Wallace Edward Brand · Harvard Law School - International Law - Israel for the Jewish people

Wallace Edward Brand · Harvard Law School - International Law

If the San Remo Agreement was a trust, as most agree, the settlers of the trust were the Allied Principal War Powers who had been at war with the Ottoman Empire. [When you settle land you are a settler but if you set up a trust you are a settler.] Having won the territory in a defensive war, they had the right under customary international law to divide it up among themselves or dispose of it otherwise. They chose to dispose of it to those entitled to self-determination, as promoted by Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points speech. Most people will think that automatically means the current majority population. According to the late Julius Stone "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 draft a 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"….
Now we have determined the cestui que trust or beneficiary we can see that the trust res, the thing placed in trust, is the political rights to Palestine. With the settlers, the trust res and the cestui que trust in hand, where do we find the vital term of the trust, that is , of course, when will the trust res vest? That is not express in the trust except that Article 22 of the League of Nations covenant is referred to as the basis for the Mandate. That shows the intention that the legal dominion for the collective political rights were to pass to the beneficiary sometime. It turns our the further research revealed that when the Jewish People were a population majority in the area to be ruled, and they had the capability of exercising sovereignty, are the two tacit standards for fulfillment of the trust.. We have to look outside the express terms of the Mandate to find them. As the San Remo Agreement was the sole basis for the Palestine Mandate, word for word, we can also look into the origins of the Mandate. We can find this in a Memorandum of the British Foreign Office dated September 19, 1917 by Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier replying to critics of the Balfour Declaration that the Jewish People's immediate rule would be anti-democratic because they made up only 10% of the population of all Palestine intended first to be a National Home and later a Jewish Commonwealth. The British Foreign Office agreed with the criticism that minority rule would be anti-democratic, but said that prospect was "imaginary" because the political rights would be placed in trust of Britain or the US and legal dominion would not pass to the Jewish People until they gained a population majority and the capability of exercising sovereignty. Under the law of trusts the mandatory or trustee relinquished its legal dominion on May 14, 1948 voluntarily, and the law of trusts vested it in the beneficiary subject to its capability of exercising sovereignty. It could exercise sovereignty within the Green Line in 1948 and had a population majority there but it was not until 1967 that it was fully vested. 
I am going to update my legal opinion to include this detail. My updated current opinion is archived at SSRN.com/abstract=2385304.
Claims of the Jewish and Arab Peoples under International Law to the Right of Political Self-Determination in Palestine. See also SSRN.com/abstract=2404738. 
I do not have a copy of the late Dr. Gauthier's magnum opus, so I don't know whether or not he covered these points. Of course we are discussing International Law, not Canon Law. Under Canon Law it is perfectly clear that the Jewish People own Palestine. None of these details is needed.

It seems to me that "Where the prior holder of territory had seized the territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense" has "liberated" the territory. It is not "occupied" in the sense of a "belligerent occupation" as that term is used in 4th Hague Convention which assumes in Article 43 that the state that has been dispossessed is the legitimate sovereign over that territory. In 1948, the collective political rights to self-determination in Palestine were in a trust in which the Jewish People were the beneficiary. In 1948, just as the Arab Legion, officered and supplied by Perfidious Albion invaded eastward, those collective political rights vested in the Jews and in 1967 when they obtained united control over the remainder of the territory of Palestine west of the Jordan, their beneficial interest was changed to legal dominion.