't want to hear.
Published: Monday, March 19, 2012 10:30 AM
Background (part of letter written by the author, a Harvard and UCLA alumnus, to UCLA):
On March 3,4 there was a conference held at Harvard on a one state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In effect it was a "one Arab majority state" solution. The panel consisted of Arab academics and Israel post modern revisionist who are apologists for terrorism. The other side or sides were completely missing. Harvard would not accept our request to be part of a panel or make a presentation.
A similar conference was held or is soon to be held at UCLA. A second conference is likely at Harvard sponsored by Professor Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School on a "two state solution" to the Arab Israeli conflict.
There are in fact three sides. That last would be "a one lawful state West of the Jordan River" solution. These three sides are akin to a three legged stool. When only one or two sides is presented it makes for a strong presentation but not a very balanced one.
I have been trying to find out how this third side could be presented at UCLA and I have been told by all my contacts at UCLA that it is impossible. They tell me that UCLA is just too politically correct. So I am making a last effort. I have published information on the three sides in an on-line blog entitled "Middle East and Terrorism" and a conservative Israeli newspaper called "Arutz Sheva", and I hope, at the very least, that you will make the links available to students at UCLA so they have access to a balanced presentation to a solution for the Arab Israeli conflict.
At least three nation-states, the UK, the US and Canada allow evidence of legislative purpose to be admitted to show the meaning of a statute that is ambiguous.
What follows is a necessary minimum of that evidence to show the purpose of the Balfour Declaration that was adopted by the WWI Allies at San Remo that established the International Law provided by that Agreement and the British Mandate for Palestine.
It is widely accepted, but not correct, that the West Bank belongs to the local Arabs in Palestine who in 1964, at the suggestion of the Sovietdezinformatsia, decided to call themselves "Palestinians.” [1]
These "invented people" [2] also pretend they had long had a passion for self government. [3] The full extent of Israel’s claim of sovereignty has not recently been stated. At most, it is said by the Israeli government that no one has sovereignty over the West Bank, but that Israel has the better claim. [4]
A better view is that the Jews obtained a beneficial interest in sovereignty over all of Palestine in the 1922 enactment of the British Mandate for Palestine, that entrusted exclusive political or national rights in Palestine to Britain in trust for the benefit of the Jews that later matured into a legal interest on the abandonment of the trusteeship by Britain and the attainment of the Jews of a majority population.
The trusts or guardianships were to be called "mandates”.
It was in 1919 that Jan Smuts submitted a memorandum to the League, which later became Article 22. The Council of Ten drafted for the League of Nations as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles [5], an Article 22 providing for trusts and guardianships for the areas in The Middle East and North Africa captured by the WWI Allies from the Ottoman Empire. This concept was later applied to other areas. Article 22's first two paragraphs provided a reasonably clear showing that a mandate was based on the longstanding British legal concepts of trusts and guardianships.
In 1917, in advance of the end of WWI, the British had drafted and published a policy for the disposition of the captured Ottoman lands in Palestine. [6] Britain and France were at that time following the “secret’ Sykes-Picot Agreement in their disposition of Ottoman Lands. But in recognition of the historic association of the Jews with Palestine, the Balfour Declaration, a British Policy approved it its Cabinet, provided for exclusive political or national rights in Palestine to be granted to the Jews.
The 1920 agreement of the WWI Allies at San Remo, on the terms of the Mandate turned what had been only a British Policy approved by the Cabinet, into International Law. Under Article 22 of the League of NationsCovenant, the rights were to be provided in trust, [7].
We know this because the Balfour policy had been attacked as antidemocratic, as giving sovereignty to the Jewish people who constituted only 60,000 of the total population of 600,000 in Palestine as of 1917.
In Jerusalem, the Jews had had a plurality of the population since 1845 and a majority since 1863, but in all of Palestine, in 1917 they constituted only 10% of the population. Even US President Woodrow Wilson was advancing that argument that award of sovereignty to a minority population was inconsistent with his 14 points that provided, among other things, for majority control.
To counter this argument, which they conceded was a good one, Arnold Toynbee and James Namier in the British Foreign Office, in a memorandum of September 19, 1917 [8] said the problem of control by a minority was "imaginary" because they predicted that the grant would be placed in trust and would not vest sovereignty in the Jews until the Jews fit to govern it on modern European state.
In my view these included attainment of a majority population, defined boundaries, unified control over all within the boundaries, etc.. Providing a National Home for Jews in Palestine with the British running the government until the Jews could attain a majority status based on favored immigration from the Jews in the Diaspora would be a temporary measure and not antidemocratic. [9]
The statement of the purpose of the British Mandate for Palestine in its Preamble and Article 2 is entirely consistent with this view although not express. [10]
What was the National Home, a reconstituted state? No, it was a place for the Jewish people to feel at home while the immigration was going on that would ultimately give the Jews a majority of the population and a reconstituted state. So that the staff of the British Mandatory Power, will know how to do that: Article 4 provides for the Zionist Organization to advise the mandate government staff. Part of Article 6 requires the staff of the Mandatory Power for The Administration of Palestine, to facilitate immigration of Jews. The Mandate does NOT provide that immigration of any other peoples is to be facilitated. (emphasis added) Article 5 provides that none of the land is to be ceded to a foreign power.
Who were the beneficiaries of the trust? Only the Jews, both those already in Palestine and many more scattered worldwide in the Diaspora since the time of the Roman Empire conquest of Palestine.
Howard Grief, who has provided the seminal work on the legal foundations of Israel under International Law, says one can conclude this because they are the only people mentioned to be dealt with specially. [11]The non-Jews are referred to only to ensure their civil and religious rights are to be protected.
Because Article 22 of the League Covenant defined the relationship of Britain and the Jews as trustee and guardian with Jews in effect being beneficiaries and ward the Mandate essentially provided for a Jewish National Home that would be supervised by the British until its ward was capable of exercising sovereignty, including helping it attain a majority of population it needed to do that. It was charged with facilitating such immigration.
All this purpose was not expressed very clearly in the Mandate, likely to avoid stirring up the Arabs in time of war that might bleed off troops to maintain stability in Palestine. But the Arabs did understand that this was the case.
After the war, the Arabs were told by Winston Churchill that the request for self government by the inhabitants of Palestine would be denied until such time as the Jews had attained a majority of the population. They made that understanding clear in their arguments against Partition in the UNSCOP hearings in 1947. [12]
The Arabs argued in 1947 "It was clear from the beginning that if Palestine were to be turned into a Jewish national home, this would involve the indefinite denial of self-government until such time as the Jews were strong enough to take over the government; that pending such time, Palestine would have to be subjected to a foreign administration [of England] which had no basis in the consent of the population and of which the policy would be determined, not by consideration of the welfare of the population, but by the desire to assist in the settlement of an alien group; and that to make such a settlement possible the country would have to be cut off from the surrounding Arab lands by artificial frontiers, would be given a separate system of law, administration, finance, tariffs, and education and would thus inevitably lose some if not all of the Arab character."
But that is what the grantors had in mind and the Arabs knew it when they argued against Partition in 1947. [13] They had learned after WWI from Winston Churchill this was their intention.
"As the first Arab delegation to England stated in the course of its correspondence with Mr. Churchill, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, 'we are to understand ...that self-government will be granted as soon as the Jewish people in Palestine are sufficiently able through numbers and powers to benefit to the full by it, and not before.' "[14]
Prior to the publishing of the British Mandate the French attached a "proce’s verbal" in French shown only in the French Version. [15] This was their agreement only on their stated understanding that the Mandate would not eliminate any existing rights of the non-Jews in Palestine. The League had no objection to the process verbal.
The Mandate expressly preserved existing civil and religious rights of the non-Jews. It could not preserve their political rights because they had never had any. The preservation of their civil rights only protected their individual political rights, ie. their electoral rights. It did not protect their collective political rights or national rights, the right of sovereignty and political self-determination.
The Arabs in Palestine had always been ruled from afar. So the Mandate carried out the “process verbal”
Why, in 1917, did Britain establish a policy that gave a preference to the Jews? There were several reasons.
1. Britain's Prime Minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration was David Lloyd-George. Later, in 1923, he was the author of an article "The Jews and Palestine" [16] In it he revealed his view that the Arabs under Ottoman Rule had turned Palestine, the Biblical land of milk and honey into a malarial wasteland. He believed it could be remedied under a reconstituted Jewish State.
2. There was considerable sympathy among many Christian Evangelicals in England who thought the Jews should be restored to Palestine to flee from the pogroms of Russia and Poland. This sympathy did not extend to receiving them in England. British workmen had complained that Jews were flooding in to England and taking their jobs and working for less. This led to the Aliens Act of 1909 restricting Jewish immigration into England.
But the British recognized that the oppression of the Jews in Russia and Poland was very bad and they needed some place to go. [17]
3. Chaim Weismann, an ardent Zionist and also a good chemist, had helped Britain in the war by developing an inexpensive method of manufacturing acetone used in cordite for munitions and had given it to the British. It was a great help to the British war effort. [18]
4. And England, according to Winston Churchill, also desired to win over the Jews in Russia, many of them in the Bolshevik government, so that they might influence the new Marxist government to remain in battle with the Germans and Ottomans in WWI on the side of the Allies. He thought that the Balfour Declaration could sway them in British favor. [19]
There came a time after WWII that the British decided their effort to be trustee was simply costing it too much. They tried to obtain some funding from the United States, but the United States declined to do so. Britain finally decided to abandon its trusteeship and guardianship in 1948.
On the abandonment of its trusteeship by Britain in 1948, political rights that were the "trust res" (the thing put in trust) devolved to the Jews as beneficiaries or wards of the trust and vested in them the political rights permitting them to exercise sovereignty. These rights had survived the demise of the League of Nations by virtue of Article 80 of the UN Charter. [20] It should be expressly noted that the Jews did not receive these rights from the Partition Resolution.
By that time the Jewish population had increased significantly. In 1947 the UN General Assembly had recommended that the Jews give up some of its rights in an attempt to avoid violence that had been threatened by the Arabs if the Jews were to reconstitute their state in Palestine. The Jews agreed to give up some of the land over which they were to have political rights, but the Arabs rejected the recommendation and commenced a war.
It was by the Arabs starting a war that led to a Jewish population majority. Some 600,000 to 700,000 Arabs fled the country before even seeing an Israeli soldier. The wealthy left first, at the first foreshadowing of war. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Mahmoud Abbas wrote this in the official organ of the PLO, “Filanstin”, most of the rest left at the request of the Arab Higher Committee that wanted to get them out of the way of the Arab armies in the surrounding states. [21]
Many left because of a false report that the Irgun had committed a massacre of Arabs at Deir Yassin, that the Haganah, their political enemies did not dispute. A BBC program based on an interview of an Arab radio commentator at the time revealed he had been pushed into designating a hard fought battle as a massacre so as to provide an excuse for the invasion of surrounding armies. [22]
Many Arabs local to Palestine left; some remained.
But those that left could not go back because the Arab Armies did not prevail
In 1948 Israel declared Independence and vindicated its claim by force of arms against the assault of other Arab states surrounding it. It established an orderly unified stable control of its territory except for Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem which had been invaded and occupied by the Arab Legion in the East. This British supplied and led organization became the Army of Jordan. [23] In the South, the Egyptian Army was able to maintain its occupation of the Gaza Strip.
In 1920 the Ottoman Empire in Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres,had ceded its sovereignty in Palestine, which had been undisputed for 400 years, to a Mandatory Power in trust for a National Homeland for the Jews. [24] The Sevres Treaty was never ratified by the Turks who were concerned over Turkey’s boundaries in Europe and in adjacent areas in Asia, not in the Middle East and North. But these issues were finally settled in 1923 in the Treaty of Lausanne that left the agreements in the Middle East unchanged.
The trustee selected by the League of Nations at San Remo was Great Britain; the US had been another possibiility. Sovereignty, i.e. political rights, over the other 99% of the lands captured from the Ottomans in the Middle East was allocated to Arab and Muslim majorities in some 20 areas such as Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq but as in the case of Palestine, in mandates of guardianship as the inhabitants had had no prior experience in self rule.
While it was expected in 1920 that the Jewish Homeland would eventually become a state when immigration gave the Jews a majority of the population, at the time the Jews were incapable of exercising sovereignty although the "Jewish Agency" was exercising administrative authority of wide scope.
End Notes
1. Brand, Soviet Russia, The Creators of the PLO and the Palestinian People, http://www.think-israel.org/brand.russiatheenemy.html
2. Newt Gingrich, Campaign speech, 2012 Republican Primary
3. Brand, Was there a Palestine Arab National Movement at the End of the Ottoman Period? http://www.think-israel.org/brand.palnationalism.html
[4] Danny Ayalon, Israel's current Deputy Foreign Minister, The Truth About the West Bank /News/News.aspx/145836
[5] See the original documents in the Avalon Project at Yale University.http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/versailles_menu.asp
[6]The Balfour Declaration Texthttp://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/E210CA73E38D9E1D052565FA00705C61
[7] See the first two paragraphs of Article 22
[8] Mueller, Editor, Churchill as a Peacemaker, Feith, p. 224 n. 36 citing Sir Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return, p. 111-12
[9] Charles Hill, Trial of a Thousand Years, World Order and Islamism
[10] San Remo Convention Text of the Mandate
http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/San_Remo_Convention
[11] Howard Grief, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, p. 36
[12] The Future of Palestine" by Musa Alami with a foreword by Mr. Alami. Hermon Press, Beirut, London (1970)
[13] Id
[14] Id
[15] Salomon Benzsimra, Jewish People’s Rights to the Land of Israel, n. 68 See below
[16] David Lloyd George, The Jews and Palestine,http://einshalom.com/archives/210
[17] Ronald Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, A history of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York (1983) p. 90-94
[18] High Walls at 189
[19] Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews,Gilbert reveals the beliefs that moved the British government to issue the Declaration: “The War Cabinet hoped that, inspired by the promise of a national home in Palestine, Russian Jews would encourage Russia—then in the throes of revolution—to stay in the war,. . .http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2011/volume_3/number_1/churchill_international_jews_and_the_holocaust.php
[20]http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/unchart.htm#art80
[21] Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States Are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Wall Street Journal; June 5, 2003)
[22]http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_independence_war_diryassin.php
[23] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Legion
[24] http://athena.hri.org/docs/sevres/part3.html
On March 3,4 there was a conference held at Harvard on a one state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In effect it was a "one Arab majority state" solution. The panel consisted of Arab academics and Israel post modern revisionist who are apologists for terrorism. The other side or sides were completely missing. Harvard would not accept our request to be part of a panel or make a presentation.
A similar conference was held or is soon to be held at UCLA. A second conference is likely at Harvard sponsored by Professor Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School on a "two state solution" to the Arab Israeli conflict.
There are in fact three sides. That last would be "a one lawful state West of the Jordan River" solution. These three sides are akin to a three legged stool. When only one or two sides is presented it makes for a strong presentation but not a very balanced one.
I have been trying to find out how this third side could be presented at UCLA and I have been told by all my contacts at UCLA that it is impossible. They tell me that UCLA is just too politically correct. So I am making a last effort. I have published information on the three sides in an on-line blog entitled "Middle East and Terrorism" and a conservative Israeli newspaper called "Arutz Sheva", and I hope, at the very least, that you will make the links available to students at UCLA so they have access to a balanced presentation to a solution for the Arab Israeli conflict.
At least three nation-states, the UK, the US and Canada allow evidence of legislative purpose to be admitted to show the meaning of a statute that is ambiguous.
What follows is a necessary minimum of that evidence to show the purpose of the Balfour Declaration that was adopted by the WWI Allies at San Remo that established the International Law provided by that Agreement and the British Mandate for Palestine.
It is widely accepted, but not correct, that the West Bank belongs to the local Arabs in Palestine who in 1964, at the suggestion of the Sovietdezinformatsia, decided to call themselves "Palestinians.” [1]
These "invented people" [2] also pretend they had long had a passion for self government. [3] The full extent of Israel’s claim of sovereignty has not recently been stated. At most, it is said by the Israeli government that no one has sovereignty over the West Bank, but that Israel has the better claim. [4]
A better view is that the Jews obtained a beneficial interest in sovereignty over all of Palestine in the 1922 enactment of the British Mandate for Palestine, that entrusted exclusive political or national rights in Palestine to Britain in trust for the benefit of the Jews that later matured into a legal interest on the abandonment of the trusteeship by Britain and the attainment of the Jews of a majority population.
The trusts or guardianships were to be called "mandates”.
It was in 1919 that Jan Smuts submitted a memorandum to the League, which later became Article 22. The Council of Ten drafted for the League of Nations as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles [5], an Article 22 providing for trusts and guardianships for the areas in The Middle East and North Africa captured by the WWI Allies from the Ottoman Empire. This concept was later applied to other areas. Article 22's first two paragraphs provided a reasonably clear showing that a mandate was based on the longstanding British legal concepts of trusts and guardianships.
In 1917, in advance of the end of WWI, the British had drafted and published a policy for the disposition of the captured Ottoman lands in Palestine. [6] Britain and France were at that time following the “secret’ Sykes-Picot Agreement in their disposition of Ottoman Lands. But in recognition of the historic association of the Jews with Palestine, the Balfour Declaration, a British Policy approved it its Cabinet, provided for exclusive political or national rights in Palestine to be granted to the Jews.
The 1920 agreement of the WWI Allies at San Remo, on the terms of the Mandate turned what had been only a British Policy approved by the Cabinet, into International Law. Under Article 22 of the League of NationsCovenant, the rights were to be provided in trust, [7].
We know this because the Balfour policy had been attacked as antidemocratic, as giving sovereignty to the Jewish people who constituted only 60,000 of the total population of 600,000 in Palestine as of 1917.
In Jerusalem, the Jews had had a plurality of the population since 1845 and a majority since 1863, but in all of Palestine, in 1917 they constituted only 10% of the population. Even US President Woodrow Wilson was advancing that argument that award of sovereignty to a minority population was inconsistent with his 14 points that provided, among other things, for majority control.
To counter this argument, which they conceded was a good one, Arnold Toynbee and James Namier in the British Foreign Office, in a memorandum of September 19, 1917 [8] said the problem of control by a minority was "imaginary" because they predicted that the grant would be placed in trust and would not vest sovereignty in the Jews until the Jews fit to govern it on modern European state.
In my view these included attainment of a majority population, defined boundaries, unified control over all within the boundaries, etc.. Providing a National Home for Jews in Palestine with the British running the government until the Jews could attain a majority status based on favored immigration from the Jews in the Diaspora would be a temporary measure and not antidemocratic. [9]
The statement of the purpose of the British Mandate for Palestine in its Preamble and Article 2 is entirely consistent with this view although not express. [10]
What was the National Home, a reconstituted state? No, it was a place for the Jewish people to feel at home while the immigration was going on that would ultimately give the Jews a majority of the population and a reconstituted state. So that the staff of the British Mandatory Power, will know how to do that: Article 4 provides for the Zionist Organization to advise the mandate government staff. Part of Article 6 requires the staff of the Mandatory Power for The Administration of Palestine, to facilitate immigration of Jews. The Mandate does NOT provide that immigration of any other peoples is to be facilitated. (emphasis added) Article 5 provides that none of the land is to be ceded to a foreign power.
Who were the beneficiaries of the trust? Only the Jews, both those already in Palestine and many more scattered worldwide in the Diaspora since the time of the Roman Empire conquest of Palestine.
Howard Grief, who has provided the seminal work on the legal foundations of Israel under International Law, says one can conclude this because they are the only people mentioned to be dealt with specially. [11]The non-Jews are referred to only to ensure their civil and religious rights are to be protected.
Because Article 22 of the League Covenant defined the relationship of Britain and the Jews as trustee and guardian with Jews in effect being beneficiaries and ward the Mandate essentially provided for a Jewish National Home that would be supervised by the British until its ward was capable of exercising sovereignty, including helping it attain a majority of population it needed to do that. It was charged with facilitating such immigration.
All this purpose was not expressed very clearly in the Mandate, likely to avoid stirring up the Arabs in time of war that might bleed off troops to maintain stability in Palestine. But the Arabs did understand that this was the case.
After the war, the Arabs were told by Winston Churchill that the request for self government by the inhabitants of Palestine would be denied until such time as the Jews had attained a majority of the population. They made that understanding clear in their arguments against Partition in the UNSCOP hearings in 1947. [12]
The Arabs argued in 1947 "It was clear from the beginning that if Palestine were to be turned into a Jewish national home, this would involve the indefinite denial of self-government until such time as the Jews were strong enough to take over the government; that pending such time, Palestine would have to be subjected to a foreign administration [of England] which had no basis in the consent of the population and of which the policy would be determined, not by consideration of the welfare of the population, but by the desire to assist in the settlement of an alien group; and that to make such a settlement possible the country would have to be cut off from the surrounding Arab lands by artificial frontiers, would be given a separate system of law, administration, finance, tariffs, and education and would thus inevitably lose some if not all of the Arab character."
But that is what the grantors had in mind and the Arabs knew it when they argued against Partition in 1947. [13] They had learned after WWI from Winston Churchill this was their intention.
"As the first Arab delegation to England stated in the course of its correspondence with Mr. Churchill, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, 'we are to understand ...that self-government will be granted as soon as the Jewish people in Palestine are sufficiently able through numbers and powers to benefit to the full by it, and not before.' "[14]
Prior to the publishing of the British Mandate the French attached a "proce’s verbal" in French shown only in the French Version. [15] This was their agreement only on their stated understanding that the Mandate would not eliminate any existing rights of the non-Jews in Palestine. The League had no objection to the process verbal.
The Mandate expressly preserved existing civil and religious rights of the non-Jews. It could not preserve their political rights because they had never had any. The preservation of their civil rights only protected their individual political rights, ie. their electoral rights. It did not protect their collective political rights or national rights, the right of sovereignty and political self-determination.
The Arabs in Palestine had always been ruled from afar. So the Mandate carried out the “process verbal”
Why, in 1917, did Britain establish a policy that gave a preference to the Jews? There were several reasons.
1. Britain's Prime Minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration was David Lloyd-George. Later, in 1923, he was the author of an article "The Jews and Palestine" [16] In it he revealed his view that the Arabs under Ottoman Rule had turned Palestine, the Biblical land of milk and honey into a malarial wasteland. He believed it could be remedied under a reconstituted Jewish State.
2. There was considerable sympathy among many Christian Evangelicals in England who thought the Jews should be restored to Palestine to flee from the pogroms of Russia and Poland. This sympathy did not extend to receiving them in England. British workmen had complained that Jews were flooding in to England and taking their jobs and working for less. This led to the Aliens Act of 1909 restricting Jewish immigration into England.
But the British recognized that the oppression of the Jews in Russia and Poland was very bad and they needed some place to go. [17]
3. Chaim Weismann, an ardent Zionist and also a good chemist, had helped Britain in the war by developing an inexpensive method of manufacturing acetone used in cordite for munitions and had given it to the British. It was a great help to the British war effort. [18]
4. And England, according to Winston Churchill, also desired to win over the Jews in Russia, many of them in the Bolshevik government, so that they might influence the new Marxist government to remain in battle with the Germans and Ottomans in WWI on the side of the Allies. He thought that the Balfour Declaration could sway them in British favor. [19]
There came a time after WWII that the British decided their effort to be trustee was simply costing it too much. They tried to obtain some funding from the United States, but the United States declined to do so. Britain finally decided to abandon its trusteeship and guardianship in 1948.
On the abandonment of its trusteeship by Britain in 1948, political rights that were the "trust res" (the thing put in trust) devolved to the Jews as beneficiaries or wards of the trust and vested in them the political rights permitting them to exercise sovereignty. These rights had survived the demise of the League of Nations by virtue of Article 80 of the UN Charter. [20] It should be expressly noted that the Jews did not receive these rights from the Partition Resolution.
By that time the Jewish population had increased significantly. In 1947 the UN General Assembly had recommended that the Jews give up some of its rights in an attempt to avoid violence that had been threatened by the Arabs if the Jews were to reconstitute their state in Palestine. The Jews agreed to give up some of the land over which they were to have political rights, but the Arabs rejected the recommendation and commenced a war.
It was by the Arabs starting a war that led to a Jewish population majority. Some 600,000 to 700,000 Arabs fled the country before even seeing an Israeli soldier. The wealthy left first, at the first foreshadowing of war. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Mahmoud Abbas wrote this in the official organ of the PLO, “Filanstin”, most of the rest left at the request of the Arab Higher Committee that wanted to get them out of the way of the Arab armies in the surrounding states. [21]
Many left because of a false report that the Irgun had committed a massacre of Arabs at Deir Yassin, that the Haganah, their political enemies did not dispute. A BBC program based on an interview of an Arab radio commentator at the time revealed he had been pushed into designating a hard fought battle as a massacre so as to provide an excuse for the invasion of surrounding armies. [22]
Many Arabs local to Palestine left; some remained.
But those that left could not go back because the Arab Armies did not prevail
In 1948 Israel declared Independence and vindicated its claim by force of arms against the assault of other Arab states surrounding it. It established an orderly unified stable control of its territory except for Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem which had been invaded and occupied by the Arab Legion in the East. This British supplied and led organization became the Army of Jordan. [23] In the South, the Egyptian Army was able to maintain its occupation of the Gaza Strip.
In 1920 the Ottoman Empire in Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres,had ceded its sovereignty in Palestine, which had been undisputed for 400 years, to a Mandatory Power in trust for a National Homeland for the Jews. [24] The Sevres Treaty was never ratified by the Turks who were concerned over Turkey’s boundaries in Europe and in adjacent areas in Asia, not in the Middle East and North. But these issues were finally settled in 1923 in the Treaty of Lausanne that left the agreements in the Middle East unchanged.
The trustee selected by the League of Nations at San Remo was Great Britain; the US had been another possibiility. Sovereignty, i.e. political rights, over the other 99% of the lands captured from the Ottomans in the Middle East was allocated to Arab and Muslim majorities in some 20 areas such as Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq but as in the case of Palestine, in mandates of guardianship as the inhabitants had had no prior experience in self rule.
While it was expected in 1920 that the Jewish Homeland would eventually become a state when immigration gave the Jews a majority of the population, at the time the Jews were incapable of exercising sovereignty although the "Jewish Agency" was exercising administrative authority of wide scope.
End Notes
1. Brand, Soviet Russia, The Creators of the PLO and the Palestinian People, http://www.think-israel.org/brand.russiatheenemy.html
2. Newt Gingrich, Campaign speech, 2012 Republican Primary
3. Brand, Was there a Palestine Arab National Movement at the End of the Ottoman Period? http://www.think-israel.org/brand.palnationalism.html
[4] Danny Ayalon, Israel's current Deputy Foreign Minister, The Truth About the West Bank /News/News.aspx/145836
[5] See the original documents in the Avalon Project at Yale University.http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/versailles_menu.asp
[6]The Balfour Declaration Texthttp://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/E210CA73E38D9E1D052565FA00705C61
[7] See the first two paragraphs of Article 22
[8] Mueller, Editor, Churchill as a Peacemaker, Feith, p. 224 n. 36 citing Sir Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return, p. 111-12
[9] Charles Hill, Trial of a Thousand Years, World Order and Islamism
[10] San Remo Convention Text of the Mandate
http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/San_Remo_Convention
[11] Howard Grief, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, p. 36
[12] The Future of Palestine" by Musa Alami with a foreword by Mr. Alami. Hermon Press, Beirut, London (1970)
[13] Id
[14] Id
[15] Salomon Benzsimra, Jewish People’s Rights to the Land of Israel, n. 68 See below
[16] David Lloyd George, The Jews and Palestine,http://einshalom.com/archives/210
[17] Ronald Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, A history of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York (1983) p. 90-94
[18] High Walls at 189
[19] Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews,Gilbert reveals the beliefs that moved the British government to issue the Declaration: “The War Cabinet hoped that, inspired by the promise of a national home in Palestine, Russian Jews would encourage Russia—then in the throes of revolution—to stay in the war,. . .http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2011/volume_3/number_1/churchill_international_jews_and_the_holocaust.php
[20]http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/unchart.htm#art80
[21] Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States Are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Wall Street Journal; June 5, 2003)
[22]http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_independence_war_diryassin.php
[23] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Legion
[24] http://athena.hri.org/docs/sevres/part3.html
Op-Ed: Part II: Israeli Sovereignty Over Judea and Samaria
Worth a careful read. Has the UN's Partition Plan any remaining significance for either the Arabs or the Jews?
Published: Monday, March 19, 2012 10:28 AM
Balfour resigned as foreign secretary following the Paris Conference in 1919, but continued in the Cabinet as lord president of the council.
In a memorandum addressed to new Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, he stated that the Balfour Declaration contradicted the letters of the covenant (referring to the League Covenant) the Anglo-French Declaration, and the instructions to the King-Crane Commission.
All of the other engagements contained pledges that the Arab or Muslim populations could establish national governments of their own choosing according to the principle of self-determination. Balfour explained: “… in Palestine we do not propose to even go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present (majority) inhabitants of the country though the American [King-Crane] Commission is going through the form of asking what they are.
Balfour stated explicitly to Curzon:
"The Four Great Powers [Britain, France, Italy and the United States] are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, and future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right." * * * * *
Balfour continued:
"I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs, but they will never say they want it. Whatever be the future of Palestine it is not now an ‘independent nation’, nor is it yet on the way to become one. Whatever deference should be paid to the views of those living there, the Powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the matter, to consult them.". . ."If Zionism is to influence the Jewish problem throughout the world, Palestine must be made available for the largest number of Jewish immigrants"
While the rights granted under the Trust restricted the Jews, when they did exercise sovereignty, from doing anything that would impair the civil or religious rights of the Arabs it was silent as to the political rights for the Arabs. The Mandate Law also became the domestic law of the UK and the US in 1924 as Treaty Law when, under a new American Administration, the Mandate became the subject of the Anglo American Convention of 1924.[24]
Perfidious Albion did not maintain the 1920 form of its proposed trust for very long. Circumstances changed, British interests changed, and the British Government also changed. President Wilson's opposition had delayed the issuance of the mandate as proposed in the initial draft submitted to the WWI Allies at San Remo. In the meantime, England had installed Feisal as the King of Syria.[25] After the Battle of Maysalun, in which the French Armed Forces defeated the Syrian Army the French deposed Feisal.[25] Abdullah, Feisal's brother, was furious. He marched his troops from their home in the Hejaz (in the Arabian Peninsula) to Eastern Palestine and made ready to attack the French in Syria.
Churchill did not want war between the Arabs and the French. In the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, Syria was in the French sphere of influence. Churchill gave Feisal the Kingdom of Iraq as a consolation prize[26] and gave Abdullah and his Hashemite tribe from the Arabian Peninsula Eastern Palestine in violation of the British Mandate.[27] The Mandate at San Remo had prohibited the Mandatory from ceding any land to a foreign nation. In the 1922 change, with a new Article 25, it formally approved delaying organized settlement by the Jews East of the Jordan River and informally gave TransJordan to Abdullah and his Hashemite Tribe from the Hejaz.
Article 25 preserved the prohibition of the Mandatory Power from discriminating among races or religions.[28] The land East of the JordanRiver became TransJordan and then Jordan and the Mandatory, despite the specific terms of the mandate, prohibited Jews, but not other ethnic groups, from settling there.
The British urging the League to adopt Article 25 was a breach of its fiduciary relationship as trustee with its beneficiary and as guardian, with its ward.[29] as were the policies in their White Papers of 1922, 1930 and the vicious White Paper of 1939 under the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, of Munich fame, that blocked many Jews from fleeing from the Nazi Holocaust. A vicious enforcement of the blockade ensued and directly disobeyed the Mandate's requirement to facilitate Jewish immigration.
During WWI the Hussein/McMahon correspondence with the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula led to a British offer to all Arabs in the Caliphate of self-government free from Turkish rule if they helped the British in the war.[30]
The Arabs local to Palestine, unlike the Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula that had been led by Lawrence declined the British offer of political self determination if they were to help the Allies, and preferred to fight for the Ottoman Turks who ruled from Constantinople. According to Winston Churchill, , "The Palestinian Arabs, of course, were for the most part fighting against us, ,,," [31]
"However the Jews assembled several battalions of Jewish soldiers that fought alongside the British in Palestine in WWI.[32]
At that point the Jews had, de facto, lost 78% of their Mandated beneficial right to sovereignty in Palestine, the land TransJordan or East of the Jordan River. Only 22% of the Mandate was left. After WWII, Article 80 of the UN Charter[33] expressly preserved the rights that had been granted by the League of Nations prior to its demise, i.e. the Jewish national rights, so the UN could not grant any of it to the Arabs. As I have noted, the Mandate itself prohibited the trustee from ceding any land in Palestine to a foreign Power.
Known as “the Palestine clause,” Article 80 was drafted by Jewish legal representatives including the liberal Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook) from the right-wing Irgun, and prominent Revisionist Ben-Zion Netanyahu (father of Bibi). It preserved the right of the Jewish people to “close settlement” throughout their remaining portion of Palestine west of the Jordan River.
In 1947 nevertheless, the UN did not “grant” but its General Assembly “recommended” (not a grant-- that would be inconsistent with the previous grant) a partition that offered a part of the area West of the Jordan (a part of the 22% remaining) to the Jews, in effect, releasing that part of the trust res (the political rights) to the Jews, and the remainder to the local Arabs, although the latter was unauthorized by the Mandate. In the UNSCOP hearings, the Arabs had threatened violence if the Jews were to have a state in any part of the Middle East. It is evident that the UN, by submitting to the Arabs extortion -- threats of violence -- and recommending still further partition of the remainder, hoped to avoid the violence.
In the San Remo Resolution, the Allies agreed
"To accept the terms of the Mandates Article as given below with reference to Palestine, on the understanding that there was inserted a process-verbal an undertaking by the Mandatory Power that this would not involve the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine;"[34]
What were those rights? The Mandate preserved the civil and religious rights of the local Arabs but did not create any political rights for them. The civil rights included individual political or electoral rights but not the collective political right of self-determination. It did not and could not "preserve" any collective political rights or "national rights" in Palestine for local Arabs in Palestine as they had never in history had any. It follows, therefore, as to political rights, the local Arabs were no worse off than they were under the Ottoman rule from 1520 to 1920, the British suzerainty from 1920 to 1948, or the Jordanian rule from 1948 to 1967.
But the Arabs didn't want the Jews to have any land with political rights for religious reasons, because it violated Islam to have any inroads on the Dar-al-Islam.[35] They engaged in jihad against the Jews and the Arab Higher Committee brought in the Armies of the surrounding Arab and Muslims States.
What was the effect of the abandonment of the trust by the trustee in 1948? Howard Grief provides a more legally precise reason,[36] but a simple way to look at it was that when the trustee quit his obligation, the only equitable thing to do was to give the rights to the beneficiary of the trust or the ward of the guardian.
Going back to 1922, by 1922 the British Government's interests had changed and the government had changed. In addition to its problems with the deposing of King Feisal, it was defending itself from charges that it had conferred political rights to the same land to the French, the Arabs and the Jews in three different agreements, the Sykes-Picot agreement, the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, and the Lord Balfour Declaration. So in 1922, Churchill, in a White Paper, tried wiggle out of England's obligation to the Jews by hinting broadly that a "national home" was not necessarily a state. However in private, many British officials agreed with the interpretation of the Zionists that a state would be established when a Jewish majority was achieved.[37]
In the British cabinet discussion during final consideration of the language of the Balfour Declaration, in responding to the opposition of Lord Curzon, who viewed the language as giving rise to the presumption that Great Britain favored a Jewish State, Lord Balfour stated: "As to the meaning of the words 'national home', to which the Zionists attach so much importance, he understood it to mean some form of British, American, or other protectorate, under which full facilities would be given to the Jews to work out their own salvation and to build up, by means of education, agriculture, and industry, a real center of national culture and focus of national life. It did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter for gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution." The key word here was 'early'; otherwise, the statement makes it quite clear that Balfour envisaged the eventual emergence of an independent Jewish state. Doubtless he had in mind a period somewhat longer than a mere thirty years; but the same could also be said of Chaim Weizmann."[38]
According to Lloyd George, one of Churchill's contemporaries, for example, the meaning was quite clear:
"There has been a good deal of discussion as to the meaning of the words "Jewish National Home" and whether it involved the setting up of a Jewish National State in Palestine. I have already quoted the words actually used by Mr. Balfour when he submitted the declaration to the Cabinet for its approval. They were not challenged at the time by any member present, and there could be no doubt as to what the Cabinet then had in their minds. It was not their idea that a Jewish State should be set up immediately by the Peace Treaty without reference to the wishes of the majority of the inhabitants.
On the other hand, it was contemplated that when the time arrived for according representative institutions to Palestine, if the Jews had meanwhile responded to the opportunity afforded them by the idea of a National Home and had become a definite majority of the inhabitants, then Palestine would thus become a Jewish Commonwealth. The notion that Jewish immigration would have to be artificially restricted in order to ensure that the Jews should be a permanent minority never entered into the heads of anyone engaged in framing the policy. That would have been regarded as unjust and as a fraud on the people to whom we were appealing."[39]
If there is any further doubt in the matter, Balfour himself told a Jewish gathering on February 7,1918: "My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state. It is up to them now; we have given them their great opportunity." [40]
Following an opinion of the renowned international lawyer Julius Stone that focused on the settlement question,[41] President Reagan and succeeding Presidents through George W. Bush maintained a US view that the Jewish Settlements in the West Bank were legal but as a policy matter should be discouraged because of their tendency to discourage the Peace Process. President Obama while continuing the position on policy has not specifically stated his view on legality of the settlements but has referred to them as “illegitimate”..
As to Jerusalem, East Jerusalem fell in 1948 [42] to an attack of the Arab Legion supplied and trained by the British and led by Sir John Bagot Glubb frequently referred to as "Glubb pasha". The Arab Legion later became the Jordanian Army.
The Jordanians demolished 58 synagogues and their contents, uprooted the tombstones of Jewish cemeteries, and used them for paving or building latrines, and built a latrine against the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, the single most holy site for Jews.[43] They expelled all the Jewish inhabitants of East Jerusalem and it became, as Adolph Hitler liked to say, judenrein or cleansed of Jews. In 1967 in the Six Day War, Israel drove the Jordanians east to the Jordan River and became in control of East Jerusalem.[44] They did not use their conquest to deprive the Moslems access to their holy sites in East Jerusalem as the Jordanians had done to the Jews and Christians.
Has the UN's Partition Plan any remaining significance for either the Arabs or the Jews?
No. According to acclaimed International Lawyer Julius Stone, ""The State of Israel is … not legally derived from the partition plan, but [in addition to the grants referred to above] rests (as do most other states in the world) on A. assertion of independence by its people and government, B. on the vindication of that independence by arms against assault by other states, and C. on the establishment of orderly government within territory under its stable control." The Partition plan had assigned the Jerusalem Metropolitan Area to the UN's International Control, at least temporarily for a period of 10 years. However in the war of 1948, the UN did nothing to vindicate that assignment by force of arms against the assault of the surrounding Arab states. Therefore nothing remains of that part of the Partition Plan either. [45]
In fact you read in the news and hear on TV a lot about Jewish settlements outside of Jerusalem and in East Jerusalem, but have you ever seen or heard a reference to new Arab settlements there? Since 1950 more than twice as many new settlements have been built by Arabs in the West Bank as have been built by Jews,[46] totally ignored by the press. They fill them with Lebanese, Iraqis, Jordanians and Egyptians, and, mirabile dictu, they are Palestinians. An Israeli Professor in Haifa named Steven Plaut suggests, tongue in cheek, that the Arabs must have changed the name of the area from Judea and Samaria to the "West Bank" so they wouldn't look silly in claiming that the Jews were illegally settling in eponymous Judea.
In June,1967, in the Six Day War , Israel recaptured Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem.[47] In 1994 Israel agreed that in return for a quitclaim of Jordan, to CisJordan, or the land of Palestine west of the Jordan River, it would release its claim to TransJordan, the land East of the Jordan to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. [48]
My understanding from many authors, is that the Arab claims for the Arab population in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem are overstated. Annexing the so called West Bank would not currently jeopardize a Jewish democracy in Israel. Nor would it in the long run as correct population growth shows Jewish population increase in the West Bank greater than that of the Arabs.[49]
I would only offer citizenship to those, Muslim, Jewish or Christian, who would take a loyalty oath to Israel. Others could remain with the status of permanent residents.
What about Gaza? It it were to keep shooting missiles at Israel, that would be a casus belli and Israel should take it over. Also, when it ceded its sovereignty over Gaza to the Arabs living there, the cession was under a tacit agreement that the Arabs would quit their attacks on Israel. They haven't. [50] A material breach of that obligation also justifies a takeover. Although the people in Gaza were ceded Israel’s political or national rights to the Gaza Strip, they never met the requirements for sovereignty
The first of these is: are the Arabs local to Palestine a “people”? No, as noted above they are an invented people. Another requirement of a separate nation-state is unified control. When armed truces were broken by the Gazans, Hamas, that claims control, always blames the problem on other terrorist organizations. Since Israel’s takeover would not be taking land of another sovereign, the land would not be occupied, but disputed with Israel having the far better claim.[51] I would suggest that until further Jewish population increase over that of the non-Jewish population justifies annexation of Gaza, that the Gazans be authorized Home Rule, but no vote in Israel’s policies.
Israel should retain the right to eliminate candidates or parties that are terrorists. That should meet the requirements of the French "procès verbal" as the Arabs in Gaza never had the right to vote on the policies of the Ottoman Empire.
In sum, it appears that there are five separate views that justify Israeli sovereignty over CisJordan. These are
1. The San Remo Resolution of 1920 which is justification under International Law,
2. The Anglo-American Convention of 1924 makes the Balfour Policy Treaty law and therefore the Domestic Law of the US and the UK,
3. Facts occurring after 1948, including Jordan’s aggressive war in invading a land in which the Jews had been awarded political rights, and the defensive war by the Jews retaking it resulted in acclaimed International Lawyers holding that the West Bank was disputed, not occupied, and the Jews had the better claim to it.
In the Partition of 1947, the UN General Assembly recommended an award of part to the Arabs, that was not a grant because it had already been granted to the Jews. The Jews assented, but the Arabs declined. The Jews still had their rights under San Remo. The Arabs had no rights, certainly not the inalienable rights continuously claimed by Arafat and Abbas.
4. In 1948 Israel declared independence, established unified control over its territory and defended it by blood and treasure. That is historically the way sovereignty arises.
5. Under canon law the Jews had exclusive rights granted by G-d as provided in the Old Testament.
These San Remo rights make possible a one state solution to the current Arab Israeli conflict in Palestine. Those in the Diaspora are also intended as the beneficiaries of the San Remo grant. However in writing this from the relative safety of suburban Washington, DC, it is not our intention to urge this course on the heroic Israelis who currently face an added existential threat from Iran. Note we say relative safety.
With Iran’s hurrying development of nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles, no one is safe. This is only to confirm the necessity and legality of a "one Jewish state solution" that others, before us, have already suggested. It is the Israelis who must choose.
Mr. Salomon Benzimra contributed to this article. He is the author of "The Jewish People's Rights to the Land of Israel", available in "Amazon-Kindle edition".
End Notes
[24] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration_of_1917
[25] http://www.answers.com/topic/faisal-i-ibn-hussein
[26] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18250.htm
[27] Mandate Article 5http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/britman.htm
[28] Article 15. It is preserved by Article 25
[29]http://www.mythsandfacts.com/conflict/mandate_for_palestine/mandate_for_palestine.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary
[30] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon%E2%80%93Hussein_Correspondence
[31]http://cojs.org/cojswiki/What_Mr._Churchill_Said_in_1939_About_the_Palestine_White_Paper:_Excerpt
[32] http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/il%5Egb.html#wwi
[33] http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/unchart.htm#art80
[34] Text of San Remo Resolution, section (a) I am advised it appears only in two paragraphs of the Agreement, written in Frenchhttp://www.cfr.org/israel/san-remo-resolution/p15248
[35] http://islamizationwatch.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-does-dar-al-harb-dar-al-islam-dar.html Spain in the dar al Harbhttp://countercultureconservative.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/dar-al-islam-muslim-worshippers-squat-spanish-cathedral/
[36] Grief refers to the doctrine of "acquired rights" codified in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Article 70 Article 70 1 b) and the legal doctrine of "estoppel" See: Grief at pp.175,176 (The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law)
[37] http://www.answers.com/topic/balfour-declaration-1917
[38] High Walls of Jerusalem, at 611
[39] David Lloyd-George, Memoirs 736-7.
[40]http://www.irfi.org/articles2/articles_2301_2350/Balfour%27s%20deceit.HTM
[41] “Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations” which dealt with the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In it, Stone set forth the central principles of international law upon which Israel’s right to settle the West Bank is based and discussed the inapplicability of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the case of Israeli settlement.
Stone drew upon the writings of Professor Stephen Schwebel, former judge on the Hague’s International Court of Justice (1981-2000), who distinguished between territory acquired in an "aggressive conquest" (such as Japanese conquests during the 1930s and Nazi conquests during World War II) and territory taken in a war of self-defense (for example, Israel’s capture of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 war). He also distinguished between the taking of territory that is legally held by another nation (such as the Japanese occupation of Chinese territory and the Nazi Germany occupation of France, Holland, Belgium and other European lands) as opposed to the taking of territory illegally held. The latter applies to the West Bank and Gaza, which were not considered the legal territories of any High Contracting Party when Israel won control of them; their occupation after 1948 by Jordan and Egypt was illegal and neither country ever had lawful or recognized sovereignty. The last legal sovereignty over the territories was that of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate which encouraged Jewish settlement of the land. See also a discussion of Stone's work, by Andrew Dahdal: “A Reflection On The Views Of Julius Stone And The Applicability Of International Law To The Middle East Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations” which dealt with the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Finally, see a video with Danny Ayalon, Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel, adopting and illustrating the position of Stephen Schwebel and Julius Stone.
[42] http://www.historynet.com/glubb-pasha-and-the-arab-legion.htm
[43] http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1948to1967_holysites.phphttp://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=443&PID=0&IID=3052 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Wall
[44] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Jerusalem
[45] http://www.dore-gold.com/2011/11/the-palestinians-resurrect-the-partition-plan.php
[46] Draft Report of Arab Settlement Activity in the West Bank http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/settlementreport.html
[47] Best account is still Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2003) See also, his Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present
[48] Israel - Jordan, Treaty of Peacehttp://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace%20Process/Guide%20to%20the%20Peace%20Process/Israel-Jordan%20Peace%20Treaty
[49] http://www.biu.ac.il/Besa/perspectives15.htmlhttp://www.ijn.com/columns/view-from-denver/2220-the-myth-of-the-palestinian-arab-womb
[50] 660 rockets and 404 mortar shells fired into Israel since the end of Operation Cast Lead until the end of February, 2012.
March 1, 2012 Palestinians fired three rockets toward Ashkelon. The projectiles landed in the Ashkelon Coast Regional Council, causing no injuries or damage.
March 2, Palestinians fired a Qassam rocket into the Eshkol Regional Council, causing no injuries or damage., March 3
After nightfall, Palestinians fired a Qassam rocket into the Eshkol Regional Council, causing no injuries or damage, March 4. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip fired two Qassam rockets at Israel. One exploded in the Sdot Negev Regional Council
[51] http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp470.htm
The title of this piece should be a slogan for those who are considering the two-state solution as a solution to the Arab Israeli conflict.
You needn't "Remember the Alamo" any longer. There are lots of Texans who will do that for you. Remember the Qurayzah - and the Atalena as well.
What happened to Alan Dershowitz's two-state solution to the Arab Israeli conflict on the way to the forum? See "The Case against the Left and Right One State Solution" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/the-case-against-the-left_b_1370294.html
Did a dog eat up his homework? He hasn't said why he has overlooked so much.
What did he overlook?
1. He over looked 38,000 broken or defaced tombstones at the 3000 year old Cemetery at the Mount of Olives, destroyed when the Jordanians had control [from 1948 to 1967] of the same land he wants to give to those Arabs local to Palestine -- Arabs that the Soviet dezinformatsia want us to call "The Palestinian Arab People".
Be sure to keep the word "Arab' in that designation otherwise someone might think you were referring to Trumpeldor and the Jews who formed the Palestinian brigade to help the WWI Allies, instead of those Arabs in Palestine.
Those "Palestinian Arab People" turned down an offer by the British to have their own state. Why? Because they could help out those occupying and colonialist rulers from Turkey, the Ottomans by fighting on their side against the British.
2. He forgot about how people in Israel and around the world missed visiting Rachel's Tomb, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the Christian sites in and around Bethlehem, and even the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. He forgot that when the Jews weren't looking at the Western Wall, the Jordanians built a latrine against it, removed by its liberators in June, 1967.
I visited Rachel's Tomb last may when the UN designated it as a mosque. I bought some genuine red threads from the tomb to give to my daughters and granddaughters and daughter's in law and the mother of one of my daughters in law who lives in Japan. (She loved it.)
When I was at the Tomb, a nice man asked me to put on Tefillin, and when I told him I didn't remember how, he said he would help.
That was also the day that a gang of so called Palestinians threw rocks at the guardians of their "mosque", the Jewish border patrol. Fortunately I had left by then. I had talked to those guards and they posed for a picture with us. They are nice guys. I don't know why "The Palestinian Arab People" threw rocks at them.
3. Alan forgot about the Treaty of Huddibyah and the Jewish tribe of Qurayza, whose 500 men, after they had surrendered to Mohammed's Quraysh tribe, had their arms tied behind them and their heads cut off, so fortunately they couldn't see their wives led off to Arab harems and their young children brought up under sharia.
He forgot about the time when Arafat was being criticized by "other Palestinians" ? (he was an Egyptian) for negotiation with the Jews instead of killing them. He winked at them and said in Arabic, "Huddibyah" -- "Remember the Qurayza" (the predecessor in the Middle East to the Two State Solution") that worked out well for the Arabs and not so well for the Qurayza who lost their heads.
The Qurayza had entered into a two-tribe solution when they were stronger than the Muslims, the treaty of Huddibyah. When Mohammed's Quraysh tribe grew in power, they canceled the treaty and wiped the Qurayza off the face of the earth. Hmmm. I've heard that expression before. Isn't that what Ahmadinejad says?.
4. What will happen to those beautiful green areas planted by the Jews since 1967? Will they go the same way as those greenhouses left behind for the Arabs of Gaza by politically correct philanthropists?.
Did Professor Dershowitz forget why Prime Minister David Lloyd George was so anxious for Lord Balfour to finish his Declaration? Lloyd-George thought that the Arabs in Palestine, whom the Soviets now want us to call Palestinians, turned the Biblical land of Milk and Honey into a malarial wasteland.
Alan Dershowitz should read (or reread) "The Jews and Palestine" by the former prime minister, published in 1923 but fortunately Jews at Ein Shalom have put it on the internet and kept it there. http://einshalom.com/archives/210
5. Young Alan forgot about those exclusive political rights the WWI Allies granted to the Jews, in trust until they could attain the things they would need to become a model of a modern European state.
He forgot about how the Arabs in Palestine, according to Mahmoud Abbas who wrote about it in Filastin, the official organ of the PLO, had voluntarily created a mass exodus from Palestine at the behest of the Arab Higher Executive Committee who said to them: "We are about to invade Palestine to clean up after Hitler, by annihilating those Jews he left behind. Leave your homes for a couple of weeks and after we finish them off, you can come back -- if you don't, you will be considered to be a traitor; you remember what we do to traitors, don't you? We tie them upside down on telephone poles, slit open the bellies and pull out their guts, a blessing for Allah's flies".
And then when they got out and the invading armies surrounding Palestine never got in, the same guys threw them into prison (eternal refugee) camps so their hatred of the Jews would fester.
He forgot that after the exodus of those Arabs, and arrival of new immigrants from the aftermath of the Holocaust and from Russia, the Jews had the population majority that would allow their beneficial grant of political rights to mature into a legal grant. Part 2:6.
He forgot that the British Mandate for Palestine was a trust agreement, so that England, who volunteered to be the trustee, and guardian, assumed a fiduciary obligation to the beneficiaries of the trust, and to his wards in Palestine. See Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, paragraphs 1,2.
And he forgot that it was while England was abusing its fiduciary obligations, that it gave away what British Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, the political officer of England at the time of the Balfour Declaration, called some three-quarters of the land that had been pledged to the Jews. Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diaries 1917-1956 p. 118.
On an earlier page, in a foonote inserted 38 years later when the diaries were published as a book, he changes his mind, but as a lawyer, I prefer the contemporaneous account.
7. Alan forgot to read Sheik Abdullah Azzam's books on how much priority must be assigned to getting infidels off any part of the dar al Islam, the land formerly controlled exclusively by Muslims, and how the two state solution would leave infidels still in control, be it ever so small, of some of the dar al Islam. Azzam taught Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden probably killed him and his two boys.
So, the best things is to assign young Alan some reading so he could learn about all these things and come back with a better paper:
1. Article 22 of the League of Nations covenant drafted by Jan Smuts. The Council of Ten put it into Part I of the Treaty of Versailles and it became the Covenant or charter of the League of Nations. By reading the first two paragraphs of Article 22, Alan will learn that the mandate was based on the old British concepts of a trust agreement or guardianship.
2. The language of the French process-verbal (he must get it translated - Mr. Salomon Benzimra can do it for him. Mr. Benzimra was born in Tangiers when it was an International Area (it is now Morrocco) went to school in Bordeaux and now resides in Toronto where one of the two official languages is French. He not only speaks French very well, he is the author of the excellent book, published last November on Kindle, entitled "The Jewish People's Rights to the land of Israel." and knows more about the San Remo agreement than some might want to know. Maybe one of them is Alan Dershowitz.
3. One of Shlomo Sand's fans has been at Harvard or UCLA, Saree Macdisi, pushing a "one [Arab Majority] state solution to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict but leaving out the bracketed worlds. He has been telling the students there that the Jewish People don't exist. Sand likely got that theory from Arthur Koestler who wrote a good novel on the subject matter.
He is a terrific novelist. Have you read his "Darkness at Noon"?
Shlomo Sand seems to believe this novelist's theory, but a historian should have done more than a novelist to conclude there is no connection between Palestine and the Ashkenazis whom he claims are not Jews. How about the more than 50% of the Israelis that are Sephardic Jews that lived in the Middle East from the time of the Roman conquest, long before Mohammed invented Islam? Why is he silent about them? How about the DNA studies that provide proof positive that the Ashkenazis and the Sephardic Jews are the only remaining indigenous people of Palestine. Professor Dershowitz can look at them.
5. I have put together some of these solutions and the facts and legal conclusions in a piece written for the blog Middle East and Terrorism and edited by the charming and friendly Sally Zahav. It is called: Three Solutions to the Arab-Israeli Conflict. and can be found on the internet at: http://israelagainstterror.blogspot.com/2012/03 It outlines the three solutions being pushed by the extremists on the left and right (according Alan Dershowitz) as well as the liberal politically correct two-state solution he and Barack Obama are pushing. He should look also at the two part op ed I have written
Part 1: /Articles/Article.aspx/11408
Part 2: /Articles/Article.aspx/11412
about the evidence I have gathered on the purpose of the Balfour Declaration, the language in the cession of Ottoman sovereignty in the Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres (as amended by the Treaty of Lausanne). He may or may not agree with me that evidence of purpose is admissible in the US, the UK and Canada as well as other nation-states to clarify ambiguity in the language of a statute such as the British Mandate for Palestine which became International Law.
He can find it in Arutz Sheva, edited by Rochel Sylvetsky, in English on the Internet.:
Finally he can read "Soviet Russia, the Creators of the PLO and the Palestinian People.http://www.think-israel.org/brand.russiatheenemy.html , "Was there a Palestine Arab National Movement at the End of the Ottoman Period?" http://www.think-israel.org/brand.palnationalism.html , and "The Third Wave" http://www.think-israel.org/brand.thirdwave.html
These are all in the Thin-Israel.org blog edited by Dr. Bernice Lipkin. To make absolutely sure he hasn't forgotten anything, he should read Col. Richard Meinertzhagen's "Middle East Diaries, 1917-1956" - a Dane who became a British Army "political officer" in the Middle East when all this was being decided. It is hard to find and pricey when you find it, but the Harvard Harry Elkins Widener Library, donated by a distant relative of mine, can undoubtedly find a copy for him.
After Harvard excluded me from their "free and open marketplace of ideas" as claimed in their press release for their two day "One State Conference", I wrote a codicil to my will, excluding them from it.
6. Alan should take his two-state solution to UCLA too. They had a "Son of Harvard Conference" conference and Judea Pearl, a faculty member, told me that they were all so politically correct -- that it was impossible to present to the students at UCLA the idea of "one lawful state to the West of the Jordan River" - a Jewish one - as a solution to the Arab Israeli conflict.
Alan has a politically correct solution so he might be given access there although the Muslim influence there is scary. Alan would give them the second leg of the stool, and so they would would have a strong presentation of the one Arab majority state solutions and Alan's politically correct two-state solution, but not the third leg. The students would not get a balanced presentation, but that does not seem to matter anymore in academia.
In a memorandum addressed to new Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, he stated that the Balfour Declaration contradicted the letters of the covenant (referring to the League Covenant) the Anglo-French Declaration, and the instructions to the King-Crane Commission.
All of the other engagements contained pledges that the Arab or Muslim populations could establish national governments of their own choosing according to the principle of self-determination. Balfour explained: “… in Palestine we do not propose to even go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present (majority) inhabitants of the country though the American [King-Crane] Commission is going through the form of asking what they are.
Balfour stated explicitly to Curzon:
"The Four Great Powers [Britain, France, Italy and the United States] are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, and future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right." * * * * *
Balfour continued:
"I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs, but they will never say they want it. Whatever be the future of Palestine it is not now an ‘independent nation’, nor is it yet on the way to become one. Whatever deference should be paid to the views of those living there, the Powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the matter, to consult them.". . ."If Zionism is to influence the Jewish problem throughout the world, Palestine must be made available for the largest number of Jewish immigrants"
While the rights granted under the Trust restricted the Jews, when they did exercise sovereignty, from doing anything that would impair the civil or religious rights of the Arabs it was silent as to the political rights for the Arabs. The Mandate Law also became the domestic law of the UK and the US in 1924 as Treaty Law when, under a new American Administration, the Mandate became the subject of the Anglo American Convention of 1924.[24]
Perfidious Albion did not maintain the 1920 form of its proposed trust for very long. Circumstances changed, British interests changed, and the British Government also changed. President Wilson's opposition had delayed the issuance of the mandate as proposed in the initial draft submitted to the WWI Allies at San Remo. In the meantime, England had installed Feisal as the King of Syria.[25] After the Battle of Maysalun, in which the French Armed Forces defeated the Syrian Army the French deposed Feisal.[25] Abdullah, Feisal's brother, was furious. He marched his troops from their home in the Hejaz (in the Arabian Peninsula) to Eastern Palestine and made ready to attack the French in Syria.
Churchill did not want war between the Arabs and the French. In the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, Syria was in the French sphere of influence. Churchill gave Feisal the Kingdom of Iraq as a consolation prize[26] and gave Abdullah and his Hashemite tribe from the Arabian Peninsula Eastern Palestine in violation of the British Mandate.[27] The Mandate at San Remo had prohibited the Mandatory from ceding any land to a foreign nation. In the 1922 change, with a new Article 25, it formally approved delaying organized settlement by the Jews East of the Jordan River and informally gave TransJordan to Abdullah and his Hashemite Tribe from the Hejaz.
Article 25 preserved the prohibition of the Mandatory Power from discriminating among races or religions.[28] The land East of the JordanRiver became TransJordan and then Jordan and the Mandatory, despite the specific terms of the mandate, prohibited Jews, but not other ethnic groups, from settling there.
The British urging the League to adopt Article 25 was a breach of its fiduciary relationship as trustee with its beneficiary and as guardian, with its ward.[29] as were the policies in their White Papers of 1922, 1930 and the vicious White Paper of 1939 under the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, of Munich fame, that blocked many Jews from fleeing from the Nazi Holocaust. A vicious enforcement of the blockade ensued and directly disobeyed the Mandate's requirement to facilitate Jewish immigration.
During WWI the Hussein/McMahon correspondence with the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula led to a British offer to all Arabs in the Caliphate of self-government free from Turkish rule if they helped the British in the war.[30]
The Arabs local to Palestine, unlike the Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula that had been led by Lawrence declined the British offer of political self determination if they were to help the Allies, and preferred to fight for the Ottoman Turks who ruled from Constantinople. According to Winston Churchill, , "The Palestinian Arabs, of course, were for the most part fighting against us, ,,," [31]
"However the Jews assembled several battalions of Jewish soldiers that fought alongside the British in Palestine in WWI.[32]
At that point the Jews had, de facto, lost 78% of their Mandated beneficial right to sovereignty in Palestine, the land TransJordan or East of the Jordan River. Only 22% of the Mandate was left. After WWII, Article 80 of the UN Charter[33] expressly preserved the rights that had been granted by the League of Nations prior to its demise, i.e. the Jewish national rights, so the UN could not grant any of it to the Arabs. As I have noted, the Mandate itself prohibited the trustee from ceding any land in Palestine to a foreign Power.
Known as “the Palestine clause,” Article 80 was drafted by Jewish legal representatives including the liberal Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook) from the right-wing Irgun, and prominent Revisionist Ben-Zion Netanyahu (father of Bibi). It preserved the right of the Jewish people to “close settlement” throughout their remaining portion of Palestine west of the Jordan River.
In 1947 nevertheless, the UN did not “grant” but its General Assembly “recommended” (not a grant-- that would be inconsistent with the previous grant) a partition that offered a part of the area West of the Jordan (a part of the 22% remaining) to the Jews, in effect, releasing that part of the trust res (the political rights) to the Jews, and the remainder to the local Arabs, although the latter was unauthorized by the Mandate. In the UNSCOP hearings, the Arabs had threatened violence if the Jews were to have a state in any part of the Middle East. It is evident that the UN, by submitting to the Arabs extortion -- threats of violence -- and recommending still further partition of the remainder, hoped to avoid the violence.
In the San Remo Resolution, the Allies agreed
"To accept the terms of the Mandates Article as given below with reference to Palestine, on the understanding that there was inserted a process-verbal an undertaking by the Mandatory Power that this would not involve the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine;"[34]
What were those rights? The Mandate preserved the civil and religious rights of the local Arabs but did not create any political rights for them. The civil rights included individual political or electoral rights but not the collective political right of self-determination. It did not and could not "preserve" any collective political rights or "national rights" in Palestine for local Arabs in Palestine as they had never in history had any. It follows, therefore, as to political rights, the local Arabs were no worse off than they were under the Ottoman rule from 1520 to 1920, the British suzerainty from 1920 to 1948, or the Jordanian rule from 1948 to 1967.
But the Arabs didn't want the Jews to have any land with political rights for religious reasons, because it violated Islam to have any inroads on the Dar-al-Islam.[35] They engaged in jihad against the Jews and the Arab Higher Committee brought in the Armies of the surrounding Arab and Muslims States.
What was the effect of the abandonment of the trust by the trustee in 1948? Howard Grief provides a more legally precise reason,[36] but a simple way to look at it was that when the trustee quit his obligation, the only equitable thing to do was to give the rights to the beneficiary of the trust or the ward of the guardian.
Going back to 1922, by 1922 the British Government's interests had changed and the government had changed. In addition to its problems with the deposing of King Feisal, it was defending itself from charges that it had conferred political rights to the same land to the French, the Arabs and the Jews in three different agreements, the Sykes-Picot agreement, the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, and the Lord Balfour Declaration. So in 1922, Churchill, in a White Paper, tried wiggle out of England's obligation to the Jews by hinting broadly that a "national home" was not necessarily a state. However in private, many British officials agreed with the interpretation of the Zionists that a state would be established when a Jewish majority was achieved.[37]
In the British cabinet discussion during final consideration of the language of the Balfour Declaration, in responding to the opposition of Lord Curzon, who viewed the language as giving rise to the presumption that Great Britain favored a Jewish State, Lord Balfour stated: "As to the meaning of the words 'national home', to which the Zionists attach so much importance, he understood it to mean some form of British, American, or other protectorate, under which full facilities would be given to the Jews to work out their own salvation and to build up, by means of education, agriculture, and industry, a real center of national culture and focus of national life. It did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter for gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution." The key word here was 'early'; otherwise, the statement makes it quite clear that Balfour envisaged the eventual emergence of an independent Jewish state. Doubtless he had in mind a period somewhat longer than a mere thirty years; but the same could also be said of Chaim Weizmann."[38]
According to Lloyd George, one of Churchill's contemporaries, for example, the meaning was quite clear:
"There has been a good deal of discussion as to the meaning of the words "Jewish National Home" and whether it involved the setting up of a Jewish National State in Palestine. I have already quoted the words actually used by Mr. Balfour when he submitted the declaration to the Cabinet for its approval. They were not challenged at the time by any member present, and there could be no doubt as to what the Cabinet then had in their minds. It was not their idea that a Jewish State should be set up immediately by the Peace Treaty without reference to the wishes of the majority of the inhabitants.
On the other hand, it was contemplated that when the time arrived for according representative institutions to Palestine, if the Jews had meanwhile responded to the opportunity afforded them by the idea of a National Home and had become a definite majority of the inhabitants, then Palestine would thus become a Jewish Commonwealth. The notion that Jewish immigration would have to be artificially restricted in order to ensure that the Jews should be a permanent minority never entered into the heads of anyone engaged in framing the policy. That would have been regarded as unjust and as a fraud on the people to whom we were appealing."[39]
If there is any further doubt in the matter, Balfour himself told a Jewish gathering on February 7,1918: "My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state. It is up to them now; we have given them their great opportunity." [40]
Following an opinion of the renowned international lawyer Julius Stone that focused on the settlement question,[41] President Reagan and succeeding Presidents through George W. Bush maintained a US view that the Jewish Settlements in the West Bank were legal but as a policy matter should be discouraged because of their tendency to discourage the Peace Process. President Obama while continuing the position on policy has not specifically stated his view on legality of the settlements but has referred to them as “illegitimate”..
As to Jerusalem, East Jerusalem fell in 1948 [42] to an attack of the Arab Legion supplied and trained by the British and led by Sir John Bagot Glubb frequently referred to as "Glubb pasha". The Arab Legion later became the Jordanian Army.
The Jordanians demolished 58 synagogues and their contents, uprooted the tombstones of Jewish cemeteries, and used them for paving or building latrines, and built a latrine against the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, the single most holy site for Jews.[43] They expelled all the Jewish inhabitants of East Jerusalem and it became, as Adolph Hitler liked to say, judenrein or cleansed of Jews. In 1967 in the Six Day War, Israel drove the Jordanians east to the Jordan River and became in control of East Jerusalem.[44] They did not use their conquest to deprive the Moslems access to their holy sites in East Jerusalem as the Jordanians had done to the Jews and Christians.
Has the UN's Partition Plan any remaining significance for either the Arabs or the Jews?
No. According to acclaimed International Lawyer Julius Stone, ""The State of Israel is … not legally derived from the partition plan, but [in addition to the grants referred to above] rests (as do most other states in the world) on A. assertion of independence by its people and government, B. on the vindication of that independence by arms against assault by other states, and C. on the establishment of orderly government within territory under its stable control." The Partition plan had assigned the Jerusalem Metropolitan Area to the UN's International Control, at least temporarily for a period of 10 years. However in the war of 1948, the UN did nothing to vindicate that assignment by force of arms against the assault of the surrounding Arab states. Therefore nothing remains of that part of the Partition Plan either. [45]
In fact you read in the news and hear on TV a lot about Jewish settlements outside of Jerusalem and in East Jerusalem, but have you ever seen or heard a reference to new Arab settlements there? Since 1950 more than twice as many new settlements have been built by Arabs in the West Bank as have been built by Jews,[46] totally ignored by the press. They fill them with Lebanese, Iraqis, Jordanians and Egyptians, and, mirabile dictu, they are Palestinians. An Israeli Professor in Haifa named Steven Plaut suggests, tongue in cheek, that the Arabs must have changed the name of the area from Judea and Samaria to the "West Bank" so they wouldn't look silly in claiming that the Jews were illegally settling in eponymous Judea.
In June,1967, in the Six Day War , Israel recaptured Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem.[47] In 1994 Israel agreed that in return for a quitclaim of Jordan, to CisJordan, or the land of Palestine west of the Jordan River, it would release its claim to TransJordan, the land East of the Jordan to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. [48]
My understanding from many authors, is that the Arab claims for the Arab population in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem are overstated. Annexing the so called West Bank would not currently jeopardize a Jewish democracy in Israel. Nor would it in the long run as correct population growth shows Jewish population increase in the West Bank greater than that of the Arabs.[49]
I would only offer citizenship to those, Muslim, Jewish or Christian, who would take a loyalty oath to Israel. Others could remain with the status of permanent residents.
What about Gaza? It it were to keep shooting missiles at Israel, that would be a casus belli and Israel should take it over. Also, when it ceded its sovereignty over Gaza to the Arabs living there, the cession was under a tacit agreement that the Arabs would quit their attacks on Israel. They haven't. [50] A material breach of that obligation also justifies a takeover. Although the people in Gaza were ceded Israel’s political or national rights to the Gaza Strip, they never met the requirements for sovereignty
The first of these is: are the Arabs local to Palestine a “people”? No, as noted above they are an invented people. Another requirement of a separate nation-state is unified control. When armed truces were broken by the Gazans, Hamas, that claims control, always blames the problem on other terrorist organizations. Since Israel’s takeover would not be taking land of another sovereign, the land would not be occupied, but disputed with Israel having the far better claim.[51] I would suggest that until further Jewish population increase over that of the non-Jewish population justifies annexation of Gaza, that the Gazans be authorized Home Rule, but no vote in Israel’s policies.
Israel should retain the right to eliminate candidates or parties that are terrorists. That should meet the requirements of the French "procès verbal" as the Arabs in Gaza never had the right to vote on the policies of the Ottoman Empire.
In sum, it appears that there are five separate views that justify Israeli sovereignty over CisJordan. These are
1. The San Remo Resolution of 1920 which is justification under International Law,
2. The Anglo-American Convention of 1924 makes the Balfour Policy Treaty law and therefore the Domestic Law of the US and the UK,
3. Facts occurring after 1948, including Jordan’s aggressive war in invading a land in which the Jews had been awarded political rights, and the defensive war by the Jews retaking it resulted in acclaimed International Lawyers holding that the West Bank was disputed, not occupied, and the Jews had the better claim to it.
In the Partition of 1947, the UN General Assembly recommended an award of part to the Arabs, that was not a grant because it had already been granted to the Jews. The Jews assented, but the Arabs declined. The Jews still had their rights under San Remo. The Arabs had no rights, certainly not the inalienable rights continuously claimed by Arafat and Abbas.
4. In 1948 Israel declared independence, established unified control over its territory and defended it by blood and treasure. That is historically the way sovereignty arises.
5. Under canon law the Jews had exclusive rights granted by G-d as provided in the Old Testament.
These San Remo rights make possible a one state solution to the current Arab Israeli conflict in Palestine. Those in the Diaspora are also intended as the beneficiaries of the San Remo grant. However in writing this from the relative safety of suburban Washington, DC, it is not our intention to urge this course on the heroic Israelis who currently face an added existential threat from Iran. Note we say relative safety.
With Iran’s hurrying development of nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles, no one is safe. This is only to confirm the necessity and legality of a "one Jewish state solution" that others, before us, have already suggested. It is the Israelis who must choose.
Mr. Salomon Benzimra contributed to this article. He is the author of "The Jewish People's Rights to the Land of Israel", available in "Amazon-Kindle edition".
End Notes
[24] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration_of_1917
[25] http://www.answers.com/topic/faisal-i-ibn-hussein
[26] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18250.htm
[27] Mandate Article 5http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/britman.htm
[28] Article 15. It is preserved by Article 25
[29]http://www.mythsandfacts.com/conflict/mandate_for_palestine/mandate_for_palestine.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary
[30] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon%E2%80%93Hussein_Correspondence
[31]http://cojs.org/cojswiki/What_Mr._Churchill_Said_in_1939_About_the_Palestine_White_Paper:_Excerpt
[32] http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/il%5Egb.html#wwi
[33] http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/unchart.htm#art80
[34] Text of San Remo Resolution, section (a) I am advised it appears only in two paragraphs of the Agreement, written in Frenchhttp://www.cfr.org/israel/san-remo-resolution/p15248
[35] http://islamizationwatch.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-does-dar-al-harb-dar-al-islam-dar.html Spain in the dar al Harbhttp://countercultureconservative.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/dar-al-islam-muslim-worshippers-squat-spanish-cathedral/
[36] Grief refers to the doctrine of "acquired rights" codified in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Article 70 Article 70 1 b) and the legal doctrine of "estoppel" See: Grief at pp.175,176 (The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law)
[37] http://www.answers.com/topic/balfour-declaration-1917
[38] High Walls of Jerusalem, at 611
[39] David Lloyd-George, Memoirs 736-7.
[40]http://www.irfi.org/articles2/articles_2301_2350/Balfour%27s%20deceit.HTM
[41] “Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations” which dealt with the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In it, Stone set forth the central principles of international law upon which Israel’s right to settle the West Bank is based and discussed the inapplicability of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the case of Israeli settlement.
Stone drew upon the writings of Professor Stephen Schwebel, former judge on the Hague’s International Court of Justice (1981-2000), who distinguished between territory acquired in an "aggressive conquest" (such as Japanese conquests during the 1930s and Nazi conquests during World War II) and territory taken in a war of self-defense (for example, Israel’s capture of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 war). He also distinguished between the taking of territory that is legally held by another nation (such as the Japanese occupation of Chinese territory and the Nazi Germany occupation of France, Holland, Belgium and other European lands) as opposed to the taking of territory illegally held. The latter applies to the West Bank and Gaza, which were not considered the legal territories of any High Contracting Party when Israel won control of them; their occupation after 1948 by Jordan and Egypt was illegal and neither country ever had lawful or recognized sovereignty. The last legal sovereignty over the territories was that of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate which encouraged Jewish settlement of the land. See also a discussion of Stone's work, by Andrew Dahdal: “A Reflection On The Views Of Julius Stone And The Applicability Of International Law To The Middle East Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations” which dealt with the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Finally, see a video with Danny Ayalon, Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel, adopting and illustrating the position of Stephen Schwebel and Julius Stone.
[42] http://www.historynet.com/glubb-pasha-and-the-arab-legion.htm
[43] http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1948to1967_holysites.phphttp://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=443&PID=0&IID=3052 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Wall
[44] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Jerusalem
[45] http://www.dore-gold.com/2011/11/the-palestinians-resurrect-the-partition-plan.php
[46] Draft Report of Arab Settlement Activity in the West Bank http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/settlementreport.html
[47] Best account is still Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2003) See also, his Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present
[48] Israel - Jordan, Treaty of Peacehttp://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace%20Process/Guide%20to%20the%20Peace%20Process/Israel-Jordan%20Peace%20Treaty
[49] http://www.biu.ac.il/Besa/perspectives15.htmlhttp://www.ijn.com/columns/view-from-denver/2220-the-myth-of-the-palestinian-arab-womb
[50] 660 rockets and 404 mortar shells fired into Israel since the end of Operation Cast Lead until the end of February, 2012.
March 1, 2012 Palestinians fired three rockets toward Ashkelon. The projectiles landed in the Ashkelon Coast Regional Council, causing no injuries or damage.
March 2, Palestinians fired a Qassam rocket into the Eshkol Regional Council, causing no injuries or damage., March 3
After nightfall, Palestinians fired a Qassam rocket into the Eshkol Regional Council, causing no injuries or damage, March 4. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip fired two Qassam rockets at Israel. One exploded in the Sdot Negev Regional Council
[51] http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp470.htm
Op-Ed: To Alan Dershowitz: Remember the Qurayza!
The writer graduated from Harvard way before Professor Alan Dershowitz. He has some homework assignments for "young Alan", as he allows himself to call him.
Published: Saturday, March 24, 2012 7:41 PM
The title of this piece should be a slogan for those who are considering the two-state solution as a solution to the Arab Israeli conflict.
You needn't "Remember the Alamo" any longer. There are lots of Texans who will do that for you. Remember the Qurayzah - and the Atalena as well.
What happened to Alan Dershowitz's two-state solution to the Arab Israeli conflict on the way to the forum? See "The Case against the Left and Right One State Solution" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-dershowitz/the-case-against-the-left_b_1370294.html
Did a dog eat up his homework? He hasn't said why he has overlooked so much.
What did he overlook?
1. He over looked 38,000 broken or defaced tombstones at the 3000 year old Cemetery at the Mount of Olives, destroyed when the Jordanians had control [from 1948 to 1967] of the same land he wants to give to those Arabs local to Palestine -- Arabs that the Soviet dezinformatsia want us to call "The Palestinian Arab People".
Be sure to keep the word "Arab' in that designation otherwise someone might think you were referring to Trumpeldor and the Jews who formed the Palestinian brigade to help the WWI Allies, instead of those Arabs in Palestine.
Those "Palestinian Arab People" turned down an offer by the British to have their own state. Why? Because they could help out those occupying and colonialist rulers from Turkey, the Ottomans by fighting on their side against the British.
2. He forgot about how people in Israel and around the world missed visiting Rachel's Tomb, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the Christian sites in and around Bethlehem, and even the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. He forgot that when the Jews weren't looking at the Western Wall, the Jordanians built a latrine against it, removed by its liberators in June, 1967.
I visited Rachel's Tomb last may when the UN designated it as a mosque. I bought some genuine red threads from the tomb to give to my daughters and granddaughters and daughter's in law and the mother of one of my daughters in law who lives in Japan. (She loved it.)
When I was at the Tomb, a nice man asked me to put on Tefillin, and when I told him I didn't remember how, he said he would help.
That was also the day that a gang of so called Palestinians threw rocks at the guardians of their "mosque", the Jewish border patrol. Fortunately I had left by then. I had talked to those guards and they posed for a picture with us. They are nice guys. I don't know why "The Palestinian Arab People" threw rocks at them.
3. Alan forgot about the Treaty of Huddibyah and the Jewish tribe of Qurayza, whose 500 men, after they had surrendered to Mohammed's Quraysh tribe, had their arms tied behind them and their heads cut off, so fortunately they couldn't see their wives led off to Arab harems and their young children brought up under sharia.
He forgot about the time when Arafat was being criticized by "other Palestinians" ? (he was an Egyptian) for negotiation with the Jews instead of killing them. He winked at them and said in Arabic, "Huddibyah" -- "Remember the Qurayza" (the predecessor in the Middle East to the Two State Solution") that worked out well for the Arabs and not so well for the Qurayza who lost their heads.
The Qurayza had entered into a two-tribe solution when they were stronger than the Muslims, the treaty of Huddibyah. When Mohammed's Quraysh tribe grew in power, they canceled the treaty and wiped the Qurayza off the face of the earth. Hmmm. I've heard that expression before. Isn't that what Ahmadinejad says?.
4. What will happen to those beautiful green areas planted by the Jews since 1967? Will they go the same way as those greenhouses left behind for the Arabs of Gaza by politically correct philanthropists?.
Did Professor Dershowitz forget why Prime Minister David Lloyd George was so anxious for Lord Balfour to finish his Declaration? Lloyd-George thought that the Arabs in Palestine, whom the Soviets now want us to call Palestinians, turned the Biblical land of Milk and Honey into a malarial wasteland.
Alan Dershowitz should read (or reread) "The Jews and Palestine" by the former prime minister, published in 1923 but fortunately Jews at Ein Shalom have put it on the internet and kept it there. http://einshalom.com/archives/210
5. Young Alan forgot about those exclusive political rights the WWI Allies granted to the Jews, in trust until they could attain the things they would need to become a model of a modern European state.
He forgot about how the Arabs in Palestine, according to Mahmoud Abbas who wrote about it in Filastin, the official organ of the PLO, had voluntarily created a mass exodus from Palestine at the behest of the Arab Higher Executive Committee who said to them: "We are about to invade Palestine to clean up after Hitler, by annihilating those Jews he left behind. Leave your homes for a couple of weeks and after we finish them off, you can come back -- if you don't, you will be considered to be a traitor; you remember what we do to traitors, don't you? We tie them upside down on telephone poles, slit open the bellies and pull out their guts, a blessing for Allah's flies".
And then when they got out and the invading armies surrounding Palestine never got in, the same guys threw them into prison (eternal refugee) camps so their hatred of the Jews would fester.
He forgot that after the exodus of those Arabs, and arrival of new immigrants from the aftermath of the Holocaust and from Russia, the Jews had the population majority that would allow their beneficial grant of political rights to mature into a legal grant. Part 2:6.
He forgot that the British Mandate for Palestine was a trust agreement, so that England, who volunteered to be the trustee, and guardian, assumed a fiduciary obligation to the beneficiaries of the trust, and to his wards in Palestine. See Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, paragraphs 1,2.
And he forgot that it was while England was abusing its fiduciary obligations, that it gave away what British Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, the political officer of England at the time of the Balfour Declaration, called some three-quarters of the land that had been pledged to the Jews. Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diaries 1917-1956 p. 118.
On an earlier page, in a foonote inserted 38 years later when the diaries were published as a book, he changes his mind, but as a lawyer, I prefer the contemporaneous account.
7. Alan forgot to read Sheik Abdullah Azzam's books on how much priority must be assigned to getting infidels off any part of the dar al Islam, the land formerly controlled exclusively by Muslims, and how the two state solution would leave infidels still in control, be it ever so small, of some of the dar al Islam. Azzam taught Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden probably killed him and his two boys.
So, the best things is to assign young Alan some reading so he could learn about all these things and come back with a better paper:
1. Article 22 of the League of Nations covenant drafted by Jan Smuts. The Council of Ten put it into Part I of the Treaty of Versailles and it became the Covenant or charter of the League of Nations. By reading the first two paragraphs of Article 22, Alan will learn that the mandate was based on the old British concepts of a trust agreement or guardianship.
2. The language of the French process-verbal (he must get it translated - Mr. Salomon Benzimra can do it for him. Mr. Benzimra was born in Tangiers when it was an International Area (it is now Morrocco) went to school in Bordeaux and now resides in Toronto where one of the two official languages is French. He not only speaks French very well, he is the author of the excellent book, published last November on Kindle, entitled "The Jewish People's Rights to the land of Israel." and knows more about the San Remo agreement than some might want to know. Maybe one of them is Alan Dershowitz.
3. One of Shlomo Sand's fans has been at Harvard or UCLA, Saree Macdisi, pushing a "one [Arab Majority] state solution to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict but leaving out the bracketed worlds. He has been telling the students there that the Jewish People don't exist. Sand likely got that theory from Arthur Koestler who wrote a good novel on the subject matter.
He is a terrific novelist. Have you read his "Darkness at Noon"?
Shlomo Sand seems to believe this novelist's theory, but a historian should have done more than a novelist to conclude there is no connection between Palestine and the Ashkenazis whom he claims are not Jews. How about the more than 50% of the Israelis that are Sephardic Jews that lived in the Middle East from the time of the Roman conquest, long before Mohammed invented Islam? Why is he silent about them? How about the DNA studies that provide proof positive that the Ashkenazis and the Sephardic Jews are the only remaining indigenous people of Palestine. Professor Dershowitz can look at them.
5. I have put together some of these solutions and the facts and legal conclusions in a piece written for the blog Middle East and Terrorism and edited by the charming and friendly Sally Zahav. It is called: Three Solutions to the Arab-Israeli Conflict. and can be found on the internet at: http://israelagainstterror.blogspot.com/2012/03 It outlines the three solutions being pushed by the extremists on the left and right (according Alan Dershowitz) as well as the liberal politically correct two-state solution he and Barack Obama are pushing. He should look also at the two part op ed I have written
Part 1: /Articles/Article.aspx/11408
Part 2: /Articles/Article.aspx/11412
about the evidence I have gathered on the purpose of the Balfour Declaration, the language in the cession of Ottoman sovereignty in the Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres (as amended by the Treaty of Lausanne). He may or may not agree with me that evidence of purpose is admissible in the US, the UK and Canada as well as other nation-states to clarify ambiguity in the language of a statute such as the British Mandate for Palestine which became International Law.
He can find it in Arutz Sheva, edited by Rochel Sylvetsky, in English on the Internet.:
Finally he can read "Soviet Russia, the Creators of the PLO and the Palestinian People.http://www.think-israel.org/brand.russiatheenemy.html , "Was there a Palestine Arab National Movement at the End of the Ottoman Period?" http://www.think-israel.org/brand.palnationalism.html , and "The Third Wave" http://www.think-israel.org/brand.thirdwave.html
These are all in the Thin-Israel.org blog edited by Dr. Bernice Lipkin. To make absolutely sure he hasn't forgotten anything, he should read Col. Richard Meinertzhagen's "Middle East Diaries, 1917-1956" - a Dane who became a British Army "political officer" in the Middle East when all this was being decided. It is hard to find and pricey when you find it, but the Harvard Harry Elkins Widener Library, donated by a distant relative of mine, can undoubtedly find a copy for him.
After Harvard excluded me from their "free and open marketplace of ideas" as claimed in their press release for their two day "One State Conference", I wrote a codicil to my will, excluding them from it.
6. Alan should take his two-state solution to UCLA too. They had a "Son of Harvard Conference" conference and Judea Pearl, a faculty member, told me that they were all so politically correct -- that it was impossible to present to the students at UCLA the idea of "one lawful state to the West of the Jordan River" - a Jewish one - as a solution to the Arab Israeli conflict.
Alan has a politically correct solution so he might be given access there although the Muslim influence there is scary. Alan would give them the second leg of the stool, and so they would would have a strong presentation of the one Arab majority state solutions and Alan's politically correct two-state solution, but not the third leg. The students would not get a balanced presentation, but that does not seem to matter anymore in academia.
Op-Ed: What Harvard Didn't Want to Hear: Part I
Arutz Sheva comes to the aid of free speech. A succinct exposition of facts and law in support of Israel's lawful exercise of sovereignty over East Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria that Harvard and UCLA don't want to hear.
Published: Monday, March 19, 2012 10:30 AM
Background (part of letter written by the author, a Harvard and UCLA alumnus, to UCLA):
On March 3,4 there was a conference held at Harvard on a one state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In effect it was a "one Arab majority state" solution. The panel consisted of Arab academics and Israel post modern revisionist who are apologists for terrorism. The other side or sides were completely missing. Harvard would not accept our request to be part of a panel or make a presentation.
A similar conference was held or is soon to be held at UCLA. A second conference is likely at Harvard sponsored by Professor Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School on a "two state solution" to the Arab Israeli conflict.
There are in fact three sides. That last would be "a one lawful state West of the Jordan River" solution. These three sides are akin to a three legged stool. When only one or two sides is presented it makes for a strong presentation but not a very balanced one.
I have been trying to find out how this third side could be presented at UCLA and I have been told by all my contacts at UCLA that it is impossible. They tell me that UCLA is just too politically correct. So I am making a last effort. I have published information on the three sides in an on-line blog entitled "Middle East and Terrorism" and a conservative Israeli newspaper called "Arutz Sheva", and I hope, at the very least, that you will make the links available to students at UCLA so they have access to a balanced presentation to a solution for the Arab Israeli conflict.
At least three nation-states, the UK, the US and Canada allow evidence of legislative purpose to be admitted to show the meaning of a statute that is ambiguous.
What follows is a necessary minimum of that evidence to show the purpose of the Balfour Declaration that was adopted by the WWI Allies at San Remo that established the International Law provided by that Agreement and the British Mandate for Palestine.
It is widely accepted, but not correct, that the West Bank belongs to the local Arabs in Palestine who in 1964, at the suggestion of the Sovietdezinformatsia, decided to call themselves "Palestinians.” [1]
These "invented people" [2] also pretend they had long had a passion for self government. [3] The full extent of Israel’s claim of sovereignty has not recently been stated. At most, it is said by the Israeli government that no one has sovereignty over the West Bank, but that Israel has the better claim. [4]
A better view is that the Jews obtained a beneficial interest in sovereignty over all of Palestine in the 1922 enactment of the British Mandate for Palestine, that entrusted exclusive political or national rights in Palestine to Britain in trust for the benefit of the Jews that later matured into a legal interest on the abandonment of the trusteeship by Britain and the attainment of the Jews of a majority population.
The trusts or guardianships were to be called "mandates”.
It was in 1919 that Jan Smuts submitted a memorandum to the League, which later became Article 22. The Council of Ten drafted for the League of Nations as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles [5], an Article 22 providing for trusts and guardianships for the areas in The Middle East and North Africa captured by the WWI Allies from the Ottoman Empire. This concept was later applied to other areas. Article 22's first two paragraphs provided a reasonably clear showing that a mandate was based on the longstanding British legal concepts of trusts and guardianships.
In 1917, in advance of the end of WWI, the British had drafted and published a policy for the disposition of the captured Ottoman lands in Palestine. [6] Britain and France were at that time following the “secret’ Sykes-Picot Agreement in their disposition of Ottoman Lands. But in recognition of the historic association of the Jews with Palestine, the Balfour Declaration, a British Policy approved it its Cabinet, provided for exclusive political or national rights in Palestine to be granted to the Jews.
The 1920 agreement of the WWI Allies at San Remo, on the terms of the Mandate turned what had been only a British Policy approved by the Cabinet, into International Law. Under Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, the rights were to be provided in trust, [7].
We know this because the Balfour policy had been attacked as antidemocratic, as giving sovereignty to the Jewish people who constituted only 60,000 of the total population of 600,000 in Palestine as of 1917.
In Jerusalem, the Jews had had a plurality of the population since 1845 and a majority since 1863, but in all of Palestine, in 1917 they constituted only 10% of the population. Even US President Woodrow Wilson was advancing that argument that award of sovereignty to a minority population was inconsistent with his 14 points that provided, among other things, for majority control.
To counter this argument, which they conceded was a good one, Arnold Toynbee and James Namier in the British Foreign Office, in a memorandum of September 19, 1917 [8] said the problem of control by a minority was "imaginary" because they predicted that the grant would be placed in trust and would not vest sovereignty in the Jews until the Jews fit to govern it on modern European state.
In my view these included attainment of a majority population, defined boundaries, unified control over all within the boundaries, etc.. Providing a National Home for Jews in Palestine with the British running the government until the Jews could attain a majority status based on favored immigration from the Jews in the Diaspora would be a temporary measure and not antidemocratic. [9]
The statement of the purpose of the British Mandate for Palestine in its Preamble and Article 2 is entirely consistent with this view although not express. [10]
What was the National Home, a reconstituted state? No, it was a place for the Jewish people to feel at home while the immigration was going on that would ultimately give the Jews a majority of the population and a reconstituted state. So that the staff of the British Mandatory Power, will know how to do that: Article 4 provides for the Zionist Organization to advise the mandate government staff. Part of Article 6 requires the staff of the Mandatory Power for The Administration of Palestine, to facilitate immigration of Jews. The Mandate does NOT provide that immigration of any other peoples is to be facilitated. (emphasis added) Article 5 provides that none of the land is to be ceded to a foreign power.
Who were the beneficiaries of the trust? Only the Jews, both those already in Palestine and many more scattered worldwide in the Diaspora since the time of the Roman Empire conquest of Palestine.
Howard Grief, who has provided the seminal work on the legal foundations of Israel under International Law, says one can conclude this because they are the only people mentioned to be dealt with specially. [11]The non-Jews are referred to only to ensure their civil and religious rights are to be protected.
Because Article 22 of the League Covenant defined the relationship of Britain and the Jews as trustee and guardian with Jews in effect being beneficiaries and ward the Mandate essentially provided for a Jewish National Home that would be supervised by the British until its ward was capable of exercising sovereignty, including helping it attain a majority of population it needed to do that. It was charged with facilitating such immigration.
All this purpose was not expressed very clearly in the Mandate, likely to avoid stirring up the Arabs in time of war that might bleed off troops to maintain stability in Palestine. But the Arabs did understand that this was the case.
After the war, the Arabs were told by Winston Churchill that the request for self government by the inhabitants of Palestine would be denied until such time as the Jews had attained a majority of the population. They made that understanding clear in their arguments against Partition in the UNSCOP hearings in 1947. [12]
The Arabs argued in 1947 "It was clear from the beginning that if Palestine were to be turned into a Jewish national home, this would involve the indefinite denial of self-government until such time as the Jews were strong enough to take over the government; that pending such time, Palestine would have to be subjected to a foreign administration [of England] which had no basis in the consent of the population and of which the policy would be determined, not by consideration of the welfare of the population, but by the desire to assist in the settlement of an alien group; and that to make such a settlement possible the country would have to be cut off from the surrounding Arab lands by artificial frontiers, would be given a separate system of law, administration, finance, tariffs, and education and would thus inevitably lose some if not all of the Arab character."
But that is what the grantors had in mind and the Arabs knew it when they argued against Partition in 1947. [13] They had learned after WWI from Winston Churchill this was their intention.
"As the first Arab delegation to England stated in the course of its correspondence with Mr. Churchill, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, 'we are to understand ...that self-government will be granted as soon as the Jewish people in Palestine are sufficiently able through numbers and powers to benefit to the full by it, and not before.' "[14]
Prior to the publishing of the British Mandate the French attached a "proce’s verbal" in French shown only in the French Version. [15] This was their agreement only on their stated understanding that the Mandate would not eliminate any existing rights of the non-Jews in Palestine. The League had no objection to the process verbal.
The Mandate expressly preserved existing civil and religious rights of the non-Jews. It could not preserve their political rights because they had never had any. The preservation of their civil rights only protected their individual political rights, ie. their electoral rights. It did not protect their collective political rights or national rights, the right of sovereignty and political self-determination.
The Arabs in Palestine had always been ruled from afar. So the Mandate carried out the “process verbal”
Why, in 1917, did Britain establish a policy that gave a preference to the Jews? There were several reasons.
1. Britain's Prime Minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration was David Lloyd-George. Later, in 1923, he was the author of an article "The Jews and Palestine" [16] In it he revealed his view that the Arabs under Ottoman Rule had turned Palestine, the Biblical land of milk and honey into a malarial wasteland. He believed it could be remedied under a reconstituted Jewish State.
2. There was considerable sympathy among many Christian Evangelicals in England who thought the Jews should be restored to Palestine to flee from the pogroms of Russia and Poland. This sympathy did not extend to receiving them in England. British workmen had complained that Jews were flooding in to England and taking their jobs and working for less. This led to the Aliens Act of 1909 restricting Jewish immigration into England.
But the British recognized that the oppression of the Jews in Russia and Poland was very bad and they needed some place to go. [17]
3. Chaim Weismann, an ardent Zionist and also a good chemist, had helped Britain in the war by developing an inexpensive method of manufacturing acetone used in cordite for munitions and had given it to the British. It was a great help to the British war effort. [18]
4. And England, according to Winston Churchill, also desired to win over the Jews in Russia, many of them in the Bolshevik government, so that they might influence the new Marxist government to remain in battle with the Germans and Ottomans in WWI on the side of the Allies. He thought that the Balfour Declaration could sway them in British favor. [19]
There came a time after WWII that the British decided their effort to be trustee was simply costing it too much. They tried to obtain some funding from the United States, but the United States declined to do so. Britain finally decided to abandon its trusteeship and guardianship in 1948.
On the abandonment of its trusteeship by Britain in 1948, political rights that were the "trust res" (the thing put in trust) devolved to the Jews as beneficiaries or wards of the trust and vested in them the political rights permitting them to exercise sovereignty. These rights had survived the demise of the League of Nations by virtue of Article 80 of the UN Charter. [20] It should be expressly noted that the Jews did not receive these rights from the Partition Resolution.
By that time the Jewish population had increased significantly. In 1947 the UN General Assembly had recommended that the Jews give up some of its rights in an attempt to avoid violence that had been threatened by the Arabs if the Jews were to reconstitute their state in Palestine. The Jews agreed to give up some of the land over which they were to have political rights, but the Arabs rejected the recommendation and commenced a war.
It was by the Arabs starting a war that led to a Jewish population majority. Some 600,000 to 700,000 Arabs fled the country before even seeing an Israeli soldier. The wealthy left first, at the first foreshadowing of war. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Mahmoud Abbas wrote this in the official organ of the PLO, “Filanstin”, most of the rest left at the request of the Arab Higher Committee that wanted to get them out of the way of the Arab armies in the surrounding states. [21]
Many left because of a false report that the Irgun had committed a massacre of Arabs at Deir Yassin, that the Haganah, their political enemies did not dispute. A BBC program based on an interview of an Arab radio commentator at the time revealed he had been pushed into designating a hard fought battle as a massacre so as to provide an excuse for the invasion of surrounding armies. [22]
Many Arabs local to Palestine left; some remained.
But those that left could not go back because the Arab Armies did not prevail
In 1948 Israel declared Independence and vindicated its claim by force of arms against the assault of other Arab states surrounding it. It established an orderly unified stable control of its territory except for Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem which had been invaded and occupied by the Arab Legion in the East. This British supplied and led organization became the Army of Jordan. [23] In the South, the Egyptian Army was able to maintain its occupation of the Gaza Strip.
In 1920 the Ottoman Empire in Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres,had ceded its sovereignty in Palestine, which had been undisputed for 400 years, to a Mandatory Power in trust for a National Homeland for the Jews. [24] The Sevres Treaty was never ratified by the Turks who were concerned over Turkey’s boundaries in Europe and in adjacent areas in Asia, not in the Middle East and North. But these issues were finally settled in 1923 in the Treaty of Lausanne that left the agreements in the Middle East unchanged.
The trustee selected by the League of Nations at San Remo was Great Britain; the US had been another possibiility. Sovereignty, i.e. political rights, over the other 99% of the lands captured from the Ottomans in the Middle East was allocated to Arab and Muslim majorities in some 20 areas such as Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq but as in the case of Palestine, in mandates of guardianship as the inhabitants had had no prior experience in self rule.
While it was expected in 1920 that the Jewish Homeland would eventually become a state when immigration gave the Jews a majority of the population, at the time the Jews were incapable of exercising sovereignty although the "Jewish Agency" was exercising administrative authority of wide scope.
End Notes
1. Brand, Soviet Russia, The Creators of the PLO and the Palestinian People, http://www.think-israel.org/brand.russiatheenemy.html
2. Newt Gingrich, Campaign speech, 2012 Republican Primary
3. Brand, Was there a Palestine Arab National Movement at the End of the Ottoman Period? http://www.think-israel.org/brand.palnationalism.html
[4] Danny Ayalon, Israel's current Deputy Foreign Minister, The Truth About the West Bank /News/News.aspx/145836
[5] See the original documents in the Avalon Project at Yale University.http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/versailles_menu.asp
[6]The Balfour Declaration Texthttp://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/E210CA73E38D9E1D052565FA00705C61
[7] See the first two paragraphs of Article 22
[8] Mueller, Editor, Churchill as a Peacemaker, Feith, p. 224 n. 36 citing Sir Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return, p. 111-12
[9] Charles Hill, Trial of a Thousand Years, World Order and Islamism
[10] San Remo Convention Text of the Mandate
http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/San_Remo_Convention
[11] Howard Grief, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, p. 36
[12] The Future of Palestine" by Musa Alami with a foreword by Mr. Alami. Hermon Press, Beirut, London (1970)
[13] Id
[14] Id
[15] Salomon Benzsimra, Jewish People’s Rights to the Land of Israel, n. 68 See below
[16] David Lloyd George, The Jews and Palestine,http://einshalom.com/archives/210
[17] Ronald Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, A history of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York (1983) p. 90-94
[18] High Walls at 189
[19] Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews,Gilbert reveals the beliefs that moved the British government to issue the Declaration: “The War Cabinet hoped that, inspired by the promise of a national home in Palestine, Russian Jews would encourage Russia—then in the throes of revolution—to stay in the war,. . .http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2011/volume_3/number_1/churchill_international_jews_and_the_holocaust.php
[20]http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/unchart.htm#art80
[21] Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States Are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Wall Street Journal; June 5, 2003)
[22]http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_independence_war_diryassin.php
[23] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Legion
[24] http://athena.hri.org/docs/sevres/part3.html
On March 3,4 there was a conference held at Harvard on a one state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In effect it was a "one Arab majority state" solution. The panel consisted of Arab academics and Israel post modern revisionist who are apologists for terrorism. The other side or sides were completely missing. Harvard would not accept our request to be part of a panel or make a presentation.
A similar conference was held or is soon to be held at UCLA. A second conference is likely at Harvard sponsored by Professor Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School on a "two state solution" to the Arab Israeli conflict.
There are in fact three sides. That last would be "a one lawful state West of the Jordan River" solution. These three sides are akin to a three legged stool. When only one or two sides is presented it makes for a strong presentation but not a very balanced one.
I have been trying to find out how this third side could be presented at UCLA and I have been told by all my contacts at UCLA that it is impossible. They tell me that UCLA is just too politically correct. So I am making a last effort. I have published information on the three sides in an on-line blog entitled "Middle East and Terrorism" and a conservative Israeli newspaper called "Arutz Sheva", and I hope, at the very least, that you will make the links available to students at UCLA so they have access to a balanced presentation to a solution for the Arab Israeli conflict.
At least three nation-states, the UK, the US and Canada allow evidence of legislative purpose to be admitted to show the meaning of a statute that is ambiguous.
What follows is a necessary minimum of that evidence to show the purpose of the Balfour Declaration that was adopted by the WWI Allies at San Remo that established the International Law provided by that Agreement and the British Mandate for Palestine.
It is widely accepted, but not correct, that the West Bank belongs to the local Arabs in Palestine who in 1964, at the suggestion of the Sovietdezinformatsia, decided to call themselves "Palestinians.” [1]
These "invented people" [2] also pretend they had long had a passion for self government. [3] The full extent of Israel’s claim of sovereignty has not recently been stated. At most, it is said by the Israeli government that no one has sovereignty over the West Bank, but that Israel has the better claim. [4]
A better view is that the Jews obtained a beneficial interest in sovereignty over all of Palestine in the 1922 enactment of the British Mandate for Palestine, that entrusted exclusive political or national rights in Palestine to Britain in trust for the benefit of the Jews that later matured into a legal interest on the abandonment of the trusteeship by Britain and the attainment of the Jews of a majority population.
The trusts or guardianships were to be called "mandates”.
It was in 1919 that Jan Smuts submitted a memorandum to the League, which later became Article 22. The Council of Ten drafted for the League of Nations as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles [5], an Article 22 providing for trusts and guardianships for the areas in The Middle East and North Africa captured by the WWI Allies from the Ottoman Empire. This concept was later applied to other areas. Article 22's first two paragraphs provided a reasonably clear showing that a mandate was based on the longstanding British legal concepts of trusts and guardianships.
In 1917, in advance of the end of WWI, the British had drafted and published a policy for the disposition of the captured Ottoman lands in Palestine. [6] Britain and France were at that time following the “secret’ Sykes-Picot Agreement in their disposition of Ottoman Lands. But in recognition of the historic association of the Jews with Palestine, the Balfour Declaration, a British Policy approved it its Cabinet, provided for exclusive political or national rights in Palestine to be granted to the Jews.
The 1920 agreement of the WWI Allies at San Remo, on the terms of the Mandate turned what had been only a British Policy approved by the Cabinet, into International Law. Under Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, the rights were to be provided in trust, [7].
We know this because the Balfour policy had been attacked as antidemocratic, as giving sovereignty to the Jewish people who constituted only 60,000 of the total population of 600,000 in Palestine as of 1917.
In Jerusalem, the Jews had had a plurality of the population since 1845 and a majority since 1863, but in all of Palestine, in 1917 they constituted only 10% of the population. Even US President Woodrow Wilson was advancing that argument that award of sovereignty to a minority population was inconsistent with his 14 points that provided, among other things, for majority control.
To counter this argument, which they conceded was a good one, Arnold Toynbee and James Namier in the British Foreign Office, in a memorandum of September 19, 1917 [8] said the problem of control by a minority was "imaginary" because they predicted that the grant would be placed in trust and would not vest sovereignty in the Jews until the Jews fit to govern it on modern European state.
In my view these included attainment of a majority population, defined boundaries, unified control over all within the boundaries, etc.. Providing a National Home for Jews in Palestine with the British running the government until the Jews could attain a majority status based on favored immigration from the Jews in the Diaspora would be a temporary measure and not antidemocratic. [9]
The statement of the purpose of the British Mandate for Palestine in its Preamble and Article 2 is entirely consistent with this view although not express. [10]
What was the National Home, a reconstituted state? No, it was a place for the Jewish people to feel at home while the immigration was going on that would ultimately give the Jews a majority of the population and a reconstituted state. So that the staff of the British Mandatory Power, will know how to do that: Article 4 provides for the Zionist Organization to advise the mandate government staff. Part of Article 6 requires the staff of the Mandatory Power for The Administration of Palestine, to facilitate immigration of Jews. The Mandate does NOT provide that immigration of any other peoples is to be facilitated. (emphasis added) Article 5 provides that none of the land is to be ceded to a foreign power.
Who were the beneficiaries of the trust? Only the Jews, both those already in Palestine and many more scattered worldwide in the Diaspora since the time of the Roman Empire conquest of Palestine.
Howard Grief, who has provided the seminal work on the legal foundations of Israel under International Law, says one can conclude this because they are the only people mentioned to be dealt with specially. [11]The non-Jews are referred to only to ensure their civil and religious rights are to be protected.
Because Article 22 of the League Covenant defined the relationship of Britain and the Jews as trustee and guardian with Jews in effect being beneficiaries and ward the Mandate essentially provided for a Jewish National Home that would be supervised by the British until its ward was capable of exercising sovereignty, including helping it attain a majority of population it needed to do that. It was charged with facilitating such immigration.
All this purpose was not expressed very clearly in the Mandate, likely to avoid stirring up the Arabs in time of war that might bleed off troops to maintain stability in Palestine. But the Arabs did understand that this was the case.
After the war, the Arabs were told by Winston Churchill that the request for self government by the inhabitants of Palestine would be denied until such time as the Jews had attained a majority of the population. They made that understanding clear in their arguments against Partition in the UNSCOP hearings in 1947. [12]
The Arabs argued in 1947 "It was clear from the beginning that if Palestine were to be turned into a Jewish national home, this would involve the indefinite denial of self-government until such time as the Jews were strong enough to take over the government; that pending such time, Palestine would have to be subjected to a foreign administration [of England] which had no basis in the consent of the population and of which the policy would be determined, not by consideration of the welfare of the population, but by the desire to assist in the settlement of an alien group; and that to make such a settlement possible the country would have to be cut off from the surrounding Arab lands by artificial frontiers, would be given a separate system of law, administration, finance, tariffs, and education and would thus inevitably lose some if not all of the Arab character."
But that is what the grantors had in mind and the Arabs knew it when they argued against Partition in 1947. [13] They had learned after WWI from Winston Churchill this was their intention.
"As the first Arab delegation to England stated in the course of its correspondence with Mr. Churchill, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, 'we are to understand ...that self-government will be granted as soon as the Jewish people in Palestine are sufficiently able through numbers and powers to benefit to the full by it, and not before.' "[14]
Prior to the publishing of the British Mandate the French attached a "proce’s verbal" in French shown only in the French Version. [15] This was their agreement only on their stated understanding that the Mandate would not eliminate any existing rights of the non-Jews in Palestine. The League had no objection to the process verbal.
The Mandate expressly preserved existing civil and religious rights of the non-Jews. It could not preserve their political rights because they had never had any. The preservation of their civil rights only protected their individual political rights, ie. their electoral rights. It did not protect their collective political rights or national rights, the right of sovereignty and political self-determination.
The Arabs in Palestine had always been ruled from afar. So the Mandate carried out the “process verbal”
Why, in 1917, did Britain establish a policy that gave a preference to the Jews? There were several reasons.
1. Britain's Prime Minister at the time of the Balfour Declaration was David Lloyd-George. Later, in 1923, he was the author of an article "The Jews and Palestine" [16] In it he revealed his view that the Arabs under Ottoman Rule had turned Palestine, the Biblical land of milk and honey into a malarial wasteland. He believed it could be remedied under a reconstituted Jewish State.
2. There was considerable sympathy among many Christian Evangelicals in England who thought the Jews should be restored to Palestine to flee from the pogroms of Russia and Poland. This sympathy did not extend to receiving them in England. British workmen had complained that Jews were flooding in to England and taking their jobs and working for less. This led to the Aliens Act of 1909 restricting Jewish immigration into England.
But the British recognized that the oppression of the Jews in Russia and Poland was very bad and they needed some place to go. [17]
3. Chaim Weismann, an ardent Zionist and also a good chemist, had helped Britain in the war by developing an inexpensive method of manufacturing acetone used in cordite for munitions and had given it to the British. It was a great help to the British war effort. [18]
4. And England, according to Winston Churchill, also desired to win over the Jews in Russia, many of them in the Bolshevik government, so that they might influence the new Marxist government to remain in battle with the Germans and Ottomans in WWI on the side of the Allies. He thought that the Balfour Declaration could sway them in British favor. [19]
There came a time after WWII that the British decided their effort to be trustee was simply costing it too much. They tried to obtain some funding from the United States, but the United States declined to do so. Britain finally decided to abandon its trusteeship and guardianship in 1948.
On the abandonment of its trusteeship by Britain in 1948, political rights that were the "trust res" (the thing put in trust) devolved to the Jews as beneficiaries or wards of the trust and vested in them the political rights permitting them to exercise sovereignty. These rights had survived the demise of the League of Nations by virtue of Article 80 of the UN Charter. [20] It should be expressly noted that the Jews did not receive these rights from the Partition Resolution.
By that time the Jewish population had increased significantly. In 1947 the UN General Assembly had recommended that the Jews give up some of its rights in an attempt to avoid violence that had been threatened by the Arabs if the Jews were to reconstitute their state in Palestine. The Jews agreed to give up some of the land over which they were to have political rights, but the Arabs rejected the recommendation and commenced a war.
It was by the Arabs starting a war that led to a Jewish population majority. Some 600,000 to 700,000 Arabs fled the country before even seeing an Israeli soldier. The wealthy left first, at the first foreshadowing of war. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Mahmoud Abbas wrote this in the official organ of the PLO, “Filanstin”, most of the rest left at the request of the Arab Higher Committee that wanted to get them out of the way of the Arab armies in the surrounding states. [21]
Many left because of a false report that the Irgun had committed a massacre of Arabs at Deir Yassin, that the Haganah, their political enemies did not dispute. A BBC program based on an interview of an Arab radio commentator at the time revealed he had been pushed into designating a hard fought battle as a massacre so as to provide an excuse for the invasion of surrounding armies. [22]
Many Arabs local to Palestine left; some remained.
But those that left could not go back because the Arab Armies did not prevail
In 1948 Israel declared Independence and vindicated its claim by force of arms against the assault of other Arab states surrounding it. It established an orderly unified stable control of its territory except for Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem which had been invaded and occupied by the Arab Legion in the East. This British supplied and led organization became the Army of Jordan. [23] In the South, the Egyptian Army was able to maintain its occupation of the Gaza Strip.
In 1920 the Ottoman Empire in Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres,had ceded its sovereignty in Palestine, which had been undisputed for 400 years, to a Mandatory Power in trust for a National Homeland for the Jews. [24] The Sevres Treaty was never ratified by the Turks who were concerned over Turkey’s boundaries in Europe and in adjacent areas in Asia, not in the Middle East and North. But these issues were finally settled in 1923 in the Treaty of Lausanne that left the agreements in the Middle East unchanged.
The trustee selected by the League of Nations at San Remo was Great Britain; the US had been another possibiility. Sovereignty, i.e. political rights, over the other 99% of the lands captured from the Ottomans in the Middle East was allocated to Arab and Muslim majorities in some 20 areas such as Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq but as in the case of Palestine, in mandates of guardianship as the inhabitants had had no prior experience in self rule.
While it was expected in 1920 that the Jewish Homeland would eventually become a state when immigration gave the Jews a majority of the population, at the time the Jews were incapable of exercising sovereignty although the "Jewish Agency" was exercising administrative authority of wide scope.
End Notes
1. Brand, Soviet Russia, The Creators of the PLO and the Palestinian People, http://www.think-israel.org/brand.russiatheenemy.html
2. Newt Gingrich, Campaign speech, 2012 Republican Primary
3. Brand, Was there a Palestine Arab National Movement at the End of the Ottoman Period? http://www.think-israel.org/brand.palnationalism.html
[4] Danny Ayalon, Israel's current Deputy Foreign Minister, The Truth About the West Bank /News/News.aspx/145836
[5] See the original documents in the Avalon Project at Yale University.http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/versailles_menu.asp
[6]The Balfour Declaration Texthttp://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/E210CA73E38D9E1D052565FA00705C61
[7] See the first two paragraphs of Article 22
[8] Mueller, Editor, Churchill as a Peacemaker, Feith, p. 224 n. 36 citing Sir Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return, p. 111-12
[9] Charles Hill, Trial of a Thousand Years, World Order and Islamism
[10] San Remo Convention Text of the Mandate
http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/San_Remo_Convention
[11] Howard Grief, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, p. 36
[12] The Future of Palestine" by Musa Alami with a foreword by Mr. Alami. Hermon Press, Beirut, London (1970)
[13] Id
[14] Id
[15] Salomon Benzsimra, Jewish People’s Rights to the Land of Israel, n. 68 See below
[16] David Lloyd George, The Jews and Palestine,http://einshalom.com/archives/210
[17] Ronald Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem, A history of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth of the British Mandate for Palestine. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York (1983) p. 90-94
[18] High Walls at 189
[19] Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews,Gilbert reveals the beliefs that moved the British government to issue the Declaration: “The War Cabinet hoped that, inspired by the promise of a national home in Palestine, Russian Jews would encourage Russia—then in the throes of revolution—to stay in the war,. . .http://www.inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2011/volume_3/number_1/churchill_international_jews_and_the_holocaust.php
[20]http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/unchart.htm#art80
[21] Abu Mazen Charges that the Arab States Are the Cause of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Wall Street Journal; June 5, 2003)
[22]http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_independence_war_diryassin.php
[23] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Legion
[24] http://athena.hri.org/docs/sevres/part3.html
Op-Ed: Part II: Israeli Sovereignty Over Judea and Samaria
Worth a careful read. Has the UN's Partition Plan any remaining significance for either the Arabs or the Jews?
Published: Monday, March 19, 2012 10:28 AM
Balfour resigned as foreign secretary following the Paris Conference in 1919, but continued in the Cabinet as lord president of the council.
In a memorandum addressed to new Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, he stated that the Balfour Declaration contradicted the letters of the covenant (referring to the League Covenant) the Anglo-French Declaration, and the instructions to the King-Crane Commission.
All of the other engagements contained pledges that the Arab or Muslim populations could establish national governments of their own choosing according to the principle of self-determination. Balfour explained: “… in Palestine we do not propose to even go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present (majority) inhabitants of the country though the American [King-Crane] Commission is going through the form of asking what they are.
Balfour stated explicitly to Curzon:
"The Four Great Powers [Britain, France, Italy and the United States] are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, and future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right." * * * * *
Balfour continued:
"I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs, but they will never say they want it. Whatever be the future of Palestine it is not now an ‘independent nation’, nor is it yet on the way to become one. Whatever deference should be paid to the views of those living there, the Powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the matter, to consult them.". . ."If Zionism is to influence the Jewish problem throughout the world, Palestine must be made available for the largest number of Jewish immigrants"
While the rights granted under the Trust restricted the Jews, when they did exercise sovereignty, from doing anything that would impair the civil or religious rights of the Arabs it was silent as to the political rights for the Arabs. The Mandate Law also became the domestic law of the UK and the US in 1924 as Treaty Law when, under a new American Administration, the Mandate became the subject of the Anglo American Convention of 1924.[24]
Perfidious Albion did not maintain the 1920 form of its proposed trust for very long. Circumstances changed, British interests changed, and the British Government also changed. President Wilson's opposition had delayed the issuance of the mandate as proposed in the initial draft submitted to the WWI Allies at San Remo. In the meantime, England had installed Feisal as the King of Syria.[25] After the Battle of Maysalun, in which the French Armed Forces defeated the Syrian Army the French deposed Feisal.[25] Abdullah, Feisal's brother, was furious. He marched his troops from their home in the Hejaz (in the Arabian Peninsula) to Eastern Palestine and made ready to attack the French in Syria.
Churchill did not want war between the Arabs and the French. In the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, Syria was in the French sphere of influence. Churchill gave Feisal the Kingdom of Iraq as a consolation prize[26] and gave Abdullah and his Hashemite tribe from the Arabian Peninsula Eastern Palestine in violation of the British Mandate.[27] The Mandate at San Remo had prohibited the Mandatory from ceding any land to a foreign nation. In the 1922 change, with a new Article 25, it formally approved delaying organized settlement by the Jews East of the Jordan River and informally gave TransJordan to Abdullah and his Hashemite Tribe from the Hejaz.
Article 25 preserved the prohibition of the Mandatory Power from discriminating among races or religions.[28] The land East of the JordanRiver became TransJordan and then Jordan and the Mandatory, despite the specific terms of the mandate, prohibited Jews, but not other ethnic groups, from settling there.
The British urging the League to adopt Article 25 was a breach of its fiduciary relationship as trustee with its beneficiary and as guardian, with its ward.[29] as were the policies in their White Papers of 1922, 1930 and the vicious White Paper of 1939 under the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, of Munich fame, that blocked many Jews from fleeing from the Nazi Holocaust. A vicious enforcement of the blockade ensued and directly disobeyed the Mandate's requirement to facilitate Jewish immigration.
During WWI the Hussein/McMahon correspondence with the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula led to a British offer to all Arabs in the Caliphate of self-government free from Turkish rule if they helped the British in the war.[30]
The Arabs local to Palestine, unlike the Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula that had been led by Lawrence declined the British offer of political self determination if they were to help the Allies, and preferred to fight for the Ottoman Turks who ruled from Constantinople. According to Winston Churchill, , "The Palestinian Arabs, of course, were for the most part fighting against us, ,,," [31]
"However the Jews assembled several battalions of Jewish soldiers that fought alongside the British in Palestine in WWI.[32]
At that point the Jews had, de facto, lost 78% of their Mandated beneficial right to sovereignty in Palestine, the land TransJordan or East of the Jordan River. Only 22% of the Mandate was left. After WWII, Article 80 of the UN Charter[33] expressly preserved the rights that had been granted by the League of Nations prior to its demise, i.e. the Jewish national rights, so the UN could not grant any of it to the Arabs. As I have noted, the Mandate itself prohibited the trustee from ceding any land in Palestine to a foreign Power.
Known as “the Palestine clause,” Article 80 was drafted by Jewish legal representatives including the liberal Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook) from the right-wing Irgun, and prominent Revisionist Ben-Zion Netanyahu (father of Bibi). It preserved the right of the Jewish people to “close settlement” throughout their remaining portion of Palestine west of the Jordan River.
In 1947 nevertheless, the UN did not “grant” but its General Assembly “recommended” (not a grant-- that would be inconsistent with the previous grant) a partition that offered a part of the area West of the Jordan (a part of the 22% remaining) to the Jews, in effect, releasing that part of the trust res (the political rights) to the Jews, and the remainder to the local Arabs, although the latter was unauthorized by the Mandate. In the UNSCOP hearings, the Arabs had threatened violence if the Jews were to have a state in any part of the Middle East. It is evident that the UN, by submitting to the Arabs extortion -- threats of violence -- and recommending still further partition of the remainder, hoped to avoid the violence.
In the San Remo Resolution, the Allies agreed
"To accept the terms of the Mandates Article as given below with reference to Palestine, on the understanding that there was inserted a process-verbal an undertaking by the Mandatory Power that this would not involve the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine;"[34]
What were those rights? The Mandate preserved the civil and religious rights of the local Arabs but did not create any political rights for them. The civil rights included individual political or electoral rights but not the collective political right of self-determination. It did not and could not "preserve" any collective political rights or "national rights" in Palestine for local Arabs in Palestine as they had never in history had any. It follows, therefore, as to political rights, the local Arabs were no worse off than they were under the Ottoman rule from 1520 to 1920, the British suzerainty from 1920 to 1948, or the Jordanian rule from 1948 to 1967.
But the Arabs didn't want the Jews to have any land with political rights for religious reasons, because it violated Islam to have any inroads on the Dar-al-Islam.[35] They engaged in jihad against the Jews and the Arab Higher Committee brought in the Armies of the surrounding Arab and Muslims States.
What was the effect of the abandonment of the trust by the trustee in 1948? Howard Grief provides a more legally precise reason,[36] but a simple way to look at it was that when the trustee quit his obligation, the only equitable thing to do was to give the rights to the beneficiary of the trust or the ward of the guardian.
Going back to 1922, by 1922 the British Government's interests had changed and the government had changed. In addition to its problems with the deposing of King Feisal, it was defending itself from charges that it had conferred political rights to the same land to the French, the Arabs and the Jews in three different agreements, the Sykes-Picot agreement, the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, and the Lord Balfour Declaration. So in 1922, Churchill, in a White Paper, tried wiggle out of England's obligation to the Jews by hinting broadly that a "national home" was not necessarily a state. However in private, many British officials agreed with the interpretation of the Zionists that a state would be established when a Jewish majority was achieved.[37]
In the British cabinet discussion during final consideration of the language of the Balfour Declaration, in responding to the opposition of Lord Curzon, who viewed the language as giving rise to the presumption that Great Britain favored a Jewish State, Lord Balfour stated: "As to the meaning of the words 'national home', to which the Zionists attach so much importance, he understood it to mean some form of British, American, or other protectorate, under which full facilities would be given to the Jews to work out their own salvation and to build up, by means of education, agriculture, and industry, a real center of national culture and focus of national life. It did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter for gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution." The key word here was 'early'; otherwise, the statement makes it quite clear that Balfour envisaged the eventual emergence of an independent Jewish state. Doubtless he had in mind a period somewhat longer than a mere thirty years; but the same could also be said of Chaim Weizmann."[38]
According to Lloyd George, one of Churchill's contemporaries, for example, the meaning was quite clear:
"There has been a good deal of discussion as to the meaning of the words "Jewish National Home" and whether it involved the setting up of a Jewish National State in Palestine. I have already quoted the words actually used by Mr. Balfour when he submitted the declaration to the Cabinet for its approval. They were not challenged at the time by any member present, and there could be no doubt as to what the Cabinet then had in their minds. It was not their idea that a Jewish State should be set up immediately by the Peace Treaty without reference to the wishes of the majority of the inhabitants.
On the other hand, it was contemplated that when the time arrived for according representative institutions to Palestine, if the Jews had meanwhile responded to the opportunity afforded them by the idea of a National Home and had become a definite majority of the inhabitants, then Palestine would thus become a Jewish Commonwealth. The notion that Jewish immigration would have to be artificially restricted in order to ensure that the Jews should be a permanent minority never entered into the heads of anyone engaged in framing the policy. That would have been regarded as unjust and as a fraud on the people to whom we were appealing."[39]
If there is any further doubt in the matter, Balfour himself told a Jewish gathering on February 7,1918: "My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state. It is up to them now; we have given them their great opportunity." [40]
Following an opinion of the renowned international lawyer Julius Stone that focused on the settlement question,[41] President Reagan and succeeding Presidents through George W. Bush maintained a US view that the Jewish Settlements in the West Bank were legal but as a policy matter should be discouraged because of their tendency to discourage the Peace Process. President Obama while continuing the position on policy has not specifically stated his view on legality of the settlements but has referred to them as “illegitimate”..
As to Jerusalem, East Jerusalem fell in 1948 [42] to an attack of the Arab Legion supplied and trained by the British and led by Sir John Bagot Glubb frequently referred to as "Glubb pasha". The Arab Legion later became the Jordanian Army.
The Jordanians demolished 58 synagogues and their contents, uprooted the tombstones of Jewish cemeteries, and used them for paving or building latrines, and built a latrine against the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, the single most holy site for Jews.[43] They expelled all the Jewish inhabitants of East Jerusalem and it became, as Adolph Hitler liked to say, judenrein or cleansed of Jews. In 1967 in the Six Day War, Israel drove the Jordanians east to the Jordan River and became in control of East Jerusalem.[44] They did not use their conquest to deprive the Moslems access to their holy sites in East Jerusalem as the Jordanians had done to the Jews and Christians.
Has the UN's Partition Plan any remaining significance for either the Arabs or the Jews?
No. According to acclaimed International Lawyer Julius Stone, ""The State of Israel is … not legally derived from the partition plan, but [in addition to the grants referred to above] rests (as do most other states in the world) on A. assertion of independence by its people and government, B. on the vindication of that independence by arms against assault by other states, and C. on the establishment of orderly government within territory under its stable control." The Partition plan had assigned the Jerusalem Metropolitan Area to the UN's International Control, at least temporarily for a period of 10 years. However in the war of 1948, the UN did nothing to vindicate that assignment by force of arms against the assault of the surrounding Arab states. Therefore nothing remains of that part of the Partition Plan either. [45]
In fact you read in the news and hear on TV a lot about Jewish settlements outside of Jerusalem and in East Jerusalem, but have you ever seen or heard a reference to new Arab settlements there? Since 1950 more than twice as many new settlements have been built by Arabs in the West Bank as have been built by Jews,[46] totally ignored by the press. They fill them with Lebanese, Iraqis, Jordanians and Egyptians, and, mirabile dictu, they are Palestinians. An Israeli Professor in Haifa named Steven Plaut suggests, tongue in cheek, that the Arabs must have changed the name of the area from Judea and Samaria to the "West Bank" so they wouldn't look silly in claiming that the Jews were illegally settling in eponymous Judea.
In June,1967, in the Six Day War , Israel recaptured Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem.[47] In 1994 Israel agreed that in return for a quitclaim of Jordan, to CisJordan, or the land of Palestine west of the Jordan River, it would release its claim to TransJordan, the land East of the Jordan to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. [48]
My understanding from many authors, is that the Arab claims for the Arab population in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem are overstated. Annexing the so called West Bank would not currently jeopardize a Jewish democracy in Israel. Nor would it in the long run as correct population growth shows Jewish population increase in the West Bank greater than that of the Arabs.[49]
I would only offer citizenship to those, Muslim, Jewish or Christian, who would take a loyalty oath to Israel. Others could remain with the status of permanent residents.
What about Gaza? It it were to keep shooting missiles at Israel, that would be a casus belli and Israel should take it over. Also, when it ceded its sovereignty over Gaza to the Arabs living there, the cession was under a tacit agreement that the Arabs would quit their attacks on Israel. They haven't. [50] A material breach of that obligation also justifies a takeover. Although the people in Gaza were ceded Israel’s political or national rights to the Gaza Strip, they never met the requirements for sovereignty
The first of these is: are the Arabs local to Palestine a “people”? No, as noted above they are an invented people. Another requirement of a separate nation-state is unified control. When armed truces were broken by the Gazans, Hamas, that claims control, always blames the problem on other terrorist organizations. Since Israel’s takeover would not be taking land of another sovereign, the land would not be occupied, but disputed with Israel having the far better claim.[51] I would suggest that until further Jewish population increase over that of the non-Jewish population justifies annexation of Gaza, that the Gazans be authorized Home Rule, but no vote in Israel’s policies.
Israel should retain the right to eliminate candidates or parties that are terrorists. That should meet the requirements of the French "procès verbal" as the Arabs in Gaza never had the right to vote on the policies of the Ottoman Empire.
In sum, it appears that there are five separate views that justify Israeli sovereignty over CisJordan. These are
1. The San Remo Resolution of 1920 which is justification under International Law,
2. The Anglo-American Convention of 1924 makes the Balfour Policy Treaty law and therefore the Domestic Law of the US and the UK,
3. Facts occurring after 1948, including Jordan’s aggressive war in invading a land in which the Jews had been awarded political rights, and the defensive war by the Jews retaking it resulted in acclaimed International Lawyers holding that the West Bank was disputed, not occupied, and the Jews had the better claim to it.
In the Partition of 1947, the UN General Assembly recommended an award of part to the Arabs, that was not a grant because it had already been granted to the Jews. The Jews assented, but the Arabs declined. The Jews still had their rights under San Remo. The Arabs had no rights, certainly not the inalienable rights continuously claimed by Arafat and Abbas.
4. In 1948 Israel declared independence, established unified control over its territory and defended it by blood and treasure. That is historically the way sovereignty arises.
5. Under canon law the Jews had exclusive rights granted by G-d as provided in the Old Testament.
These San Remo rights make possible a one state solution to the current Arab Israeli conflict in Palestine. Those in the Diaspora are also intended as the beneficiaries of the San Remo grant. However in writing this from the relative safety of suburban Washington, DC, it is not our intention to urge this course on the heroic Israelis who currently face an added existential threat from Iran. Note we say relative safety.
With Iran’s hurrying development of nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles, no one is safe. This is only to confirm the necessity and legality of a "one Jewish state solution" that others, before us, have already suggested. It is the Israelis who must choose.
Mr. Salomon Benzimra contributed to this article. He is the author of "The Jewish People's Rights to the Land of Israel", available in "Amazon-Kindle edition".
End Notes
[24] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration_of_1917
[25] http://www.answers.com/topic/faisal-i-ibn-hussein
[26] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18250.htm
[27] Mandate Article 5http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/britman.htm
[28] Article 15. It is preserved by Article 25
[29]http://www.mythsandfacts.com/conflict/mandate_for_palestine/mandate_for_palestine.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary
[30] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon%E2%80%93Hussein_Correspondence
[31]http://cojs.org/cojswiki/What_Mr._Churchill_Said_in_1939_About_the_Palestine_White_Paper:_Excerpt
[32] http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/il%5Egb.html#wwi
[33] http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/unchart.htm#art80
[34] Text of San Remo Resolution, section (a) I am advised it appears only in two paragraphs of the Agreement, written in Frenchhttp://www.cfr.org/israel/san-remo-resolution/p15248
[35] http://islamizationwatch.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-does-dar-al-harb-dar-al-islam-dar.html Spain in the dar al Harbhttp://countercultureconservative.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/dar-al-islam-muslim-worshippers-squat-spanish-cathedral/
[36] Grief refers to the doctrine of "acquired rights" codified in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Article 70 Article 70 1 b) and the legal doctrine of "estoppel" See: Grief at pp.175,176 (The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law)
[37] http://www.answers.com/topic/balfour-declaration-1917
[38] High Walls of Jerusalem, at 611
[39] David Lloyd-George, Memoirs 736-7.
[40]http://www.irfi.org/articles2/articles_2301_2350/Balfour%27s%20deceit.HTM
[41] “Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations” which dealt with the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In it, Stone set forth the central principles of international law upon which Israel’s right to settle the West Bank is based and discussed the inapplicability of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the case of Israeli settlement.
Stone drew upon the writings of Professor Stephen Schwebel, former judge on the Hague’s International Court of Justice (1981-2000), who distinguished between territory acquired in an "aggressive conquest" (such as Japanese conquests during the 1930s and Nazi conquests during World War II) and territory taken in a war of self-defense (for example, Israel’s capture of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 war). He also distinguished between the taking of territory that is legally held by another nation (such as the Japanese occupation of Chinese territory and the Nazi Germany occupation of France, Holland, Belgium and other European lands) as opposed to the taking of territory illegally held. The latter applies to the West Bank and Gaza, which were not considered the legal territories of any High Contracting Party when Israel won control of them; their occupation after 1948 by Jordan and Egypt was illegal and neither country ever had lawful or recognized sovereignty. The last legal sovereignty over the territories was that of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate which encouraged Jewish settlement of the land. See also a discussion of Stone's work, by Andrew Dahdal: “A Reflection On The Views Of Julius Stone And The Applicability Of International Law To The Middle East Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations” which dealt with the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Finally, see a video with Danny Ayalon, Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel, adopting and illustrating the position of Stephen Schwebel and Julius Stone.
[42] http://www.historynet.com/glubb-pasha-and-the-arab-legion.htm
[43] http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1948to1967_holysites.phphttp://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=443&PID=0&IID=3052 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Wall
[44] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Jerusalem
[45] http://www.dore-gold.com/2011/11/the-palestinians-resurrect-the-partition-plan.php
[46] Draft Report of Arab Settlement Activity in the West Bank http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/settlementreport.html
[47] Best account is still Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2003) See also, his Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present
[48] Israel - Jordan, Treaty of Peacehttp://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace%20Process/Guide%20to%20the%20Peace%20Process/Israel-Jordan%20Peace%20Treaty
[49] http://www.biu.ac.il/Besa/perspectives15.htmlhttp://www.ijn.com/columns/view-from-denver/2220-the-myth-of-the-palestinian-arab-womb
[50] 660 rockets and 404 mortar shells fired into Israel since the end of Operation Cast Lead until the end of February, 2012.
March 1, 2012 Palestinians fired three rockets toward Ashkelon. The projectiles landed in the Ashkelon Coast Regional Council, causing no injuries or damage.
March 2, Palestinians fired a Qassam rocket into the Eshkol Regional Council, causing no injuries or damage., March 3
After nightfall, Palestinians fired a Qassam rocket into the Eshkol Regional Council, causing no injuries or damage, March 4. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip fired two Qassam rockets at Israel. One exploded in the Sdot Negev Regional Council
[51] http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp470.htm
In a memorandum addressed to new Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, he stated that the Balfour Declaration contradicted the letters of the covenant (referring to the League Covenant) the Anglo-French Declaration, and the instructions to the King-Crane Commission.
All of the other engagements contained pledges that the Arab or Muslim populations could establish national governments of their own choosing according to the principle of self-determination. Balfour explained: “… in Palestine we do not propose to even go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present (majority) inhabitants of the country though the American [King-Crane] Commission is going through the form of asking what they are.
Balfour stated explicitly to Curzon:
"The Four Great Powers [Britain, France, Italy and the United States] are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, and future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right." * * * * *
Balfour continued:
"I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs, but they will never say they want it. Whatever be the future of Palestine it is not now an ‘independent nation’, nor is it yet on the way to become one. Whatever deference should be paid to the views of those living there, the Powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the matter, to consult them.". . ."If Zionism is to influence the Jewish problem throughout the world, Palestine must be made available for the largest number of Jewish immigrants"
While the rights granted under the Trust restricted the Jews, when they did exercise sovereignty, from doing anything that would impair the civil or religious rights of the Arabs it was silent as to the political rights for the Arabs. The Mandate Law also became the domestic law of the UK and the US in 1924 as Treaty Law when, under a new American Administration, the Mandate became the subject of the Anglo American Convention of 1924.[24]
Perfidious Albion did not maintain the 1920 form of its proposed trust for very long. Circumstances changed, British interests changed, and the British Government also changed. President Wilson's opposition had delayed the issuance of the mandate as proposed in the initial draft submitted to the WWI Allies at San Remo. In the meantime, England had installed Feisal as the King of Syria.[25] After the Battle of Maysalun, in which the French Armed Forces defeated the Syrian Army the French deposed Feisal.[25] Abdullah, Feisal's brother, was furious. He marched his troops from their home in the Hejaz (in the Arabian Peninsula) to Eastern Palestine and made ready to attack the French in Syria.
Churchill did not want war between the Arabs and the French. In the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, Syria was in the French sphere of influence. Churchill gave Feisal the Kingdom of Iraq as a consolation prize[26] and gave Abdullah and his Hashemite tribe from the Arabian Peninsula Eastern Palestine in violation of the British Mandate.[27] The Mandate at San Remo had prohibited the Mandatory from ceding any land to a foreign nation. In the 1922 change, with a new Article 25, it formally approved delaying organized settlement by the Jews East of the Jordan River and informally gave TransJordan to Abdullah and his Hashemite Tribe from the Hejaz.
Article 25 preserved the prohibition of the Mandatory Power from discriminating among races or religions.[28] The land East of the JordanRiver became TransJordan and then Jordan and the Mandatory, despite the specific terms of the mandate, prohibited Jews, but not other ethnic groups, from settling there.
The British urging the League to adopt Article 25 was a breach of its fiduciary relationship as trustee with its beneficiary and as guardian, with its ward.[29] as were the policies in their White Papers of 1922, 1930 and the vicious White Paper of 1939 under the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, of Munich fame, that blocked many Jews from fleeing from the Nazi Holocaust. A vicious enforcement of the blockade ensued and directly disobeyed the Mandate's requirement to facilitate Jewish immigration.
During WWI the Hussein/McMahon correspondence with the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula led to a British offer to all Arabs in the Caliphate of self-government free from Turkish rule if they helped the British in the war.[30]
The Arabs local to Palestine, unlike the Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula that had been led by Lawrence declined the British offer of political self determination if they were to help the Allies, and preferred to fight for the Ottoman Turks who ruled from Constantinople. According to Winston Churchill, , "The Palestinian Arabs, of course, were for the most part fighting against us, ,,," [31]
"However the Jews assembled several battalions of Jewish soldiers that fought alongside the British in Palestine in WWI.[32]
At that point the Jews had, de facto, lost 78% of their Mandated beneficial right to sovereignty in Palestine, the land TransJordan or East of the Jordan River. Only 22% of the Mandate was left. After WWII, Article 80 of the UN Charter[33] expressly preserved the rights that had been granted by the League of Nations prior to its demise, i.e. the Jewish national rights, so the UN could not grant any of it to the Arabs. As I have noted, the Mandate itself prohibited the trustee from ceding any land in Palestine to a foreign Power.
Known as “the Palestine clause,” Article 80 was drafted by Jewish legal representatives including the liberal Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook) from the right-wing Irgun, and prominent Revisionist Ben-Zion Netanyahu (father of Bibi). It preserved the right of the Jewish people to “close settlement” throughout their remaining portion of Palestine west of the Jordan River.
In 1947 nevertheless, the UN did not “grant” but its General Assembly “recommended” (not a grant-- that would be inconsistent with the previous grant) a partition that offered a part of the area West of the Jordan (a part of the 22% remaining) to the Jews, in effect, releasing that part of the trust res (the political rights) to the Jews, and the remainder to the local Arabs, although the latter was unauthorized by the Mandate. In the UNSCOP hearings, the Arabs had threatened violence if the Jews were to have a state in any part of the Middle East. It is evident that the UN, by submitting to the Arabs extortion -- threats of violence -- and recommending still further partition of the remainder, hoped to avoid the violence.
In the San Remo Resolution, the Allies agreed
"To accept the terms of the Mandates Article as given below with reference to Palestine, on the understanding that there was inserted a process-verbal an undertaking by the Mandatory Power that this would not involve the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine;"[34]
What were those rights? The Mandate preserved the civil and religious rights of the local Arabs but did not create any political rights for them. The civil rights included individual political or electoral rights but not the collective political right of self-determination. It did not and could not "preserve" any collective political rights or "national rights" in Palestine for local Arabs in Palestine as they had never in history had any. It follows, therefore, as to political rights, the local Arabs were no worse off than they were under the Ottoman rule from 1520 to 1920, the British suzerainty from 1920 to 1948, or the Jordanian rule from 1948 to 1967.
But the Arabs didn't want the Jews to have any land with political rights for religious reasons, because it violated Islam to have any inroads on the Dar-al-Islam.[35] They engaged in jihad against the Jews and the Arab Higher Committee brought in the Armies of the surrounding Arab and Muslims States.
What was the effect of the abandonment of the trust by the trustee in 1948? Howard Grief provides a more legally precise reason,[36] but a simple way to look at it was that when the trustee quit his obligation, the only equitable thing to do was to give the rights to the beneficiary of the trust or the ward of the guardian.
Going back to 1922, by 1922 the British Government's interests had changed and the government had changed. In addition to its problems with the deposing of King Feisal, it was defending itself from charges that it had conferred political rights to the same land to the French, the Arabs and the Jews in three different agreements, the Sykes-Picot agreement, the McMahon-Hussein correspondence, and the Lord Balfour Declaration. So in 1922, Churchill, in a White Paper, tried wiggle out of England's obligation to the Jews by hinting broadly that a "national home" was not necessarily a state. However in private, many British officials agreed with the interpretation of the Zionists that a state would be established when a Jewish majority was achieved.[37]
In the British cabinet discussion during final consideration of the language of the Balfour Declaration, in responding to the opposition of Lord Curzon, who viewed the language as giving rise to the presumption that Great Britain favored a Jewish State, Lord Balfour stated: "As to the meaning of the words 'national home', to which the Zionists attach so much importance, he understood it to mean some form of British, American, or other protectorate, under which full facilities would be given to the Jews to work out their own salvation and to build up, by means of education, agriculture, and industry, a real center of national culture and focus of national life. It did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter for gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution." The key word here was 'early'; otherwise, the statement makes it quite clear that Balfour envisaged the eventual emergence of an independent Jewish state. Doubtless he had in mind a period somewhat longer than a mere thirty years; but the same could also be said of Chaim Weizmann."[38]
According to Lloyd George, one of Churchill's contemporaries, for example, the meaning was quite clear:
"There has been a good deal of discussion as to the meaning of the words "Jewish National Home" and whether it involved the setting up of a Jewish National State in Palestine. I have already quoted the words actually used by Mr. Balfour when he submitted the declaration to the Cabinet for its approval. They were not challenged at the time by any member present, and there could be no doubt as to what the Cabinet then had in their minds. It was not their idea that a Jewish State should be set up immediately by the Peace Treaty without reference to the wishes of the majority of the inhabitants.
On the other hand, it was contemplated that when the time arrived for according representative institutions to Palestine, if the Jews had meanwhile responded to the opportunity afforded them by the idea of a National Home and had become a definite majority of the inhabitants, then Palestine would thus become a Jewish Commonwealth. The notion that Jewish immigration would have to be artificially restricted in order to ensure that the Jews should be a permanent minority never entered into the heads of anyone engaged in framing the policy. That would have been regarded as unjust and as a fraud on the people to whom we were appealing."[39]
If there is any further doubt in the matter, Balfour himself told a Jewish gathering on February 7,1918: "My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state. It is up to them now; we have given them their great opportunity." [40]
Following an opinion of the renowned international lawyer Julius Stone that focused on the settlement question,[41] President Reagan and succeeding Presidents through George W. Bush maintained a US view that the Jewish Settlements in the West Bank were legal but as a policy matter should be discouraged because of their tendency to discourage the Peace Process. President Obama while continuing the position on policy has not specifically stated his view on legality of the settlements but has referred to them as “illegitimate”..
As to Jerusalem, East Jerusalem fell in 1948 [42] to an attack of the Arab Legion supplied and trained by the British and led by Sir John Bagot Glubb frequently referred to as "Glubb pasha". The Arab Legion later became the Jordanian Army.
The Jordanians demolished 58 synagogues and their contents, uprooted the tombstones of Jewish cemeteries, and used them for paving or building latrines, and built a latrine against the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, the single most holy site for Jews.[43] They expelled all the Jewish inhabitants of East Jerusalem and it became, as Adolph Hitler liked to say, judenrein or cleansed of Jews. In 1967 in the Six Day War, Israel drove the Jordanians east to the Jordan River and became in control of East Jerusalem.[44] They did not use their conquest to deprive the Moslems access to their holy sites in East Jerusalem as the Jordanians had done to the Jews and Christians.
Has the UN's Partition Plan any remaining significance for either the Arabs or the Jews?
No. According to acclaimed International Lawyer Julius Stone, ""The State of Israel is … not legally derived from the partition plan, but [in addition to the grants referred to above] rests (as do most other states in the world) on A. assertion of independence by its people and government, B. on the vindication of that independence by arms against assault by other states, and C. on the establishment of orderly government within territory under its stable control." The Partition plan had assigned the Jerusalem Metropolitan Area to the UN's International Control, at least temporarily for a period of 10 years. However in the war of 1948, the UN did nothing to vindicate that assignment by force of arms against the assault of the surrounding Arab states. Therefore nothing remains of that part of the Partition Plan either. [45]
In fact you read in the news and hear on TV a lot about Jewish settlements outside of Jerusalem and in East Jerusalem, but have you ever seen or heard a reference to new Arab settlements there? Since 1950 more than twice as many new settlements have been built by Arabs in the West Bank as have been built by Jews,[46] totally ignored by the press. They fill them with Lebanese, Iraqis, Jordanians and Egyptians, and, mirabile dictu, they are Palestinians. An Israeli Professor in Haifa named Steven Plaut suggests, tongue in cheek, that the Arabs must have changed the name of the area from Judea and Samaria to the "West Bank" so they wouldn't look silly in claiming that the Jews were illegally settling in eponymous Judea.
In June,1967, in the Six Day War , Israel recaptured Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem.[47] In 1994 Israel agreed that in return for a quitclaim of Jordan, to CisJordan, or the land of Palestine west of the Jordan River, it would release its claim to TransJordan, the land East of the Jordan to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. [48]
My understanding from many authors, is that the Arab claims for the Arab population in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem are overstated. Annexing the so called West Bank would not currently jeopardize a Jewish democracy in Israel. Nor would it in the long run as correct population growth shows Jewish population increase in the West Bank greater than that of the Arabs.[49]
I would only offer citizenship to those, Muslim, Jewish or Christian, who would take a loyalty oath to Israel. Others could remain with the status of permanent residents.
What about Gaza? It it were to keep shooting missiles at Israel, that would be a casus belli and Israel should take it over. Also, when it ceded its sovereignty over Gaza to the Arabs living there, the cession was under a tacit agreement that the Arabs would quit their attacks on Israel. They haven't. [50] A material breach of that obligation also justifies a takeover. Although the people in Gaza were ceded Israel’s political or national rights to the Gaza Strip, they never met the requirements for sovereignty
The first of these is: are the Arabs local to Palestine a “people”? No, as noted above they are an invented people. Another requirement of a separate nation-state is unified control. When armed truces were broken by the Gazans, Hamas, that claims control, always blames the problem on other terrorist organizations. Since Israel’s takeover would not be taking land of another sovereign, the land would not be occupied, but disputed with Israel having the far better claim.[51] I would suggest that until further Jewish population increase over that of the non-Jewish population justifies annexation of Gaza, that the Gazans be authorized Home Rule, but no vote in Israel’s policies.
Israel should retain the right to eliminate candidates or parties that are terrorists. That should meet the requirements of the French "procès verbal" as the Arabs in Gaza never had the right to vote on the policies of the Ottoman Empire.
In sum, it appears that there are five separate views that justify Israeli sovereignty over CisJordan. These are
1. The San Remo Resolution of 1920 which is justification under International Law,
2. The Anglo-American Convention of 1924 makes the Balfour Policy Treaty law and therefore the Domestic Law of the US and the UK,
3. Facts occurring after 1948, including Jordan’s aggressive war in invading a land in which the Jews had been awarded political rights, and the defensive war by the Jews retaking it resulted in acclaimed International Lawyers holding that the West Bank was disputed, not occupied, and the Jews had the better claim to it.
In the Partition of 1947, the UN General Assembly recommended an award of part to the Arabs, that was not a grant because it had already been granted to the Jews. The Jews assented, but the Arabs declined. The Jews still had their rights under San Remo. The Arabs had no rights, certainly not the inalienable rights continuously claimed by Arafat and Abbas.
4. In 1948 Israel declared independence, established unified control over its territory and defended it by blood and treasure. That is historically the way sovereignty arises.
5. Under canon law the Jews had exclusive rights granted by G-d as provided in the Old Testament.
These San Remo rights make possible a one state solution to the current Arab Israeli conflict in Palestine. Those in the Diaspora are also intended as the beneficiaries of the San Remo grant. However in writing this from the relative safety of suburban Washington, DC, it is not our intention to urge this course on the heroic Israelis who currently face an added existential threat from Iran. Note we say relative safety.
With Iran’s hurrying development of nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles, no one is safe. This is only to confirm the necessity and legality of a "one Jewish state solution" that others, before us, have already suggested. It is the Israelis who must choose.
Mr. Salomon Benzimra contributed to this article. He is the author of "The Jewish People's Rights to the Land of Israel", available in "Amazon-Kindle edition".
End Notes
[24] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration_of_1917
[25] http://www.answers.com/topic/faisal-i-ibn-hussein
[26] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18250.htm
[27] Mandate Article 5http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/britman.htm
[28] Article 15. It is preserved by Article 25
[29]http://www.mythsandfacts.com/conflict/mandate_for_palestine/mandate_for_palestine.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary
[30] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon%E2%80%93Hussein_Correspondence
[31]http://cojs.org/cojswiki/What_Mr._Churchill_Said_in_1939_About_the_Palestine_White_Paper:_Excerpt
[32] http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/il%5Egb.html#wwi
[33] http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/unchart.htm#art80
[34] Text of San Remo Resolution, section (a) I am advised it appears only in two paragraphs of the Agreement, written in Frenchhttp://www.cfr.org/israel/san-remo-resolution/p15248
[35] http://islamizationwatch.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-does-dar-al-harb-dar-al-islam-dar.html Spain in the dar al Harbhttp://countercultureconservative.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/dar-al-islam-muslim-worshippers-squat-spanish-cathedral/
[36] Grief refers to the doctrine of "acquired rights" codified in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Article 70 Article 70 1 b) and the legal doctrine of "estoppel" See: Grief at pp.175,176 (The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law)
[37] http://www.answers.com/topic/balfour-declaration-1917
[38] High Walls of Jerusalem, at 611
[39] David Lloyd-George, Memoirs 736-7.
[40]http://www.irfi.org/articles2/articles_2301_2350/Balfour%27s%20deceit.HTM
[41] “Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations” which dealt with the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In it, Stone set forth the central principles of international law upon which Israel’s right to settle the West Bank is based and discussed the inapplicability of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the case of Israeli settlement.
Stone drew upon the writings of Professor Stephen Schwebel, former judge on the Hague’s International Court of Justice (1981-2000), who distinguished between territory acquired in an "aggressive conquest" (such as Japanese conquests during the 1930s and Nazi conquests during World War II) and territory taken in a war of self-defense (for example, Israel’s capture of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 war). He also distinguished between the taking of territory that is legally held by another nation (such as the Japanese occupation of Chinese territory and the Nazi Germany occupation of France, Holland, Belgium and other European lands) as opposed to the taking of territory illegally held. The latter applies to the West Bank and Gaza, which were not considered the legal territories of any High Contracting Party when Israel won control of them; their occupation after 1948 by Jordan and Egypt was illegal and neither country ever had lawful or recognized sovereignty. The last legal sovereignty over the territories was that of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate which encouraged Jewish settlement of the land. See also a discussion of Stone's work, by Andrew Dahdal: “A Reflection On The Views Of Julius Stone And The Applicability Of International Law To The Middle East Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations” which dealt with the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Finally, see a video with Danny Ayalon, Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel, adopting and illustrating the position of Stephen Schwebel and Julius Stone.
[42] http://www.historynet.com/glubb-pasha-and-the-arab-legion.htm
[43] http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1948to1967_holysites.phphttp://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=443&PID=0&IID=3052 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Wall
[44] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Jerusalem
[45] http://www.dore-gold.com/2011/11/the-palestinians-resurrect-the-partition-plan.php
[46] Draft Report of Arab Settlement Activity in the West Bank http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/settlementreport.html
[47] Best account is still Michael B. Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2003) See also, his Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present
[48] Israel - Jordan, Treaty of Peacehttp://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace%20Process/Guide%20to%20the%20Peace%20Process/Israel-Jordan%20Peace%20Treaty
[49] http://www.biu.ac.il/Besa/perspectives15.htmlhttp://www.ijn.com/columns/view-from-denver/2220-the-myth-of-the-palestinian-arab-womb
[50] 660 rockets and 404 mortar shells fired into Israel since the end of Operation Cast Lead until the end of February, 2012.
March 1, 2012 Palestinians fired three rockets toward Ashkelon. The projectiles landed in the Ashkelon Coast Regional Council, causing no injuries or damage.
March 2, Palestinians fired a Qassam rocket into the Eshkol Regional Council, causing no injuries or damage., March 3
After nightfall, Palestinians fired a Qassam rocket into the Eshkol Regional Council, causing no injuries or damage, March 4. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip fired two Qassam rockets at Israel. One exploded in the Sdot Negev Regional Council
[51] http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp470.htm
Op-Ed: Harvard Had no Room for a One Jewish State Solution
This Harvard alumnus applied to speak at the Harvard One State Solution Conference, but his solution was not seen as deserving of a voice in the "free market of ideas" advertised by the university.
Published: Wednesday, February 29, 2012 10:29 PM
The question of the day is: how much lasting influence does Prince Talal's $20 million check have, the one he donated to Harvard in 2009? To my knowledge, donating to colleges is not a part of AIPAC's operations.
What I do know is that here is no room for a one Jewish state solution with a continuing Jewish majority population at the Harvard Conference on March 3 on one state solutions to the Arab-Israel Conflict.
Alan Dershowitz talks about this biased conference in Newsmax at http://www.newsmax.com/AlanDershowitz/harvard-conference-palestinians-israel/2012/02/26/id/430605
A Mr. S. Benzimra of Toronto and I have been trying to get Harvard to accept a speaker on the panel to talk about a one Jewish state solution. He just had his book on the San Remo Agreement of 1920 published last November. The San Remo Agreement granted the Jews exclusive political rights to Palestine.
The speaker would have also talked about the Palestinians being a people invented in 1964 by the Soviet dezinformatsia. The term "Palestinian Arab People" appears three times in the preamble to the 1964 Charter of the PLO as if to comply with the Humpty Dumplty standard. It is the first time it had been seen anywhere so far as I can tell. It is corroborated only by affirmation of the first 422 members of the Palestinian National Council, formed contemporaneously, each hand picked by the KGB.
The PLO Charter was drafted in Moscow, according to the reports of Major General Ion Pacepa. He was the highest ranking defector from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. He has personal knowledge of the matter. Newt Gingrich recently said they were an "invented people", but didn't say who invented them, Pacepa did.
The speaker would also talk about the fiduciary obligations of Britain under the trust or guardianship and of Britain ignoring them in the White Papers of 1922, 1930 and especially the Chamberlain White Paper of 1939 that blocked Jews trying to flee for their lives from the Holocaust from entering what was to become Israel. In the debates on Chamberlain's 1939 White Paper, Winston Churchill charged that Britain was reneging on its promise to the Jews.
The speaker could also dispel some of the canards about Israel, including the lie that the Jews expelled the Arabs from Israel, by showing that theWall Street Journal reported that Mahmoud Abbas has written to the contrary in "Filastin", the official organ of the PLO. He wrote that almost all left at the call and threats of the Arab Higher Executive without ever seeing a Jewish soldier; and after a manufactured report of a massacre at Deir Yassin, ultimately corrected by the BBC interviewing the Arab news commentator of 1948.
Harvard put out a statement on this conference extolling its free market of ideas -- this about a conference that has only Arab and Israeli anti-Zionists and apologists for terrorism speakers on its schedule. Try as we may, we cannot get our speaker on the panel or even have an op-ed published in the Harvard Crimson that would let the students know about the possibility we raise, based on a Jewish one state solution in the San Remo agreement. San Remo is obscured by time and the action of anti-Zionists and anti-Semites. It would be an excellent history lesson for the students.
I have a connection to Harvard. My late wife and I were in the Law School class of '57; she also was in the Radcliffe class of '54. Her mother was President of the Radcliffe Class of 1920, her father was at the law school then; her two brothers went there in the '50s.
I attended the funeral of a relative last week in North Carolina whose family connections to Harvard go back to the time of the sinking of the Titanic. But no access to the panel for our speaker.
Prince Talal went to Menlo College in California and did graduate work at Syracuse, but I have found no evidence of his donations to them. He is known as a shrewd businessman.
Harvard has put out a statement about its free market of ideas, but access to that market is blocked to us.
It really would be an excellent history lesson, commencing with the drafting of Part I of the Treaty of Versailles that is the Covenant of theLeague of Nations. Article 22 provides for trusts or guardianships over parcels of land captured from the Ottoman Empire in WWI by the Allies.
The speaker could show that the Allies intended to reconstitute a Jewish state by granting exclusive political rights to the Jews, but these were not to vest until the Jews were a majority population, a goal to be attained from immigration from the diaspora. If it had been allowed to vest immediately, the plan would have been anti-democratic, as the Jews were only 10% of the population in 1917.
This was referred to in a memo of the British Foreign Office in September 1917 by Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier during the drafting of Lord Balfour's declaration. and also confirmed by Winston Churchill after WWI as stated in the Arabs' submission to UNSCOP in 1948. (See: Musa Alami, The Future of Palestine, Hermon Press, Beirut and London, 1970.) That policy is what was later adopted by the Allies at San Remo.
Ironically, Alan Dershowitz although a strong pro Zionist, is a liberal and supporter of Obama, and is pushing for a two state solution that would needlessly give away much of the Jewish and Christian heritage in Palestine. such as Rachel's Tomb, Tomb of the Patriarchs and sites in Bethlehem.
But a Jewish one-state solution would end up. in the short run. with one less enemy on Israel's borders. and in the long run. with sovereignty over Gaza as well if it doesn't stop firing rockets at Israel.
Home Rule could be provided for the Gazans, but no vote on Israeli policy, until the Jewish population expands enough so that annexing Gaza would not destroy the Jewish democracy, Israel, the only MIddle East country with western values.
That is all that was guaranteed by the cession of sovereignty over Palestine by the Ottomans in Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres -- unamended in the Treaty of Lausanne. It preserved the civil rights of the non-Jews in Palestine prior to the Mandate, but no more. That is all the rights the Arabs in Palestine had for 400 years of rule by the Turkish Ottomans before 1920. It is also all that was required by the French process verbal to the British Mandate for Palestine -- that the non-Jews do not lose any rights.
According to Abbas Zaki, a member of the Fatah Central Committee, and quasi Ambassador to Lebanon, "With the two-state solution, in [his] opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made - just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward".
He suggested, however, also in Arabic, that this view not be made known to the West.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=3d5_1242669760
Mr. Benzimra and I have fashioned a one Jewish state solution that proposes a continuing Jewish majority for one Jewish state in cisJordan, as transJordan was traded in 1994 for a Jordanian quiet claim to cisJordan.
It would commence with a prompt annexation of Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem, where the Arab claims of population are much overstated.
Gaza's continuing attacks on Israel are a casus belli that would justify Israel taking over Gaza. As stated above, it could be given Home Rule but no vote in Israeli elections until growth in Jewish population warranted its annexation.
This, in our opinion, would satisfy the requirement that the civil rights of non-Jews must not be impaired, as the Arabs in Gaza never had rights to vote in elections determining the policy of the Ottoman empire. That met the test of the French "process verbal" appended to the British Mandate for Palestine and the San Remo Agreement of 1920.
It would leave one Jewish state with a western valued democracy and borders that are more defensible than those of the two state solution.
We will be sending an oped shortly with more details on the San Remo Agreement, using it as a basis to secure a "One Jewish State Solution".
What I do know is that here is no room for a one Jewish state solution with a continuing Jewish majority population at the Harvard Conference on March 3 on one state solutions to the Arab-Israel Conflict.
Alan Dershowitz talks about this biased conference in Newsmax at http://www.newsmax.com/AlanDershowitz/harvard-conference-palestinians-israel/2012/02/26/id/430605
A Mr. S. Benzimra of Toronto and I have been trying to get Harvard to accept a speaker on the panel to talk about a one Jewish state solution. He just had his book on the San Remo Agreement of 1920 published last November. The San Remo Agreement granted the Jews exclusive political rights to Palestine.
The speaker would have also talked about the Palestinians being a people invented in 1964 by the Soviet dezinformatsia. The term "Palestinian Arab People" appears three times in the preamble to the 1964 Charter of the PLO as if to comply with the Humpty Dumplty standard. It is the first time it had been seen anywhere so far as I can tell. It is corroborated only by affirmation of the first 422 members of the Palestinian National Council, formed contemporaneously, each hand picked by the KGB.
The PLO Charter was drafted in Moscow, according to the reports of Major General Ion Pacepa. He was the highest ranking defector from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. He has personal knowledge of the matter. Newt Gingrich recently said they were an "invented people", but didn't say who invented them, Pacepa did.
The speaker would also talk about the fiduciary obligations of Britain under the trust or guardianship and of Britain ignoring them in the White Papers of 1922, 1930 and especially the Chamberlain White Paper of 1939 that blocked Jews trying to flee for their lives from the Holocaust from entering what was to become Israel. In the debates on Chamberlain's 1939 White Paper, Winston Churchill charged that Britain was reneging on its promise to the Jews.
The speaker could also dispel some of the canards about Israel, including the lie that the Jews expelled the Arabs from Israel, by showing that theWall Street Journal reported that Mahmoud Abbas has written to the contrary in "Filastin", the official organ of the PLO. He wrote that almost all left at the call and threats of the Arab Higher Executive without ever seeing a Jewish soldier; and after a manufactured report of a massacre at Deir Yassin, ultimately corrected by the BBC interviewing the Arab news commentator of 1948.
Harvard put out a statement on this conference extolling its free market of ideas -- this about a conference that has only Arab and Israeli anti-Zionists and apologists for terrorism speakers on its schedule. Try as we may, we cannot get our speaker on the panel or even have an op-ed published in the Harvard Crimson that would let the students know about the possibility we raise, based on a Jewish one state solution in the San Remo agreement. San Remo is obscured by time and the action of anti-Zionists and anti-Semites. It would be an excellent history lesson for the students.
I have a connection to Harvard. My late wife and I were in the Law School class of '57; she also was in the Radcliffe class of '54. Her mother was President of the Radcliffe Class of 1920, her father was at the law school then; her two brothers went there in the '50s.
I attended the funeral of a relative last week in North Carolina whose family connections to Harvard go back to the time of the sinking of the Titanic. But no access to the panel for our speaker.
Prince Talal went to Menlo College in California and did graduate work at Syracuse, but I have found no evidence of his donations to them. He is known as a shrewd businessman.
Harvard has put out a statement about its free market of ideas, but access to that market is blocked to us.
It really would be an excellent history lesson, commencing with the drafting of Part I of the Treaty of Versailles that is the Covenant of theLeague of Nations. Article 22 provides for trusts or guardianships over parcels of land captured from the Ottoman Empire in WWI by the Allies.
The speaker could show that the Allies intended to reconstitute a Jewish state by granting exclusive political rights to the Jews, but these were not to vest until the Jews were a majority population, a goal to be attained from immigration from the diaspora. If it had been allowed to vest immediately, the plan would have been anti-democratic, as the Jews were only 10% of the population in 1917.
This was referred to in a memo of the British Foreign Office in September 1917 by Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier during the drafting of Lord Balfour's declaration. and also confirmed by Winston Churchill after WWI as stated in the Arabs' submission to UNSCOP in 1948. (See: Musa Alami, The Future of Palestine, Hermon Press, Beirut and London, 1970.) That policy is what was later adopted by the Allies at San Remo.
Ironically, Alan Dershowitz although a strong pro Zionist, is a liberal and supporter of Obama, and is pushing for a two state solution that would needlessly give away much of the Jewish and Christian heritage in Palestine. such as Rachel's Tomb, Tomb of the Patriarchs and sites in Bethlehem.
But a Jewish one-state solution would end up. in the short run. with one less enemy on Israel's borders. and in the long run. with sovereignty over Gaza as well if it doesn't stop firing rockets at Israel.
Home Rule could be provided for the Gazans, but no vote on Israeli policy, until the Jewish population expands enough so that annexing Gaza would not destroy the Jewish democracy, Israel, the only MIddle East country with western values.
That is all that was guaranteed by the cession of sovereignty over Palestine by the Ottomans in Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres -- unamended in the Treaty of Lausanne. It preserved the civil rights of the non-Jews in Palestine prior to the Mandate, but no more. That is all the rights the Arabs in Palestine had for 400 years of rule by the Turkish Ottomans before 1920. It is also all that was required by the French process verbal to the British Mandate for Palestine -- that the non-Jews do not lose any rights.
According to Abbas Zaki, a member of the Fatah Central Committee, and quasi Ambassador to Lebanon, "With the two-state solution, in [his] opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made - just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward".
He suggested, however, also in Arabic, that this view not be made known to the West.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=3d5_1242669760
Mr. Benzimra and I have fashioned a one Jewish state solution that proposes a continuing Jewish majority for one Jewish state in cisJordan, as transJordan was traded in 1994 for a Jordanian quiet claim to cisJordan.
It would commence with a prompt annexation of Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem, where the Arab claims of population are much overstated.
Gaza's continuing attacks on Israel are a casus belli that would justify Israel taking over Gaza. As stated above, it could be given Home Rule but no vote in Israeli elections until growth in Jewish population warranted its annexation.
This, in our opinion, would satisfy the requirement that the civil rights of non-Jews must not be impaired, as the Arabs in Gaza never had rights to vote in elections determining the policy of the Ottoman empire. That met the test of the French "process verbal" appended to the British Mandate for Palestine and the San Remo Agreement of 1920.
It would leave one Jewish state with a western valued democracy and borders that are more defensible than those of the two state solution.
We will be sending an oped shortly with more details on the San Remo Agreement, using it as a basis to secure a "One Jewish State Solution".
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