Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People:
From the San Remo Conference (1920) to the Netanyahu-Abbas Talks
Dr. Joshua Teitelbaum, September 15, 2010
Filed Under: Diplomacy - Peace Process, World Jewry
No. 579 September-October 2010
§ According to Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, the real root of the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians had been their ongoing refusal to recognize “the right of the
Jewish people to a state of their own in their historic homeland”, and the
continued terror and violence and he has singled out this issue as a key
“prerequisite for ending the conflict.” Netanyahu’s proposal puts back on the
global agenda a fundamental Jewish national right that was once axiomatic but
today is rarely mentioned.
§ Ninety five years ago at the San
Remo Conference following World War I (April 1920), the Supreme Council of the
Principal Allied Powers determined the allocation of the Middle Eastern
territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire and decided to incorporate the 1917
Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine into the
British Mandate for the territory, a move which confirmed international
recognition of the right of Jewish self-determination.
§ The language adopted at San
Remo was a triumph for Zionism, which saw a
national solution to the problem of the Jews been dispersed and persecuted in
the Diaspora. It recognized the existence of the Jews as more than individuals
who subscribed to a certain religion – Judaism – but rather as a corporate group
deserving of national expression, in this case in the form of a national home.
And this home was to be in Palestine, the
ancient historical homeland of the Jews. The language agreed upon at San
Remo was, as British Foreign Secretary Lord
Curzon put it, “the Magna Carta of the Zionists.” It was clear at the time that
the term “national home” unequivocally meant a state.
§ Jewish self-determination was
part of a process that ended up decolonizing and deoccupation of the Middle
East in an effort that led to Arab as well as Jewish
independence. Repeated recent associations of Israel with
colonialism – a historical canard that erases the millennia-long association of
Jews with the Land of Israel as an
indigenous people for over 3,000 years– ignores the benefit that Zionism
actually brought to the Arabs through the process of decolonization and
deoccupation. The British Peel Commission Report of 1937 was quite clear on
this. Indeed, it was the return of the Jews to the their historical Land of Israel that
gave critical mass to a distinct and unique Palestinian identity as well.
§ The Jews have been brought back
into history through the re-establishment of the State of Israel. This was
accomplished with the aid of international institutions which recognized the justice
and importance of Jewish national self-determination. These institutions
accepted the validity of Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jews.
Today, those who deny the Jewish right to national self-determination, more
than 65 years after the founding of Israel, engage
in a new kind of anti-Semitism.
In his June
14, 2009, address at Bar-Ilan University in
which he accepted the principle of a demilitarized Palestinian state, Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly emphasized an important Israeli
requirement for a final peace agreement: Palestinian recognition of Israel as the
nation-state of the Jewish people. For Netanyahu, this was not a precondition
for negotiations. But, according to his analysis, the real “root of the
conflict” between Israel and the
Palestinians had been their ongoing refusal to recognize “the right of the
Jewish people to a state of their own in their historic ancestral homeland.” He
thus singled out this issue as a key “prerequisite for ending the conflict.”1
The recognition
of the right of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland is not a new
idea. It actually has long historical roots going back in recent history to
1799 when Napoleon Bonaparte was battling forces in Accre , Napoleon at that
time sent a formal letter to the Jews on April 20, 1799 - TO THE RIGHTFUL HEIRS
OF PALESTINE-ISRAEL, offering Palestine as a homeland to the Jews under French
protection, this event and other such events, of which, unfortunately,
have been forgotten in much of the public discourse on the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Indeed, the denial of this right has been part of the international
campaign to challenge Israel’s very legitimacy. For
that reason, it is critical to reemphasize the international, legal, and
historical foundations of this idea in order to challenge the current discourse
of intentional false Delegitimization and restore the fact of Jewish
self-determination as an internationally-accepted norm. Thus, Netanyahu’s
proposal is important for reasons that go beyond the peace process, for it puts
back on the global agenda a fundamental Jewish national right that was once
axiomatic but today is rarely mentioned.
Historical Roots of the Internationally-Recognized Right of
Jewish Self-Determination
Ninety Five years ago at the San Remo Conference in Italy following
World War I (April 1920), the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers
(Great Britain, France, and Italy) and the U.S. as associate power, determined
the allocation of the Middle Eastern territories of the defeated Ottoman
Empire. At San Remo it was decided to incorporate the 1917 Balfour
Declaration supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine into the British
Mandate for the territory, a move which confirmed international recognition of
the right of Jewish self-determination in the place known to the Jews
historically as the Land of Israel (in Hebrew, Eretz Yisrael).
While some have viewed the mandate system as a continuation of British
and French colonialism, the Mandates were temporary by design and eventually
gave way to Arab and Jewish independence. Indeed, the Mandate system could be
viewed essentially as a move toward decolonization and deoccupation (U.S.
President Woodrow Wilson certainly saw it as such), 2 a step on the way to
returning much of the Middle East to its
indigenous peoples and freeing them from the Ottoman colonizers-occupiers who
had ruled for 400 years.
Ironically, the peace process of recent decades, which revived the
unworkable idea of a two-state solution which would allow the fulfillment of
both Jewish and Palestinian self-determination, has also resurrected the idea
of a one-state solution (the Arabs already have a new state on the east bank of
the Jordan river which is 78% of the Palestine Mandate territory, originally
allocated to the Jewish people) – a move which in time would bring about an
Arab majority in the land, thus ending Jewish self-determination. Although the
supporters of a one-state solution or a Palestinian “right of return” may drape
their ideas in the cloth of human rights, in effect they would be denying the
Jewish people their fundamental right of self-determination, which included the
resettlement of the million Jewish families expelled from Arab countries.
Beyond the great injustice this would bring upon the Jewish people, it would
most certainly not bring about peace. Those truly and sincerely concerned with
peace and stability should support self-determination for both peoples in two
states, as decided by the Mandate for Palestine which
divided Palestine, East
of the Jordan river the
Arab state of Jordan and West of the Jordan river the
Jewish State of Israel. since in the Middle East a new
one-state solution west of the Jordan river is in
violation of international laws, treaties and the terms of the Mandate for Palestine and
would only bring death and destruction. Think; Lebanon, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan – not Switzerland.
The Lead-Up to San
Remo
By the time the San Remo Conference convened in April 1920, the Allies
had already made some progress regarding the disposition of Ottoman territorial
possessions. The British had become convinced of the desirability of a post-war
British Palestine, but still needed to convince the French, since this
contradicted the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 which determined
that Palestine was to
be under international control. The best way for the British to gain French
support was first to convince them to support a Jewish national home in Palestine, which
was achieved in June 1917.3 As a result of this diplomacy, the Balfour
Declaration was issued on November
2, 1917. French acquiescence to British rule in Palestine
was a result of the realities brought about by British military successes in
the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and Palestine in particular – in which
the French played practically no role at all.4
The Covenant of the League of Nations, which
was approved by the Paris Peace Conference in April 1919 and later incorporated
in the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, recognized the mandate system
of “tutelage” and gave international validity to it in Article 22 of the
Covenant.5 But the nature of the mandates and who would be the actual mandatory
powers was negotiated between the victorious powers, Britain and France, who
first met in London during February 12-24, 1920. The London
conference, and the San Remo meeting
which followed in April 1920, were aimed at establishing an Allied consensus
prior to signing a treaty with the Ottoman Empire, which
would become known as the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres superseded all previous
agreements and treaties (and which would eventually be replaced by the Treaty
of Lausanne with Turkey).
At San Remo Conference; Britain, France, Japan, and Italy, with
the United States
observing, met from April 18 to April
26, 1920, as the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied
Powers to discuss the Mandates and the future of the Middle Eastern territories
of the recently defeated and now defunct Ottoman
Empire. Britain was
represented by Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the Secretary for Foreign
Affairs, Lord George Nathaniel Curzon. At the table for the French were Prime
Minister Alexandre Millerand and the director of political affairs for the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Philippe Berthelot. The significance of what transpired
at San Remo on April 24-25, 1920, has not always received the attention it
deserves, for in a sense, it was at San Remo that Israel was reborn.6
On April 24, Britain and France, with Italy chairing the meeting and
Japan observing, discussed the future of Palestine. The British, led by Lloyd
George and Lord Curzon, were keen to have the Mandate for Palestine awarded
to Great Britain, and to
include the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration in the treaty with Turkey. The
French, however, were not enthusiastic, despite what the British perceived to
have been prior agreement on the issue. Berthelot argued that the Balfour
Declaration was a unilateral British document, and “an unofficial declaration
made by one power” had no place in the treaty. Furthermore, the French wanted
some recognition of their role as a custodian and protector of Christian holy
sites, which the Balfour Declaration did not mention.
Lloyd George, however, would hear nothing of a French presence. Two
Mandatory powers in Palestine were
quite impossible, and, he threatened ominously, “it might even easily raise
difficulties in regard to [Great
Britain’s] relations with France.”
France should let Britain handle Palestine alone and have mercy on London’s
burden, since “[i]n any case the task of governing Palestine would not be an
easy one, and it would not be rendered less difficult by the fact that it was
to be the reconstituted national home of the Jewish people, who were an
extraordinarily intelligent race, but not easy to govern.”7 The French
eventually relented, reducing their demands to a stipulation in the process
verbal that the rights of non-Jewish communities would not be suspended. A
draft of the article was put before the Supreme Council on April 24 and it was
officially approved on April 25. In the end, the British had carried the day.
The San Remo
language gave detailed content to the general provisions regarding the Mandate
system as formulated in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League
of Nations noted above.
The operative paragraph reads:
The Mandatory power will be responsible for putting into effect the
declaration originally made on the 8th [2nd] November, 1917, by the British
Government, and adopted by the all the other Allied Powers, in favor of the
reestablishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights
and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.8
The parties also agreed that France would be the Mandatory power for
Syria and Lebanon, and Great Britain for Mesopotamia (later Iraq) and
Palestine.9
The language with respect to Palestine adopted at San Remo is remarkable
for several reasons. First, it established recognition by the Great Powers of
the principle of Jewish national self-determination in their own ancestral
historical land. As such, it was a triumph for Zionism, which saw a national
solution to the problem of the Jewish people in Diaspora, as opposed to other
proposed solutions, such as assimilation. It recognized the existence of the
Jews as more than individuals who subscribed to a certain religion – Judaism –
but rather as a corporate group deserving of national expression, in this case
in the form of reconstituting their historical national home. And this homeland
was to be in Palestine aka Israel, the
ancient ancestral homeland of the Jewish people. Interestingly, the rights of
the Arabs (“non-Jewish communities”) in Palestine did not
include national, but only civil and religious rights.
The language is a verbatim repetition of the Balfour Declaration, with
one significant change. Whereas in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Great
Britain promised to “use their best endeavors
to facilitate” a Jewish national home in Palestine, at San
Remo this became an operative
obligation. As the Mandatory power, Britain was
directly charged with “putting [the 1917 Balfour Declaration] into effect.” But
most importantly, when the 1917 Balfour Declaration was first issued, it was
little more than a political declaration. Once it was embedded into the San
Remo Conference and adopted by the Palestine Mandate, it became “an
international legislative act” by the Principal Allied Powers.10
The language agreed upon at San Remo was, as Lord Curzon put it, “the
Magna Carta of the Zionists.”11 It was clear at the time that the term
“national home” unequivocally meant a state. Back in 1917, three months after
his declaration was issued, Lord Balfour confessed: “My personal hope is that
the Jews will make good in Palestine and
eventually found and rebuilt the Jewish state.”12
U.S.
intelligence recommendations drafted for President Wilson at the 1919 Paris
Peace Conference had the same impression: “It will be the policy of the League
of Nations to recognize Palestine as a
Jewish State as soon as it is a Jewish state in fact.”13
In the Wake of San Remo
On April 26, 1920, acting upon instructions, British Major General Louis
Jean Bols, Chief Political Officer and Chief Administrator, Occupied Enemy
Territory Administration (South), announced to the heads of the communities in
Jerusalem that the Supreme Council had approved a Mandate for Palestine that
would probably go to Great Britain. Most importantly, he told them, “the
Balfour Declaration regarding a Jewish National Home shall be included in the
Turkish Peace Treaty.”14 The announcement, reported the Times, “was quietly
received.”15 But in Jewish communities throughout the world, there were celebrations.16
The agreed language of San Remo was incorporated verbatim into the
Treaty of Sèvres, executed by all the Supreme Allied Powers and signed with
Turkey on August 10, 1920, as Article 95.17 The treaty, however, was never
ratified by Turkey since the new nationalist government headed by Mustafa
Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, would have no part of the treaty due to its many
clauses – unrelated to Palestine – that he considered prejudicial to Turkey. By
the time a replacement treaty, the Treaty of Lausanne which added some
modification relating to Turkey only,
was signed with Turkey on July 24, 1923,18 the
Mandate for Palestine had
already been adopted and confirmed in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine of July
24, 1922.19 It went into effect on September 26, 1923.
The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine is a
key document that underscores the international legitimacy of the right of
Jewish self-determination in their ancestral Land of Israel, or Palestine.
According to Howard Grief, this can be seen in the three “recitals” occurring
in the Preamble.20 The first recital is embodied in the
reference to Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, which, by
implication, represents self-determination as “the well-being and development”
of the former subject peoples. The second recital is the
repetition of the 1917 Balfour Declaration as modified at San
Remo, where Britain is
charged with actually carrying out the intent of the Declaration. Finally,
the third recital and perhaps the most important recital in the Preamble
recalls and notes that “recognition has thereby been given to the
historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine”; it
further stresses that this was “grounds for reconstituting their national home
in that country.”21
It should be clear from the above that Jewish self-determination was
part of a process that ended up decolonizing and deoccupation the Middle
East, if not entirely by design. This effort led to
Jewish as well as Arab independence in many states that formerly were occupied
by the Ottoman Empire.
Repeated recent deceptive and false associations of Israel with
colonialism – an a historical canard that erases the millennia-long association
of Jews with the Land of Israel as an
indigenous people – ignores the benefit (even if ironic) that Zionism actually
brought to the Arabs through the process of decolonization and deoccupation.
The British Peel Commission Report of 1937 in Palestine was
quite clear on this:
The fact that the 1917 Balfour Declaration was issued in order to enlist
Jewish support for the Allies and the fact that this support was forthcoming
are not sufficiently appreciated in Palestine. The
Arabs do not appear to realize in the first place that the present position of
the Arab world as a whole is mainly due to the great sacrifices made by the
Allied and Associated Powers in the War and, secondly, that, insofar as the
1917 Balfour Declaration helped to bring about the Allies’ victory, it helped
to bring about the emancipation of all the Arab countries from Turkish rule. If
the Turks and their German allies had won the War, it is improbable that all
the Arab countries, except Palestine, would now have become or be about to
become independent states.22
With respect to the Palestinians per se, it is clear that for many years
after the end of World War I, they the Arabs considered themselves part of
Syria,23 although through constant contact with the challenge of Zionism, and
with the independence of the Arab states, a separate Palestinian identity later
developed in the 1960's.24
Indeed, it was the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral
historical Land of Israel that gave critical mass to a distinct and unique
Palestinian Jewish identity. If Jewish national self-determination had not been
fulfilled, it is debatable if an entirely separate Palestinian nation would
have emerged. The Syrian delegate raised this issue during the UN debate on the
1947 partition plan:
Palestine used to
be a Syrian province. Geographical, historical, racial and religious links exist
there, since hundreds of thousand of Arabs from Syria went to
Palestine after
WWI. There is no distinction whatever between the Palestinians and the Syrians
and had it not been for the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the terms of the
mandate, Palestine would now be a Syrian province [emphasis mine – J.T.], as it
used to be.25
Putting Jewish Self-Determination into Action:
The Partition of Palestine and the Admission of Israel to the
United Nations.
If there were some lingering doubts in the international community about
the wisdom of a reconstituted Jewish state, the German Nazi horrors of the
Holocaust made abundantly clear its absolute necessity. On November 29, 1947,
the United Nations, in General Assembly Resolution 181,26 agreed in violation
of international treaty and the Mandate for Palestine to the partition of
Palestine into a Jewish and a second Arab state,27 to share an economic union,
with a special international regime for Jerusalem. The tally was 33 votes in
favor, 13 against, 10 abstentions, and one absent. At the time, the fact of a
Jewish nation-state was internationally accepted, and taken for granted. Jews
were referred to in national terms – not just religious – throughout the UN
document, as are Arabs. The term “Jewish state” is mentioned 27 times in the
resolution.
Israel is both
a Jewish nation-state and a democratic state. This was neither an impossible
feat nor a contradiction in terms to the framers of the partition resolution,
who stipulated that both the Jewish and Arab states in partitioned Palestine
would have to be democratic and protect the rights of the national minority in
their respective states.28 But Israel’s legitimacy as a state is not by
definition connected to its democratic nature. That Israel’s
democracy is imperfect – and what democracy is not – does not detract from its
legitimacy. As Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein write,
Even nations that do not maintain even a semblance of democracy are
universally recognized as entitled to national independence, and even in such
cases (not in fact wholly exceptional in the Middle East) no one claims that
the very idea of national independence is an undemocratic one.29
Israel allowed a large national Arab minority to remain in its territory
after the 1948 war. (Jordan and Egypt did not
allow Jews to remain in the territory they captured [and confiscated all their
assets including homes and over 50,000 sq. km. of land], which had been
allotted to the Arab state authorized by the UN to come into existence in Palestine.) It naturally
gave expression to the Jewish majority by using Jewish symbols in the national
flag and seal, and in national culture and the designation of Saturday as the
day of rest. This is no different from the many democracies that give
expression to the Christian identity of their majority populations. For
example, several states have Christian crosses in their flags: the United
Kingdom, New
Zealand, and Australia (these
actually have threes crosses in their flags); Switzerland; Norway; Finland; Denmark; Switzerland; and Greece. Pakistan and Turkey make
use of the Islamic crescent in their flags, while India uses a
religious symbol in its flag. Britain’s head
of state, the Queen, is head of the Church of England.
The historical an ancestral connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel
was clear to the international community, as manifested in the League of
Nations Mandate which recognized the “historic connection of the Jewish people
with Palestine” and their right to reconstitute “their national home in that
country.”30 UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine which
recommended partition, clearly saw the historical connection of the Jews to the
Land of Israel and its report mentions this several times.31
On May 11, 1949, the UN admitted Israel, the reconstituted Jewish state
and reestablished by the 1920 San Remo International Conference as
international law and treaty, and which was adopted by the League of Nations
and the Mandate for Palestine adopted by the United Nations, as “a peace-loving
State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and
willing to carry out those obligations.”32
Europe and America: The
Denial of the Legitimacy of Jewish Self-Determination is Anti-Semitic.
Not only is Jewish self-determination a right implemented by
international law and treaties, just like the Arab states created after WWI and
recognized by the international community for nearly a century, it has been
defined as such by the European Union and the U.S. State Department in recent years,
and the rejection of that right has officially been declared to be
anti-Semitism and outright fraud and deception.
The EU’s European Monitoring Center on
Racism and Xenophobia arrived at a “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism” in
2005. In elaborating the various manifestations of anti-Semitism, the document
notes that the State of Israel is “conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” and
cites as an example of anti-Semitism:
denying the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, e.g., by
claiming that the existence of Israel is a
racist endeavor.
This definition was adopted verbatim by the anti-Semitic U.S. State
Department in March 2008.33
The International Legal Status of the State of Israel
In traditional international legal theory, states deserving of
recognition are those which “possess a defined territory; a permanent
population; an effective government; and the capacity to enter into relations
with other States.”34 Israel met and
continues to meet all these criteria. The fact that Israel is a Jewish
state did not add to (or, for that matter, hinder) its acceptance as a
legitimate state among the family of nations. It is legitimate because it meets
these criteria.
The State of Israel is the legitimate expression of Jewish
self-determination. This is in keeping with universal human rights, including
the right to self-determination. While there are those who deny Jewish
self-determination by claiming that the Jews are only a religion, this is not
the position historically shared by the international community. This is
because the Jews have a history and ancestral attachment to the Land of Israel and a
constant yearning for a return to it, whether it is physical and contemporary,
or metaphysical and anchored in messianic times.
The term “Jewish state” refers to national, not religious, identity.
Most Israelis would claim they are members of the Jewish people, but are not
religiously observant Jews. As Ruth Gavison admits, the relationship between
Jews and Judaism is a unique one, since [n]o other people has its own
specific religion. The Arab peoples, for example, comprise Christians, Muslims,
and Druze. While there was a time when the French were mostly Catholics or
former Catholics, they still waged religious wars with the Huguenots, and today
a large number of Frenchmen are Muslim. At the same time, no other religion has
a specific nationality of its own: Christians can be French, American, Mexican,
or Arab; Muslims, too, can be Arabs, Persians, or African-Americans. This
distinction is not merely the result of secularization: Judaism, at least from
a historical perspective, has never differentiated between the people and the
religion. Nor was there any belated development that altered this unique fact:
Social stereotyping never allowed an individual to be a part of the Jewish
people while at the same time a member of another religion; nor could one be an
observant Jew without belonging to the Jewish people.35
Denying Israel’s Legitimacy: Thoughts on Root Causes
The legitimacy of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people seemed
unassailable when the UN Partition Plan was approved in 1947 and the State of
Israel was admitted to the United Nations the following year. What has happened
to change that?
Supporters of Israel
continue to be baffled by the constant barrage of Media attacks on Israel, no
matter what Israel does.
Sure, Israel still
controls its liberated West Bank aka Judea and Samaria, and
its settlement policy is controversial, but this is not for lack of trying to
reach an agreement based on far-reaching and serious offers to the Palestinians
(Camp David, 2000; Taba, 2001; and Prime
Minster Ehud Olmert’s proposals, 2008). Yet Jerusalem seems
to get no credit for withdrawals from Sinai (1982), Lebanon (2000),
and Gaza (2005).
In addition, clear acts of self-defense when attacked from these areas: Lebanon
(2006) and Gaza (2008-2009), and defending a legal blockade against Turkish
blockade runners (2010) and Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in response to
thousands of rockets launched at Israel's population centers in July-August
2014, receive little sympathy from self-righteous pundits and government
officials. In September 2010, TIME magazine published a cover story entitled:
“Why Israel Doesn’t
Care About Peace,” just as Israel and the
Palestinians re-embarked on direct negotiations, which had been delayed for a
year and a half at Palestinian insistence. The article itself suggests that
Israelis (read Jews) care more about money than about peace.36
Some American audiences have difficulty reconciling their notions of
democratic freedom with that of Israel’s. This
is because the American idea of freedom revolves around the right of the
individual to be free from tyranny – foreign and domestic – while the founders
of Israel, heirs
to a European legacy of nationalism, conceived of freedom as the collective
rights of a certain nation or people – in this case, the Jewish people. Daniel
Gordis writes that while America has
inspired much of the Israeli project, each country had a different founding ethos.
America was
about freedom as defined by breaking away from an undemocratic monarchy,
designed to end “the long train of abuses and usurpations,” as stated in the
American Declaration of Independence, while Israel’s
Declaration of Independence is based on the Land of Israel “as the
birthplace of the Jewish people.”37
Edward Said, drawing on Michel Foucault and others, taught us about the
importance of narrative and discourse in the Arab-Israeli conflict.38 He was
sensitive to how capturing the discourse – that nexus of language, knowledge,
and power – was essential for promoting the Palestinian cause. Said and his
followers have been enormously successful. Israel is
often falsely cast in the role of colonialist, and words and phrases such as
“occupation” and “right of return” have become politically saturated
expressions with only one meaning. They then play an insidious psychological
role in forming and weighting the discourse against Israel. But
the law and possession is on the side of Israel. Had Israel not
been standing today in the Middle East, the
whole Middle east would
be in Radical Islamist's hands and murder, terror, violence and mayhem would
rule the region.
Certain elite circles in Europe have
their own reasons for denying Israel’s
legitimacy, especially the right of the Jewish people to a nation-state of
their own. Daniel Hannan, a British Conservative Party member of the European
Parliament, pointed out during an address in Jerusalem in
early 2010 that Israel, by its
very existence, challenges the intellectual basis of European integration,
which seeks to supplant the old national ideal on the European continent with
the European Union.
After all, Hannan argues, the EU was founded on the idea that old
national loyalties are arbitrary, transient, and ultimately have been
discredited since they were the cause of many of Europe’s great
wars.
In contrast, Israel, which
was resurrected after 2,000 years, is the embodiment of the national ideal. If
Israel was right to re-establish itself and thrive, Hannan concludes, and the
national ideal is correct, then some in Europe might feel challenged that their
multinational alternative was a mistake, explaining their need to attack Israel
and undermine its legitimacy.39
There is something particularly galling and despicable about denying
Jewish people-hood and self-determination. Identity is by definition
self-defining. The Jews define themselves as a people and overwhelmingly
support the embodiment of Jewish self-determination as manifested in the State
of Israel. Just as there can be a Palestinian state in Jordan, since
the Palestinians choose a unique identity, there can be a Jewish state.
Affirming the right of the Jewish people to a nation-state, however, is not
only important in the context of the Arab-Israeli peace process. It is critical
for countering the forces that feel the need to delegitimize the Jewish state
for their own internal political reasons.
The Jews have been brought back into history through the reestablishment
of the State of Israel on its historical ancestral land. This was accomplished
with the aid of international institutions which recognized the justice and
importance of Jewish national self-determination. These institutions accepted
the validity of Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jews. Today,
those who deny the Jewish right to national self-determination, more than 65
years after the internationally Mandated the reconstituting and founding of
Israel, engage in a new kind of anti-Semitism, one that calls for the elimination
of a state created by International law and treaties adopted by the League of
Nations and assumed by the United Nations.
This cannot stand. The circumstances that led the international
community to support the establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state in Jordan (the
second legally unauthorized Arab state did not come into existence because the
Arabs made war on Israel and
took over the territories allotted to the Arab-Palestinians in Jordan) still
obtain today. The international community thus has an obligation not only to
work for peace and a two-state solution, the Jewish people west of the
Jordan river and the Arab-Palestinians east of the Jordan river as
international law and treaties are being effectuated and adopted by the Mandate
for Palestine signed by all the members of the League of Nations, but also to
stand by its previous decisions and stop the campaign to delegitimize Israel as
the nation-state of the Jewish people.
* * *
Notes
1. Address by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Bar-Ilan University, June 14, 2009,
http://bit.ly/bZUrlH.
2. Irwin Mansdorf, “Is Israel a Colonial State? The
Political Psychology of Palestinian Nomenclature,” Jerusalem Center For Public
Affairs, Jerusalem Viewpoints, No. 576, March-April 2010, http://bit.ly/Is_Israel_a_Colonial_State.
3. French Foreign Minister Paul Cambon to Zionist Executive Member Nahum
Sokolow, June 4, 1917, in
J.C. Hurewitz (ed.), The Middle East and North
Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, Vol. 2,
British-French Supremacy, 1914-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979),
p. 103.
4. Hurewitz, p. 119; 202-203.
5. Avalon Project – The Covenant of the League
of Nations,
http://bit.ly/CovenantofLeagueofNationsArticle22.
6. The most exhaustive study of the international legal basis for the
State of Israel is Howard Grief, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel
under International Law (Jerusalem: Mazo Publishers, 2008), which attributes
great importance to the San Remo decision, and which he terms the “San Remo
Resolution.”
7. See Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle
for Mastery in the Middle East,
1789-1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2001), pp. 256-258. The minutes of the meeting from which these quotations are
taken, as well as the text of the draft and final articles, are in Rohan Butler
and J.P.T. Bury, Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939, First Series,
Vol. 8 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1958), pp. 156-185.
8. Balfour’s letter to Lord Rothschild was dated November 2; the text
was published in the Times on November 9, after probably being communicated to
the press by the Foreign Office on November 8.
9. Butler and
Bury, p. 177.
10. See Allan Gerson, Israel, the West
Bank, and International Law (London: Routledge, 1978),
p. 43. This was the language used by Judge Moore in the Mavrommatis case heard
by the Permanent Court of International Justice.
11. Grief, p. 39.
12. Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (New
Haven: Yale University Press,
2008), p. 10.
13. “Tentative Recommendations for President Wilson by the Intelligence
Section of the American Delegation to the Peace Conference,” January 21, 1919, in
Hurewitz, pp. 132-36.
14. FO 371/5114, Bols to Lord Curzon, June 7, 1920, reprinted in Isaiah Friedman
(ed.), The Rise of Israel: Riots in Jerusalem-San Remo Conference, April 1920,
Vol. 12 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), pp. 212-221.
15. Times, May 1,
1920, reproduced in Friedman, p. 222.
16. FO 371/5118, Geddes (Washington) to
Foreign Office, May 3,
1920, and editor’s introduction, in Friedman, p. 224.
17. Peace Treaty of Sèvres – World War I Document Archive,
http://bit.ly/SevresTreaty.
18. Treaty of Lausanne – World
War I Document Archive, http://bit.ly/TreatyofLausanne.
19. The Avalon Project – The Palestine Mandate,
http://bit.ly/PalestineMandate.
20. Legally, a “recital” is “the repetition of some former writing, or
the statement of something which has been done. Recitals are used to explain
those matters of fact which are necessary to make the transaction
intelligible.” http://bit.ly/RecitalDefinition, at lectlaw.com.
21. Grief, pp. 143-146.
22. http://unispal.un.org/pdfs/Cmd5479.pdf, (ch. II, para. 19, p. 24),
cited in Mansdorf, “Is Israel a Colonial State?”
23. Peel Report, paragraph 23, p. 25, cited in Mansdorf, “Is Israel a Colonial State?”
24. For important views on the historical development of Palestinian
identity, see Muhammad Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the
Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1918-1929 (London: Frank Cass, 1974);
Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity (New York: Columbia University Press,
1998).
25. Alexander Yakobson and Amnon
Rubinstein, Israel and the
Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights (New
York: Routledge, 2009), p. 38.
26. http://bit.ly/Resolution_181.
27. It was clear why the term “Arab” and not “Palestinian” was used for
the Arab state. The Mandate for Palestine had
included both Jews and Arabs, and the use of “Palestinian” only for the Arabs
would not have made semantic sense at the time.
28. Yakobson and Rubinstein, p. 2; http://bit.ly/Resolution_181.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., p. 41
31. Ibid., pp. 41-42, and quotation from the report therein.
32. http://bit.ly/Resolution_273.
33. http://bit.ly/EU_Working_Defintiton_of_Anti_Semitism; U.S.
Department of State, Contemporary Global
Anti-Semitism,http://bit.ly/state_anti_semitism. I thank Prof. Amnon Rubinstein
for these references.
34. Sean Murphy, “Democratic Legitimacy and the Recognition of States
and Governments,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3
(July 1999), pp. 545-581. I thank international law expert Dr. Amichai Magen
for discussing this issue and providing me with this reference.
35. Ruth Gavison, “The Jews’ Right to Statehood: A Defense,” Azure
(Summer 2003), pp. 70-108 (pp. 101-102 quoted), http://bit.ly/9TRRjm.
36. See Daniel Gordis, “Acceptable in Polite Society,”
commentarymagazine.com, September
7, 2010, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/acceptable-in-polite-society-15527.
The online version of the TIME article is significantly abridged and edited and
does not give the full effect of the print version.
37. Daniel Gordis, Saving Israel: How
the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End (Hoboken: Wiley,
2009), pp. 136-137.
38. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
39. See Daniel Hannan on “Europe’s
Antagonism to Israel,”
Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, February 14, 2010,
http://www.jims-israel.org/.
* * *
Joshua Teitelbaum, Ph.D., is Principal Research Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for
Public Affairs. He holds research positions at the GLORIA Center, IDC
Herzliya, and the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. He
also holds visiting positions at the Hoover Institution and the Center for
Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, both at Stanford University. He is
the author of several Jerusalem Center studies
including WhatIranian Leaders Really Say about Doing Away with Israel (2008)
and The Arab Peace Initiative: A Primer and Future Prospects (2009). His latest
book is Political Liberalization in the Persian
Gulf (Columbia University Press, 2009).
Publication: Jerusalem
Viewpoints
Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People:
From the San
Remo
Conference (1920) to the Netanyahu-Abbas Talks
No. 579
September-October 2010
§
According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the real root of
the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians had been their ongoing refusal to recognize “the right of the
Jewish people to a state of their own in their historic homeland” and he has
singled out this issue as a key “prerequisite for ending the conflict.”
Netanyahu’s proposal puts back on the global agenda a fundamental Jewish
national right that was once axiomatic but today is rarely mentioned.
§
Ninety years ago at the San Remo Conference following World War I
(April 1920), the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers determined the
allocation of the Middle Eastern territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire and
decided to incorporate the 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish
national home in Palestine into the British Mandate for the territory, a move
which confirmed international recognition of the right of Jewish
self-determination.
§
The language adopted at San Remo was a triumph for
Zionism, which saw a national solution to the problem of the Jews. It
recognized the existence of the Jews as more than individuals who subscribed to
a certain religion –
Judaism – but rather as a corporate group deserving of national expression, in this case in the form of
a national home. And this home was to be in Palestine, the ancient
homeland of the Jews. The language agreed upon at San Remo was, as British
Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon put it, “the Magna Carta of the Zionists.” It was
clear at the time that the term “national home” really meant a state.
§
Jewish self-determination was part of a process that ended up
decolonizing the Middle East in an effort that led to Arab as
well as Jewish independence. Repeated recent associations of Israel with
colonialism – an historical canard that erases the millennia-long association
of Jews with the Land of Israel as an indigenous people – ignores the benefit
that Zionism actually brought to the Arabs through the process of
decolonization. The British Peel Commission Report of 1937 was quite clear on
this. Indeed, it was the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel that gave critical
mass to a distinct and unique Palestinian identity as well.
§
The Jews have been brought back into history through the
establishment of the State of Israel. This was accomplished with the aid of
international institutions which recognized the justice and importance of
Jewish national self-determination. These institutions accepted the validity of
Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jews. Today, those who deny
the Jewish right to national self-determination, more than 60 years after the
founding of Israel, engage in a new
kind of anti-Semitism.
In his June 14, 2009, address at Bar-Ilan University in which he accepted
the principle of a demilitarized Palestinian state, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu repeatedly emphasized an important Israeli requirement for a final
peace agreement: Palestinian recognition of Israel as the nation-state of
the Jewish people. For Netanyahu, this was not a precondition for negotiations.
But, according to his analysis, the real “root of the conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians
had been their ongoing refusal to recognize “the right of the Jewish people to
a state of their own in their historic homeland.” He thus singled out this
issue as a key “prerequisite for ending the conflict.”1
The recognition of the
right of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland is not a new idea. It
actually has long historical roots which, unfortunately, have been forgotten in
much of the public discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Indeed, the denial
of this right has been part of the international campaign to challenge Israel’s very legitimacy. For
that reason, it is critical to reemphasize the international, legal, and
historical foundations of this idea in order to challenge the current discourse
of Delegitimization and restore the idea of Jewish self-determination as an
internationally-accepted norm. Thus, Netanyahu’s proposal is important for
reasons that go beyond the peace process, for it puts back on the global agenda
a fundamental Jewish national right that was once axiomatic but today is rarely
mentioned.
Historical Roots of the
Internationally-Recognized Right of Jewish Self-Determination
Ninety years ago at the
San Remo Conference in Italy following World War I (April 1920), the Supreme
Council of the Principal Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, and Italy)
determined the allocation of the Middle Eastern territories of the defeated
Ottoman Empire. At San Remo it was decided to incorporate the 1917 Balfour
Declaration supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine into the British
Mandate for the territory, a move which confirmed international recognition of
the right of Jewish self-determination in the place known to the Jews as the
Land of Israel (in Hebrew, Eretz Yisrael).
While some have viewed
the mandate system as a continuation of British and French colonialism, the
mandates were temporary by design and eventually gave way to Arab and Jewish
independence. Indeed, the mandate system could be viewed essentially as a move
toward decolonization (U.S. President Woodrow Wilson certainly saw it as such),2 a step on the way to returning much
of the Middle East to its indigenous peoples and freeing them from the Ottoman
colonizers who had ruled for 400 years.
Ironically, the peace
process of recent decades, which revived the idea of a two-state solution which
would allow the fulfillment of both Jewish and Palestinian self-determination,
has also resurrected the idea of a one-state solution – a move which in time
would bring about an Arab majority in the land, thus ending Jewish
self-determination. Although the supporters of a one-state solution or a
Palestinian “right of return” may drape their ideas in the cloth of human
rights, in effect they would be denying the Jewish people their fundamental
right of self-determination. Beyond the great injustice this would bring upon
the Jewish people, it would most certainly not bring about peace. Those truly
concerned with peace and stability should support self-determination for both
peoples in two states, since in the Middle East a one-state solution
would only bring death and destruction. Think Lebanon, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan – not Switzerland.
The Lead-Up to San Remo
By the time the San Remo
Conference convened in April 1920, the Allies had already made some progress
regarding the disposition of Ottoman territorial possessions. The British had
become convinced of the desirability of a post-war British Palestine, but still
needed to convince the French, since this contradicted the terms of the
Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 which determined that Palestine was to be under
international control. The best way for the British to gain French support was
first to convince them to support a Jewish national home in Palestine, which was achieved in
June 1917.3 As a result of
this diplomacy, the Balfour Declaration was issued on November 2, 1917. French acquiescence to British rule in Palestine was a result of the
realities brought about by British military successes in the Arab provinces of
the Ottoman Empire and Palestine in particular – in
which the French played practically no role at all.4
The Covenant of the
League of Nations, which was approved by the Paris Peace Conference in April
1919 and later incorporated in the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28,
1919, recognized the mandate system of “tutelage” and gave international
validity to it in Article 22 of the Covenant.5But the nature of the mandates and who would be
the actual mandatory powers was negotiated between the victorious powers,
Britain and France, who first met in London during February 12-24, 1920. The
London conference, and the San Remo meeting which followed in April, were aimed
at establishing an Allied consensus prior to signing a treaty with the Ottoman
Empire, which would become known as the Treaty of Sèvres (and which would
eventually be replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey).
At San Remo
Britain, France, Japan, and Italy, with the United States observing, met from
April 18 to April 26, 1920, as the Supreme Council
of the Principal Allied Powers to discuss the mandates and the future of the
Middle Eastern territories of the recently defeated and now defunct Ottoman Empire. Britain was represented by
Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Lord
George Nathaniel Curzon. At the table for the French were Prime Minister
Alexandre Millerand and the director of political affairs for the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, Philippe Berthelot. The significance of what transpired at San Remo on April 24-25, 1920, has not always received the attention it
deserves, for in a sense, it was at San Remo that Israel was born.6
On April 24, Britain and France, with Italy chairing the meeting
and Japan observing, discussed
the future of Palestine. The British, led by
Lloyd George and Lord Curzon, were keen to have the mandate for Palestine awarded to Great Britain, and to include the
language of the Balfour Declaration in the treaty with Turkey. The French, however,
were not enthusiastic, despite what the British perceived to have been prior
agreement on the issue. Berthelot argued that the Balfour Declaration was a
unilateral British document, and “an unofficial declaration made by one power”
had no place in the treaty. Furthermore, the French wanted some recognition of
their role as a custodian and protector of Christian holy sites, which the
Balfour Declaration did not mention.
Lloyd George, however,
would hear nothing of a French presence. Two mandatory powers in Palestine were quite impossible,
and, he threatened ominously, “it might even easily raise difficulties in
regard to [Great Britain’s] relations with France.” France should let
Britain handle Palestine alone and have mercy on London’s burden, since “[i]n
any case the task of governing Palestine would not be an easy one, and it would
not be rendered less difficult by the fact that it was to be the national home
of the Jews, who were an extraordinarily intelligent race, but not easy to
govern.”7 The French
eventually relented, reducing their demands to a stipulation in the procès verbal that the rights of non-Jewish
communities would not be suspended. A draft of the article was put before the
Supreme Council on April 24 and it was officially approved on April 25. In the
end, the British had carried the day.
The San Remo language gave detailed
content to the general provisions regarding the mandate system as formulated in
Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations noted above. The
operative paragraph reads:
The mandatory power will
be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on the 8th [2nd] November, 1917, by the
British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favor of the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights
and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.8
The parties also agreed
that France would be the mandatory
power for Syria, and Great Britain for Mesopotamia (later Iraq) and Palestine.9
The language with
respect to Palestine adopted at San Remo is remarkable for
several reasons. First, it established recognition by the Great Powers of the
principle of Jewish national self-determination. As such, it was a triumph for
Zionism, which saw a national solution to the problem of the Jews, as opposed
to other proposed solutions, such as assimilation. It recognized the existence
of the Jews as more than individuals who subscribed to a certain religion – Judaism – but rather as a corporate
group deserving of national expression,
in this case in the form of a national home. And this home was to be in Palestine, the ancient homeland
of the Jews. Interestingly, the rights of the Arabs (“non-Jewish communities”)
in Palestine did not include national, but only civil
and religious rights.
The language is a
verbatim repetition of the Balfour Declaration, with one significant change.
Whereas in the Balfour Declaration, Great Britain promised to “use their
best endeavors to facilitate” a Jewish national home in Palestine, at San Remo this became an
operative obligation. As the mandatory power, Britain was directly charged
with “putting [the Balfour Declaration] into effect.” But most importantly,
when the Balfour Declaration was first issued, it was little more than a
political declaration. Once it was embedded into the Palestine Mandate, it
became “an international legislative act” by the Principal Allied Powers.10
The language agreed upon
at San Remo was, as Lord Curzon put it, “the Magna
Carta of the Zionists.”11 It was clear at the time that the term “national home”
really meant a state. Back in 1917, three months after his declaration was
issued, Lord Balfour confessed: “My personal hope is that the Jews will make
good in Palestine and eventually found a
Jewish state.”12 U.S. intelligence
recommendations drafted for President Wilson at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference
had the same impression: “It will be the policy of the League of Nations to recognize Palestine as a Jewish State as
soon as it is a Jewish state in fact.”13
In the Wake of San Remo
On April 26, 1920, acting upon instructions, British Major
General Louis Jean Bols, Chief Political Officer and Chief Administrator,
Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (South), announced to the heads of the
communities in Jerusalem that the Supreme
Council had approved a mandate for Palestine that would probably go
to Great Britain. Most importantly, he
told them, “the Balfour Declaration regarding a Jewish National Home shall be
included in the Turkish Peace Treaty.”14 The announcement, reported the Times, “was quietly received.”15 But in Jewish
communities throughout the world, there were celebrations.16
The agreed language of
San Remo was incorporated verbatim into the Treaty of Sèvres, signed with
Turkey on August 10, 1920, as Article 95.17 The treaty, however, was never ratified by Turkey since the
new nationalist government headed by Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli,
would have no part of the treaty due to its many clauses – unrelated to
Palestine – that he considered prejudicial to Turkey. By the time a replacement
treaty, the Treaty of Lausanne, was signed with Turkey on July 24, 1923,18 the mandate for Palestine had already been
confirmed in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine of July 24, 1922.19 It went into
effect on September 26, 1923.
The League of Nations
Mandate for Palestine is a key document that
underscores the international legitimacy of the right of Jewish self-determination
in the Land of Israel, or Palestine. According to Howard
Grief, this can be seen in the three “recitals” occurring in the Preamble.20 The first recital
is embodied in the reference to Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant,
which, by implication, represents self-determination as “the well-being and
development” of the former subject peoples. The second recital is the
repetition of the Balfour Declaration as changed at San Remo, where Britain is charged with
actually carrying out the intent of the Declaration. Finally, the third and
perhaps the most important recital in the Preamble recalls and notes that
“recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish
people with Palestine”; it further stresses that this was “grounds for
reconstituting their national home in that country.”21
It should be clear from
the above that Jewish self-determination was part of a process that ended up
decolonizing the Middle East, if not entirely by design. This effort led to
Jewish as well as Arab independence. Repeated recent associations of Israel with colonialism – an
ahistorical canard that erases the millennia-long association of Jews with the Land of Israel as an indigenous people
– ignores the benefit (even if ironic) that Zionism actually brought to the
Arabs through the process of decolonization. The British Peel Commission Report
of 1937 was quite clear on this:
The fact that the
Balfour Declaration was issued in order to enlist Jewish support for the Allies
and the fact that this support was forthcoming are not sufficiently appreciated
in Palestine. The Arabs do not
appear to realize in the first place that the present position of the Arab
world as a whole is mainly due to the great sacrifices made by the Allied and
Associated Powers in the War and, secondly, that, insofar as the Balfour
Declaration helped to bring about the Allies’ victory, it helped to bring about
the emancipation of all the Arab countries from Turkish rule. If the Turks and
their German allies had won the War, it is improbable that all the Arab
countries, except Palestine, would now have become
or be about to become independent states.22
With respect to the
Palestinians per se, it is clear that for many years after the end of World War
I, they considered themselves part of Syria,23although through
constant contact with the challenge of Zionism, and with the independence of
the Arab states, a separate Palestinian identity later developed.24
Indeed, it was the
return of the Jews to the Land of Israel that gave critical mass
to a distinct and unique Palestinian identity. If Jewish national
self-determination had not been fulfilled, it is debatable if an entirely
separate Palestinian nation would have emerged. The Syrian delegate raised this
issue during the UN debate on the 1947 partition plan:
Palestine used to be a Syrian
province. Geographical, historical, racial and religious links exist there.
There is no distinction whatever between the Palestinians and the Syrians
and had
it not been for the Balfour Declaration and the terms of the mandate, Palestine would now be a Syrian province [emphasis mine –
J.T.], as it used to be.25
Putting Jewish
Self-Determination into Action: The Partition of Palestine and the Admission of Israel to the United Nations
If there were some lingering
doubts in the international community about the wisdom of a Jewish state, the
German Nazi horrors of the Holocaust made abundantly clear its absolute
necessity. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations, in General Assembly
Resolution 181,26 agreed to the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an
Arab state,27 to share an
economic union, with a special international regime for Jerusalem. The tally
was 33 votes in favor, 13 against, 10 abstentions, and one absent. At the time,
the idea of a Jewish nation-state was internationally accepted, even taken for
granted. Jews were referred to in national terms – not just religious –
throughout the UN document, as are Arabs. The term “Jewish state” is mentioned
27 times in the resolution.
Israel is both a Jewish
nation-state and a democratic state. This was neither an impossible feat nor a
contradiction in terms to the framers of the partition resolution, who
stipulated that both the Jewish and Arab states in partitioned Palestine would
have to be democratic and protect the rights of the national minority in their
respective states.28 But Israel’s legitimacy as a state is not by definition
connected to its democratic nature. That Israel’s democracy is
imperfect – and what democracy is not – does not detract from its legitimacy.
As Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein write,
Even nations that do not
maintain even a semblance of democracy are universally recognized as entitled
to national independence, and even in such cases (not in fact wholly
exceptional in the Middle East) no one claims that the very idea of national
independence is an undemocratic one.29
Israel allowed a large
national minority to remain in its territory after the 1948 war. (Jordan and Egypt did not allow Jews to
remain in the territory they captured, which had been allotted to the Arab
state authorized by the UN to come into existence in Palestine.) It naturally gave
expression to the Jewish majority by using Jewish symbols in the national flag
and seal, and in national culture and the designation of Saturday as the day of
rest. This is no different from the many democracies that give expression to
the Christian identity of their majority populations. For example, several
states have Christian crosses in their flags: the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia (these actually have
threes crosses in their flags); Switzerland; Norway; Finland; Denmark; Switzerland; and Greece. Pakistan and Turkey make use of the Islamic
crescent in their flags, while India uses a religious symbol
in its flag. Britain’s head of state, the
Queen, is head of the Church of England.
The historical
connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel was clear to the international
community, as manifested in the League of Nations mandate which recognized the
“historic connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and their right to
reconstitute “their national home in that country.”30UNSCOP, the United
Nations Special Committee on Palestine which recommended
partition, clearly saw the historical connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel and its report mentions
this several times.31
On May 11, 1949, the UN admitted Israel, the Jewish state
created by the United Nations, as “a peace-loving State which accepts the
obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those
obligations.”32
Europe and America: The Denial of the Legitimacy
of Jewish Self-Determination is Anti-Semitic
Not only is Jewish
self-determination a right recognized by the international community for nearly
a century, it has been defined as such by the European Union and the U.S. State
Department in recent years, and the rejection of that right has officially been
declared to be anti-Semitism.
The EU’s European Monitoring Center on Racism and
Xenophobia arrived at a “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism” in 2005. In
elaborating the various manifestations of anti-Semitism, the document notes
that the State of Israel is “conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” and cites as
an example of anti-Semitism:
denying the right of the
Jewish people to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of Israel is a racist endeavor.
This definition was
adopted verbatim by the U.S. State Department in March 2008.33
The International Legal Status
of the State of Israel
In traditional
international legal theory, states deserving of recognition are those which
“possess a defined territory; a permanent population; an effective government;
and the capacity to enter into relations with other States.”34 Israel met and continues to
meet these criteria. The fact that Israel is a Jewish state did
not add to (or, for that matter, hinder) its acceptance as a legitimate state
among the family of nations. It is legitimate because it meets these criteria.
The State of Israel is
the legitimate expression of Jewish self-determination. This is in keeping with
universal human rights, including the right to self-determination. While there
are those who deny Jewish self-determination by claiming that the Jews are only
a religion, this is not the position historically shared by the international
community. This is because the Jews have a history of attachment to the Land of Israel and a constant yearning
for a return to it, whether it is physical and contemporary, or metaphysical
and anchored in messianic times.
The term “Jewish state”
refers to national, not religious, identity. Most Israelis would claim they are
members of the Jewish people, but are not religiously observant Jews. As Ruth
Gavison admits, the relationship between Jews and Judaism is a unique one,
since
[n]o other people has
its own specific religion. The Arab peoples, for example, comprise Christians,
Muslims, and Druze. While there was a time when the French were mostly
Catholics or former Catholics, they still waged religious wars with the
Huguenots, and today a large number of Frenchmen are Muslim. At the same time,
no other religion has a specific nationality of its own: Christians can be
French, American, Mexican, or Arab; Muslims, too, can be Arabs, Persians, or
African-Americans. This distinction is not merely the result of secularization:
Judaism, at least from a historical perspective, has never differentiated
between the people and the religion. Nor was there any belated development that
altered this unique fact: Social stereotyping never allowed an individual to be
a part of the Jewish people while at the same time a member of another
religion; nor could one be an observant Jew without belonging to the Jewish
people.35
Denying Israel’s Legitimacy:
Thoughts on Root Causes
The legitimacy of Israel as the nation-state of
the Jewish people seemed unassailable when the UN Partition Plan was approved
in 1947 and the State of Israel was admitted to the United Nations the
following year. What has happened to change that?
Supporters of Israel continue to be baffled
by the constant barrage of media attacks on Israel, no matter what Israel does. Sure, Israel still controls the West Bank, and its settlement
policy is controversial, but this is not for lack of trying to reach an
agreement based on far-reaching and serious offers to the Palestinians (Camp David, 2000; Taba, 2001; and
Prime Minster Ehud Olmert’s proposals, 2008). Yet Jerusalem seems to get no credit
for withdrawals from Sinai (1982), Lebanon (2000), and Gaza (2005). In
addition, clear acts of self-defense when attacked from these areas: Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2008-2009), and
defending a legal blockade against Turkish blockade runners (2010), receive
little sympathy from self-righteous pundits and government officials. In
September 2010, TIME magazine
published a cover story entitled: “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About
Peace,” just as Israel and the Palestinians
re-embarked on direct negotiations, which had been delayed for a year and a
half at Palestinian insistence. The article itself suggests that Israelis (read
Jews) care more about money than about peace.36
Some American audiences
have difficulty reconciling their notions of democratic freedom with that of Israel’s. This is because the
American idea of freedom revolves around the right of the individual to be free
from tyranny – foreign and domestic – while the founders of Israel, heirs to a European
legacy of nationalism, conceived of freedom as the collective rights of a
certain nation or people – in this case, the Jewish people. Daniel Gordis
writes that while America has inspired much of
the Israeli project, each country had a different founding ethos. America was about freedom as
defined by breaking away from an undemocratic monarchy, designed to end “the
long train of abuses and usurpations,” as stated in the American Declaration of
Independence, while Israel’s Declaration of
Independence is based on the Land of Israel “as the birthplace of
the Jewish people.”37
Edward Said, drawing on
Michel Foucault and others, taught us about the importance of narrative and
discourse in the Arab-Israeli conflict.38 He was sensitive to how capturing the discourse – that nexus
of language, knowledge, and power – was essential for promoting the Palestinian
cause. Said and his followers have been enormously successful. Israel is often cast in the
role of colonialist, and words and phrases such as “occupation” and “right of
return” have become politically saturated expressions with only one meaning.
They then play an insidious psychological role in forming and weighting the
discourse against Israel.
Certain elite circles in
Europe have their own reasons
for denying Israel’s legitimacy,
especially the right of the Jewish people to a nation-state of their own.
Daniel Hannan, a British Conservative Party member of the European Parliament,
pointed out during an address in Jerusalem in early 2010 that Israel, by its very existence,
challenges the intellectual basis of European integration, which seeks to
supplant the old national ideal on the European continent with the European
Union.
After all, Hannan
argues, the EU was founded on the idea that old national loyalties are
arbitrary, transient, and ultimately have been discredited since they were the
cause of many of Europe’s great wars. In contrast, Israel, which was resurrected
after 2,000 years, is the embodiment of the national ideal. If Israel was right to
re-establish itself, Hannan concludes, and the national ideal is correct, then
some in Europe might feel challenged that their multinational
alternative was a mistake, explaining their need to attack Israel and undermine its
legitimacy.39
There is something
particularly galling about denying Jewish people hood and self-determination.
Identity is by definition self-defining. The Jews define themselves as a people
and overwhelmingly support the embodiment of Jewish self-determination as
manifested in the State of Israel. Just as there can be a Palestinian state,
since the Palestinians choose a unique identity, there can be a Jewish state.
Affirming the right of the Jewish people to a nation-state, however, is not
only important in the context of the Arab-Israeli peace process. It is critical
for countering the forces that need to delegitimize the Jewish state for their
own internal political reasons.
The Jews have been
brought back into history through the establishment of the State of Israel.
This was accomplished with the aid of international institutions which
recognized the justice and importance of Jewish national self-determination.
These institutions accepted the validity of Zionism, the national liberation
movement of the Jews. Today, those who deny the Jewish right to national
self-determination, more than 60 years after the founding of Israel, engage in a new kind
of anti-Semitism, one that calls for the elimination of a state created by the
United Nations.
This cannot stand. The
circumstances that led the international community to support the establishment
of a Jewish and an Arab state (the Arab state did not come into existence
because the Arabs made war on Israel and took over the
territories allotted to the Palestinians) still obtain today. The international
community thus has an obligation not only to work for peace and a two-state
solution, but also to stand by its previous decisions and stop the campaign to
delegitimize Israel as the nation-state of
the Jews.
* * *
Notes
1. Address by Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Bar-Ilan University, June 14, 2009, http://bit.ly/bZUrlH.
2. Irwin Mansdorf, “Is Israel a Colonial State? The Political
Psychology of Palestinian Nomenclature,” Jerusalem Center For Public
Affairs, Jerusalem Viewpoints,
No. 576, March-April 2010, http://bit.ly/Is_Israel_a_Colonial_State.
3. French Foreign
Minister Paul Cambon to Zionist Executive Member Nahum Sokolow, June 4, 1917, in J.C. Hurewitz (ed.), The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A
Documentary Record, Vol. 2, British-French Supremacy, 1914-1945 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1979), p. 103.
4. Hurewitz, p. 119;
202-203.
5. Avalon Project – The
Covenant of the League of Nations, http://bit.ly/CovenantofLeagueofNationsArticle22.
6. The most exhaustive
study of the international legal basis for the State of Israel is Howard
Grief, The Legal Foundation and
Borders of Israel under International Law (Jerusalem: Mazo Publishers,
2008), which attributes great importance to the San Remo decision, and which he
terms the “San Remo Resolution.”
7. See Efraim Karsh and
Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The
Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp.
256-258. The minutes of the meeting from which these quotations are taken, as
well as the text of the draft and final articles, are in Rohan Butler and
J.P.T. Bury, Documents on British Foreign
Policy, 1919-1939, First Series, Vol. 8 (London: Her Majesty’s
Stationary Office, 1958), pp. 156-185.
8. Balfour’s letter to
Lord Rothschild was dated November 2; the text was published in the Times on November 9, after probably being
communicated to the press by the Foreign Office on November 8.
9. Butler and Bury, p. 177.
10. See Allan
Gerson, Israel, the West Bank, and International Law (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 43. This was
the language used by Judge Moore in the Mavrommatis case heard by the Permanent Court of International
Justice.
11. Grief, p. 39.
12. Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 10.
13. “Tentative
Recommendations for President Wilson by the Intelligence Section of the
American Delegation to the Peace Conference,” January
21, 1919, in Hurewitz, pp. 132-36.
14. FO 371/5114, Bols to
Lord Curzon, June 7, 1920, reprinted in Isaiah
Friedman (ed.), The Rise of Israel: Riots in Jerusalem-San Remo
Conference, April 1920, Vol. 12 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), pp. 212-221.
15. Times, May 1, 1920, reproduced in
Friedman, p. 222.
16. FO 371/5118, Geddes
(Washington) to Foreign Office, May 3, 1920, and editor’s introduction, in Friedman, p.
224.
17. Peace Treaty of
Sèvres – World War I Document Archive, http://bit.ly/SevresTreaty.
18. Treaty of Lausanne – World War I Document
Archive, http://bit.ly/TreatyofLausanne.
19. The Avalon Project –
The Palestine Mandate, http://bit.ly/PalestineMandate.
20. Legally, a “recital”
is “the repetition of some former writing, or the statement of something which
has been done. Recitals are used to explain those matters of fact which are
necessary to make the transaction
intelligible.” http://bit.ly/RecitalDefinition, at lectlaw.com.
21. Grief, pp. 143-146.
22. http://unispal.un.org/pdfs/Cmd5479.pdf,
(ch. II, para. 19, p. 24), cited in Mansdorf, “Is Israel a Colonial State?”
23. Peel Report,
paragraph 23, p. 25, cited in Mansdorf, “Is Israel a Colonial State?”
24. For important views
on the historical development of Palestinian identity, see Muhammad Muslim, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989); Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1918-1929 (London:
Frank Cass, 1974); Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian
Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
25. Alexander Yakobson
and Amnon Rubinstein, Israel and the Family of Nations: The
Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights (New York: Routledge, 2009), p.
38.
26. http://bit.ly/Resolution_181.
27. It was clear why the
term “Arab” and not “Palestinian” was used for the Arab state. The Mandate for Palestine had included both Jews
and Arabs, and the use of “Palestinian” only for the Arabs would not have made
semantic sense at the time.
28. Yakobson and
Rubinstein, p. 2; http://bit.ly/Resolution_181.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., p. 41
31. Ibid., pp. 41-42, and quotation from the report
therein.
32. http://bit.ly/Resolution_273.
33. http://bit.ly/EU_Working_Defintiton_of_Anti_Semitism;
U.S. Department of State, Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism,http://bit.ly/state_anti_semitism.
I thank Prof. Amnon Rubinstein for these references.
34. Sean Murphy,
“Democratic Legitimacy and the Recognition of States and Governments,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 48,
No. 3 (July 1999), pp. 545-581. I thank
international law expert Dr. Amichai Magen for discussing this issue and
providing me with this reference.
35. Ruth Gavison, “The
Jews’ Right to Statehood: A Defense,” Azure (Summer
2003), pp. 70-108 (pp. 101-102 quoted), http://bit.ly/9TRRjm.
36. See Daniel Gordis,
“Acceptable in Polite Society,” commentarymagazine.com, September 7, 2010,
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/acceptable-in-polite-society-15527.
The online version of the TIME article
is significantly abridged and edited and does not give the full effect of the
print version.
37. Daniel Gordis, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win
a War That May Never End (Hoboken: Wiley, 2009), pp.
136-137.
38. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
39. See Daniel Hannan on
“Europe’s Antagonism to Israel,” Jerusalem Institute
for Market Studies, February 14, 2010, http://www.jims-israel.org/.
* * *
Joshua Teitelbaum,
Ph.D., is Principal Research Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He
holds research positions at the GLORIA Center, IDC Herzliya, and the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. He also holds visiting
positions at the Hoover Institution and the Center for Democracy, Development
and the Rule of Law, both at Stanford University. He is the author of
several Jerusalem Center studies including What Iranian Leaders Really Say about Doing Away with Israel (2008)
and The Arab Peace Initiative: A
Primer and Future Prospects (2009). His latest book is Political Liberalization in the Persian Gulf (Columbia
University Press, 2009).
- See more at:
http://jcpa.org/article/israel-as-the-nation-state-of-the-jewish-people-from-the-san-remo-conference-1920-to-the-netanyahu-abbas-talks/#sthash.YXPRPD0r.dpuf
48
COMMENTS
W E Brand
If you can find a copy of “A
Jewish Palestine: the Jewish case for a British trust”, read it. In it Harry
Sacher who had written the first draft of the Balfour Declaration, described
five methods of obtaining a Jewish Palestine and selected placing the
collective political rights to self-determination in trust for the Jews until
the Jews in Palestine were a majority in the territory they would rule and
capable of assuming the duties of a state. It was published by the Zionist Organization
in London in 1919.
The Law of Return is for The Jews, the option to return to
Greater Israel and The Arab-Arab-Arab-Palestinians to leave Greater Israel and
return to the Arab countries they originated from. The
Arab-Arab-Arab-Palestinians should move to the Million plus Jewish homes
confiscated by the Arab countries from the expelled Jewish people and the
120,440 sq. km. of Real property the Arabs confiscated from the million plus
Jews and their children expelled from Arab countries. That is the only viable
alternative.
Face it and stop hallucinating, once and for all. There will never be an Arab-Arab-Palestinian
State in Greater Israel West of the
Jordan River (Judea and Samaria).
Jerusalem the United Eternal
Capital of the Jewish people.
YJ Draiman
Sending thousands of rockets indiscriminately into civilian
centers and tunneling into Israel
to kill civilians and sending suicide bombers is not an obstacle to peace but
building homes is? Are the U.S. & E.U. going on tour as a new comedy duo?
The Jewish heart and mind is eternally
connected to Jerusalem
and Israel
for thousands of years.
“For over three thousand years, Jerusalem
has been the center of Jewish hope and longing. No other city has played such a
dominant role in the history, culture, religion and consciousness of a people
as has Jerusalem
in the life of Jewry and Judaism. Throughout centuries of exile, Jerusalem
remained alive in the hearts and prayers of Jews everywhere as the focal point
of Jewish history, the symbol of ancient glory, spiritual fulfillment and
modern renewal. This heart and soul of the Jewish people engenders the thought
that if you want one simple word to symbolize all of Jewish history, that word
would be ‘Jerusalem.’
”
“Every Jew has a spark in his soul from the
light of God above that illuminates his way during difficult times. And when it
seems to him that he is lost and that there is no way out, the spark flares and
lights his way. This is the little jug of oil that is revealed in time to save
the Jew in times of despair and to light up his life in desperate times.” The
Jewish people liberation and return to Jerusalem
in 1967 fulfilled part of the Jewish aspirations and the completion will be
when the Jewish Temple
is rebuilt.
Ron
Wow! This thread is filled with more genuine geniuses than
MIT, Technion and Oxford — put
together! And not one of you pointed out that the UN and the Obama dictatorship
are serial law breakers! So put away your legal documents and historical
narratives and simply be prepared for another war because that ignominious
organization called the United Nations and the Islamist president of the United
States are colluding as we type in a villainous attempt to eradicate Israel
whether it’s legal or not.
With The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under
International Law (Mazo Publishers, Jerusalem) Canadian-born Israeli
constitutional scholar and lawyer Howard Grief has given us a book that
shatters every myth, lie, misrepresentation and distortion employed over the 61
years of Israel’s existence to negate the sovereign rights of the Jewish People
to their national home.
It is a lengthy treatise – 660 pages plus a 50-page appendix – but the Jewish
people’s long and tortuous struggle to retrieve their stolen patrimony deserves
nothing less than full disclosure. Anyone who has ever been at a loss to
counter the slanders and calumnies that are the stock in trade of the
Israel-bashers and anti-Semites on both the Left and Right will treasure every
one of its 20 illuminating chapters.
Rooted in the premise that the best antidote to a myriad of
small and medium sized fabrications is the exposure of the whole cloth from
which they’ve been woven, The Legal Foundation lays bare two dominant myths
that have shaped popular perspectives on Israel.
The first is the fallacy that Jewish sovereignty over the land
of Israel was the joint product of
the 1947 United Nations Partition and the May 15th, 1948 termination of the British Mandate for Palestine.
In fact, as Grief points out, Jewish sovereignty in Palestine
had been validated under international law 28 years earlier.
“The legal title of the Jewish People to the mandated territory of Palestine in
all of its historical parts,” he informs us, was first recognized on April 24,
1920 when the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council (Britain, France, Italy
and Japan), meeting in San Remo, Italy, “converted the 1917 ‘Balfour
Declaration’ into a binding legal document.” This was confirmed by the 1920
Treaty of Sevres and Lausanne.
How “binding” may be construed from the fact that its wording gave effect to
the provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of
Nations and became incorporated into the Mandate for Palestine.
Indeed, the “San Remo Resolution,” within which the Allied Supreme Council’s
decision is contained, constitutes what the author terms “the foundation
document of the State of Israel, the legal existence of which is directly
traceable from that document.”
That the Jewish People were unable to exercise their sovereignty in Palestine
for 28 years – it being assigned to the British Mandatory power as their de
facto agent – did in no way detract from their ‘de jure’ rights to the land
under international law during that interregnum.
In this thesis, Grief is ironically supported by both a passionate Zionist,
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and one of Zionism’s most
implacable opponents, post World War I British Foreign Secretary Lord George
Nathaniel Curzon.
Brandeis believed that with the passage of the San Remo Resolution, the debate
over who owned Palestine was
effectively over. Curzon called the Resolution the “Magna Carta” of the Jewish
People.
From the initial miss-attribution of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to the
1947 Partition Plan rather than the 1920 San Remo Resolution, it was just a hop
and a skip to a second major miss-representation of Israel’s international
legal status – the erroneous assumption that the Partition Plan and the May
1948 termination of the British Mandate somehow erased the Jewish People’s
rights to Palestine in all its historical parts and dimensions enunciated at
San Remo, and implemented under the terms of the League of Nations Covenant.
Those “parts and dimensions” were defined inter alia, as including the
northwestern portions of the Golan and most of present day Jordan
by the “Franco-British Boundary Convention” in Paris.
The presumptive cancellation of those rights, Grief submits, is thoroughly
discredited by “the principle of acquired rights,” codified in the 1969 Vienna
Convention on the “Law of Treaties,” and the “doctrine of estoppel.”
The first, he asserts, insures that “the fundamental rights of the Jewish
people did not lapse with the international process which brought them into
existence. The second further guarantees that these rights cannot simply be
abrogated or denied by those states which previously recognized their
existence.”
Taken together, they provide what the author terms a “definitive answer anyone
who claims that Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty over all of
Palestine and the land of Israel did not continue after the end of the Mandate
for Palestine…except in the allotted boundaries of the UN Partition Plan…”
Noteworthy among the states that wholeheartedly endorsed Jewish sovereignty
over Palestine in all its
“historical parts and dimensions” was the United
States of America – the same U.S.A that
today regards Israel’s
presence in Judea and Samaria
as an illegal “occupation” of lands upon which it favors the creation of a Palestinian
State.
The Obama administration and the Bush administration that preceded it are
either unaware or have chosen to be unaware of the fact that the 1924
Anglo-American Convention on Palestine made the U.S. a “contracting party” to
the Mandate, further reinforcing a unanimously passed Joint Resolution of the
67th Congress two years earlier, signed by President Warren G. Harding,
recognizing a future Jewish State in “the whole of Palestine.”
It needs to be borne in mind, Grief notes, that the Mandate for Palestine
that was ceremoniously incorporated into U.S.
law in 1924 “was a constitution for the projected Jewish state that made no
provision for an Arab state and which especially prohibited the partition of
the country.”
Thus, he concludes, the fierce exception the U.S.
has taken to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria
and its unremitting pressure for creation of a “Palestinian
State” amount to a repudiation of
its signature to the Anglo-American Convention on Palestine.
It is in violation of American law and America’s
obligations under international law.
Jen Chant
Your comment below
sounds like a good basis for my PhD
“Mandate for Palestine that was ceremoniously incorporated into U.S. law in 1924 “was a constitution for the
projected Jewish state that made no provision for an Arab state and which
especially prohibited the partition of the country.”
Iyad Rafidi
The article is deficient on
the following premises:
1. It ignores the rights
provided in the mandate of the indigenous Palestinian people;
2. It infers the words “home
for the Jewish people” to mean “homeland”;
3. it ignores the fact that Palestine was declared as a “State” under a Class A mandate
under tutelage in 1922 and it took legal effect in 1924. Palestine had its own courts etc;
4. It assumes that all Jews
have a “connection” to the land of Palestine as stated in the mandate in complete contradiction to
the facts.
2. There was never a Roman
exile of the Jews some 2000 years ago see the work of Israeli Historian The
Myth of the Jewish Exile from the Land of Israel: A Demonstration of Irenic Scholarship Yuval, Israel
Jacob;https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-5JeCa2Z7hV2szWm1VYmVlckE/edit
3. The Palestinian People are
the Hebrews of the bible amongst other tribes of the biblical land as traced in
the Demographic History of Palestine in Wikipedia;
In these circumstances one
can completely discount the Myth of the Diaspora and therefore the supposed
Aliyah Jewish Right of Return, as well as any Jewish “Connection” to the land of Palestine as required under the mandate.
Finally Professor John
Quigley in his book “The Statehood of Palestine” clearly spells out the fact
that Palestine has been a state continuously since 1924 and Israel is a state that ceded a part of Palestine in 1924.
Professor Quigley shows that
British legal opinion questioned weather Israel can be formed as a state in a legal sense and the
United Nations in 1948 refused the Syrian request to obtain such an opinion.
Under those circumstances and
from a legal perspective it may be worthwhile to obtain final legal judgment on
the question of Palestinian and Israeli Statehood.
Mara Cohen
Iyad Rafidi- By what standards do you label Arab
Palestinians as “Indigenous”. Residents of longstanding are not necessarily
Indigenous. And just given documented history, as well as Family Names
indicating place of origin, the Arab Palestinians are not Indigenous to the
that area of the Levant.
Mara Cohen,
You’re question implies that you believe that Jews are the
only rightful owners of Palestine.
If so, and likewise, by what standards does one label European Jews as the
owners of Palestine? As Jewish and
other scientific DNA research concluded, European Jews aren’t even Semites.
Nikita Kamenetski
Before mid 1970s in the
English Language dictionaries the term Palestinian People had never been used.
The Columbia Encyclopedia, New York
& London, Columbia University Press, 1968 in the article on Palestine there’s not a single word “a Palestinian”. The reason
was that there were no Palestinian people in 1968. For the first time in the
Global arena the term Palestinian People was used on December 22 1976 UN General Assembly document A/Dec/31/318 Resolution
31/318.
And here I am citing from Wallace Edward Brand’s “SOVIET RUSSIA, THE CREATORS
OF THE PLO AND THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE”:
“The revelations of the highest ranking Soviet bloc defector, Lt. Gen. Ion
Mihai Pacepa [Romania], show that the peace process is, and has from the
outset, been nothing but a charade.
It all started with the creation of a fictitious “Palestinian People” who
allegedly demand political self determination. This collective noun was created
by the Soviet disinformation masters in 1964 when they created the Palestinian
Liberation Organization, the “PLO”. The term “Palestinian People” as a
descriptive of Arabs in Palestine
appeared for the first time in the preamble of the 1964 PLO Charter, drafted in
Moscow. The Charter was affirmed by the first 422 members of
the Palestinian National Council, handpicked by the KGB.
Why in Moscow? The 1960s and 1970s were the years the Soviets were
in the business of creating “liberation organizations”: for Palestine and Bolivia in 1964, Columbia 1965, in the 70s “The Secret Army for the Liberation
of Armenia” that bombed US airline offices in Europe,
and “The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine that bombed
Israelis.” But the PLO, was by far its most enduring success….
In the PLO Charter preamble they actually had to use the phrase “Palestinian
Arab People” to exclude those Jews who had retained a presence in Palestine since Biblical times and had been a majority
population in Jerusalem as early as 1845. Romanian Communist dictator
Ceausescu, at Soviet urging, persuaded Arafat to abandon his claim of wanting
to annihilate the Jews in Israel in favor of “liberating the Palestinian
People” in Israel.
Why? A brilliant strategy. That was the first step in reframing the conflict
between the Arabs and the Jews from religious jihad to secular nationalism in a
quest for political self determination, a posture far less offensive to the
West. By focusing on political liberation for a small group of Arabs, it
ignored the fact that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the
surrounding Arab states. These are states that outnumber its population many
fold with Muslims who are commanded by an extreme form of their religion to
kill infidels to take back land formerly controlled by Muslims. It creates
Jews, ignoring they are a small group, as oppressors of an even smaller
discrete group of Arabs, described in the Charter as Palestinian Arabs
excluding those in Jordan, Judea, Samaria and Gaza. (After the 1967 war, and
the Israeli conquest of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the exclusions for Arabs in
those areas were removed the Charter). It transforms the Jews from victims to
oppressors. “
Wallace Edward Brand
The Palestine Mandate was a
trust in which the settlers who contributed the trust res were the Allied
Principal War Powers. The lodestar of interpreting the trust is the intention
of the settlers. This was described in a memorandum of the British Foreign
Office dated December 19, 1917. The Jewish People had the immediate right of
settlement in Palestine but the collective political rights were to be held
in trust until the Jewish People attained a population majority in the area to
be ruled and the capability of exercising sovereignty. This was to avoid
charges that the government was “antidemocratic. These national rights vested
in two parts. One part vested in 1948 when the Jews attained a majority of the
population inside the Green Line and unified control over the defined territory
and the permanent population. The second part vested when the Jews attained
unified control over Judea, Samaria
and East Jerusalem.
“The Official Journal of the League of Nations, dated June 1922, contained a statement by Lord
Balfour (UK) in which he explained that the League’s authority was strictly
limited. The article related that the ‘Mandates were not the creation of the
League, and they could not in substance be altered by the League. The League’s
duties were confined to seeing that the specific and detailed terms of the
mandates were in accordance with the decisions taken by the Allied and
Associated Powers, and that in carrying out these mandates the Mandatory Powers
should be under the supervision—not under the control—of the League.'[
Article 27 gave a little
flexibility to the supervisors of the trust but they could not alter it in
substance. They could not change the cestui que trust from the Jewish People to
the Arab People as has been implied. And the Permanent Mandates Commission
ruled that the UK had no authority to adopt the changes in the 1939 Mandate. The trust
lived on until 1967 when the territory of Judea,
Samaria and East
Jerusalem vested in the
Jewish People even though the State of Israel has not asserted as yet asserted
Jurisdiction over Judea and Samaria. Under Article 80 of the UN Charter, the UN has no
authority to change the rights of the Jews in those territories.
Under the Palestine Mandate
the Jewish People could not require the non-Jewish communities to surrender any
of their rights. By providing internal autonomy to those non-Jewish
communities, they have lived up to their obligations. The non-Jews in those
territories never had collective political rights to self-determination. They
had been under the colonial rule of Turkey for 400 years prior to 1920. All they had was
individual political rights which were saved as “civil rights”, and religious
rights also saved.
See SSRN.com/abstract=2385304
David
I have no time right now to address all of your
inaccuracies, Iyad, but just very few for starter:
The most important inaccuracy is your contention regarding
“the rights provided in the mandate of the indigenous Palestinian people;”!!
Without getting into too many “complications” you ignore the
fact that the mandate was issued in order to build a national home for the
Jewish People – not for the “Palestinians”!!!
That said, the mere fact that said “Palestinians” have
rejected the UN Partition Plan, decided to go to war and losing that war,
deprives them from any “rights” they may have had by any twisted interpretation
you may wish to bring up!!!
Their acts do not award them any such prizes!!!!
I’m sorry I don’t have the time to go farther with this. May
be another time.
Wallace Edward Brand
Greater Israel belongs to the
Jewish people under International Law!
The Jewish People’s historical right to the land
of Greater Israel had been
recognized by the international community and upheld by the rule of public
international law.
Any view that contradicts this statement is pure distortion of the facts and
history.
Israel is not
obliged to support the creation of an Arab state west of the Jordan
river alongside Israel
and it must not concede to any such arrangement or the security and survival of
Israel will be
compromised.
The Oslo Agreements were made with a view to enhance “a just, lasting and
comprehensive peace.” Yet, since their coming into effect the Middle
East has witnessed not peace but violence of the worst kind in
recent history. As of today the Oslo
agreement is null and void. The Arab Palestinians have not lived up to any of
the agreement. The Arab Palestinians promote, preach and teach their children
and the masses to create terror, violence and suicide bombing. Their only goal
is the destruction of the Jewish State, read the Palestinian and Hamas Charter.
The establishment of the Palestinian Authority should serve as a “guide to the
bewildered” of the grave risks posed by such an Arab
State, which may eventually lead to
the destruction of the Jewish State. Any land for peace compromise by Israel
has made the situation worse. Sadly, appeasement and concessions by Israel
only aggravated the situation and increased violence. Israel
must stand its ground, resist unjust world pressure and protect its citizens at
all costs. Any concessions by Israel
will only make the situation worse and bring about more violence and death, as
the past experience has proven.
Under public international law, Israel
is entitled to diligently encourage and promote close Jewish settlement of the land
of Israel, thereby realizing the
principles set out by the San Remo Treaty of 1920 and the League of
Nations in the original Mandate document. In 1922 in violation of
the treaty, the British gave away 80% of the land allocated to the Jewish
people and gave it to the Arabs to set-up a state that never existed in
history. (The British wanted to protect their oil interests).
In addition at that time, the Allied powers also set up 21 Arab
States and one Jewish State. If you
questions Israel’s
borders, you must question the 21 Arab States borders and Jordan.
It is also important to address the expulsion of over a million Jewish people
from the Arab countries and the confiscation of land owned by Jewish people in
the Arab countries, totaling 120,000 sq. km. (4 times the size of Israel)
valued at over 15 trillion dollars and other personal assets confiscated by the
Arabs totaling over 990 billion dollars.
The Jewish people resettled the million Jewish refugees from the Arab
countries. It is about time the Arab countries who expelled the million Jewish
people, must settle the Arab-Palestinian refugees once and for all without
compromising Israel
and bring about peace and tranquility to the region.
Neither the U.N. nor any Country in the world has the authority to create a
state or dissolve a state, (check the U.N. charter and international law.)
A true peace will bring about an economic boom to the region of which the world
has never seen before. It will raise the standard of living for all the people
in the Middle East and accelerate peace and harmony.
It will also divert the billions of dollars invested in war materials to be
used to advance the economy, medical and social services and more.
YJ Draiman
LEV
Howard Weisberg
At last — a coherent comment. I agree with everything you
say.
Re: Israel
– To whom it may concern in Europe, Asia,
the US and
elsewhere:
We are tired of hearing that withdrawal from Judea
and Samaria will bring peace. We
know and you know that it would bring another Gaza.
So stop saying it and promoting this fallacy. Past experience has proven that
concessions, appeasement and land for peace only increased terror, violence and
more conflict.
We are tired of hearing that land beyond the Green Line is
‘Arab-Palestinian land’. The Green Line is simply an armistice line that has no
political significance. You know this too. The San Remo Treaty of 1920 Granted
the Mandate for Palestine to the Jewish people, the same Allied powers also
established 21 Arab States and one Jewish State – The Arabs are not willing to
give up any part of the 21 Arab States and the Jews are not willing to give up
any part of the Jewish State.
We are tired of hearing about the “Arab-Palestinian people.”
They are no different from the Arabs of Syria or Egypt,
from which most of their ancestors migrated in the last 150 years or so. There
is no Palestinian language or religion, and until very recently they considered
themselves simply ‘Arabs’. Their culture is almost entirely defined by their
opposition to the Jewish state. Teaching hate and terror to their children.
There never was an Arab-Palestinian State
or people in History. The Arab Palestinians have a State in Jordan
which is 80% of the land originally allocated to the Jewish people under the
San Remo Treaty of 1920.
We are tired of hearing that “the Arab-Palestinians deserve
a state.” We are indigenous here, not them, and their behavior entitles them
more to a trial at The Hague than
to a state. The Arab Palestinians have a State it is called Jordan
which was carved out of Jewish allocated land in 1922.
And they certainly don’t deserve our state, which is the
only state they want. They already took 80% of Jewish allocated land which is Jordan.
Israel also
gave them the Gaza Strip.
We are tired of hearing about ‘The Occupation’. As Minister
Naftali Bennett said the other day, you can’t be an occupier in your own land.
The Arabs are the occupiers, Greater Israel has been a Jewish state for 4,000
years even if it was temporarily conquered and occupied by various nations over
the centuries.
We are tired of hearing that “settlements are illegal under
international law.” They are not. The San Remo Treaty of 1920 explicitly
stated that Jewish people can reside anywhere in the Mandate for Palestine,
those terms are set in perpetuity.
We are tired of hearing that “settlement construction is an
obstacle to peace.” Arab rejectionism and terrorism and suicide bombing is the
reason there is no peace. When the Arab-Palestinians teach and preach hate,
terror and destruction to their children, this is definitely not a road to
peace and coexistence.
By the way, we are pro-peace. We are just not pro-suicide
and self destruction.
We are tired of hearing about the 5 million (or whatever
ridiculous number there are alleged to be) ‘Arab-Palestinian refugees’ or the
‘Arab-Palestinian Diaspora’. There were about 600,000 Arabs that left their
homes in 1948, mostly of their own volition, more or less at the same time as
the over 980,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries, of which the Arabs
confiscated their homes and assets. We resettled ours with limited land and
resources — resettle yours, the 21 Arab states have more land and resources.
The Arab dis-information must be ignored.
We are tired of hearing anything from anyone associated with
the U.N. The U.N. is a parasitic and criminal enterprise dominated by our
mortal enemies. The U.N. cannot create states, it can only recommend and so can
other nations only recommend and not create a state that never existed before
in history. If they want an Arab-Palestinian state, it already exists, it is Jordan
which has taken 80% of Jewish allocated land.
We are tired of stupid post-colonialist rhetoric. We are not
‘colonists’ and Arabs do not have the right to murder us in the name of
‘resistance’ or beheading Jewish Rabbi’s in Jerusalem’s Har Nof Synagogue.
Talking this way reveals you as moral imbeciles. They train their children to
be suicide bombers. The Arabs are the colonialists.
You can not recognize a state and people that never existed
and that has no borders, no single government, and no economy. They are not
trusted by Arab states either.
We know we can not depend on any kind of security guarantee
from anyone except the Israel Defense Forces. So stop being insulted because we
do not trust you. And do not ask us to give up any nuclear weapons we might or
might not have or any other method and technology that could help protect us.
We know that the left-wing parties in Israel
are bankrupt of ideas. We are not going to vote for them, no matter how much
you would like us to. So do not bother trying to influence our election. We
will only vote for a government that protects its people and cares about the
Jewish heritage, more than it cares for world opinion.
Don’t believe what you read in Ha’aretz newspaper, they
represent a minority that has no allegiance to the Jewish heritage.
Jerusalem,
undivided, is the capital of the state of Israel.
Get used to it, because you can’t change it, the Jewish temple will be rebuilt
in Jerusalem.
Sincerely,
Ordinary Israelis who care about their heritage.
Posted by: Draiman
Lynn Harrison
Excellent post. This American supports you fully and am
ashamed and terrified by my president's actions. My desperate hope is that we
get a republican in 2016 and things will be better for Israel.
Shalom.
Joseph Samuels
Th hypocrisy of the UN continues unabated.
Wayne
Well, after studying the Bible for over 50 years, both Old
and New Testaments, I would emphatically state that the Bible is the most
accurate historical document known to man. Take the time to read the well
respected historian and reporter, Josephus who’s writings concur and confirm
much of Scripture. The Bible has been used by archaeologist, historians, as
well as theologians and found to be the most accurate document we have. With
that said, God is very clear that His covenant promise of the land was to be to
Abraham’s descendents through his son Isaac who was born to his wife (accepted
of God as his wife) and not Ismael who was the son of Hagar. “And Abraham said
unto God, O that Ishmael might live before thee! And God said, Sarah thy wife
shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call his name Isaac: and I will
establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant, and with his seed
after him And as for Ishmael, I have heard thee: Behold, I have blessed him,
and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes
shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation. But my covenant will I
establish with Isaac, which Sarah shall bear unto thee at this set time in the
next year.” Balfour recognized the extent of the land that God had made promise
to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, and reminded Moses as He took him up on Mount
Nebo and showed him the land. Why
the political correctness, why the misinformation??? When will we truly seek
truth and believe the truth and have the courage to state the truth. The land
rightfully, by a far greater authority than the UN or the US
or any other government belongs to the descendants of Abraham! I stand amazed
that people are unable to see the promise of God to not only scatter Israel
because of her disobedience, but also His promise to bless her and bring her
back into the land for an everlasting covenant. It is remarkable and should
cause many to sit up and pay attention to what is going on. Through the prophet
Zechariah, God states, “Behold, I will make Jerusalem
a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the
siege both against Judah
and against Jerusalem.” (Zechariah
12:2) How true that is today! Jerusalem
is a cup of trembling to the world, that little sliver of land, 14 % of what
God promised!!! Pray for the peace of Jerusalem
and may God help us see truth! It is not far from us!
Justifying Occupation by a God that loves one and rejects
another? What kind of a God is this? Then you tell me Christianity and Jesus
love us?
Chad
“It should be common knowledge that under the Mandate, all
of Palestine was reserved exclusively for the establishment of the Jewish
National Home and future independent Jewish State, as was previously decided at
the San Remo Peace Conference that took place in April 1920.”
I don’t understand how did the author of this article reach
this ridiculous conclusion;
San Remo never
said that the entire Palestinian Mandate was to be the Jewish homeland and it
clearly said IN Palestine not ALL of Palestine
nor did it mention a future independent state, not even Jewish self rule or
sovereignty but homeland i.e. a place where Jews could immigrate and live
WITHOUT affecting the rights of the existing non-Jewish communities.
Garrett Rutledge
Basically true. The Mandate’s purpose was to facilitate the
creation of a bi-national state. The Jewish homeland was to exist within this
state. The Jewish state was created after Arab nationalists rejected both the
bi-national option and the UN partition plan. That being said, the Arabs are
due no more of what was Mandate Palestine than what was granted to them when
the Trans-Jordan portion of the territories was made into the Hashemite Kingdom
of Jordan. No other portion of the territories may be set aside for the
creation of a solely Arab state or country without the consent of a duly
elected representative of the Jewish people; which would be the government of
the State of Israel.
LJ
Wrong. The Jews were given the right to immigrate to Palestine
and apply for Palestinian citizenship. But it was specifically stated that the
rights of the non-Jewish citizens of Palestine
were not to be violated. They were never given Palestine,
only the right to live there. They have since taken, by force, a huge potion of
land and made it exclusive to Jewish citizens, no Arabs allowed. This is a
direct violation of the original agreement. They have no legal right to that
land, whatever they might tell you. And Article 80 does not apply exclusively
to the Jews. It doesn’t even mention them. This is an attempt to twist and
distort the historical facts to give people the impression that the illegal
Jewish settlements are legal. And it is all in response to the UN recognizing
the State of Palestine, something Israel
very much does not want to have happen.
HH
How can you say “no Arabs allowed” when 1.5 million Arabs
live alongside Jews, Christians, Druze and Ba’hais in Israel?
The Apartheid of South Africa did not grant blacks rights;
in Israel,
Arabs are MPs and on the Supreme Court.
And who said that Arab Israelis should be expelled from Israel
and “deported” to the West Bank?”
Rachmaninov Dwek
Class A Mandates by definition vies a vis the League of
Nations Charter are territories read for independence but in need of temporary
administrative mentoring. That the League consigned Mandatory Palestine AS a
Class A is how “Jewish State” is derived from “Jewish National Home.” Moreover
it was Class Sui Generis with Arabs not even mentioned as an afterthought.
While the Mandate named the Jewish Agency as the indigenous governing entity it
laid out absolutely no equivalent for Arabs. Jews were permitted to immigrate
at will regardless whether Arabs agreed or not. The League provided two Class A
Mandates for Arabs and if local Arabs did not like living in a Jewish nation
they were free to migrate into those two Arab Class As.
simon
Jews were permitted to emigrate at will. White Paper. Please
renew your library card. Avalon research at Yale is a great resource for
documents.
Enzo
The first White Paper (Churchill White Paper) of 1922 has
absolutely nothing to do with limiting Jewish immigration and one of the
provisions thereby included is the following:
‘During the last two or three generations the Jews have recreated in Palestine
a community, now numbering 80,000… it is essential that it should know that it
is in Palestine as of right and not on the sufferance. That is the reason why
it is necessary that the existence of a Jewish National Home in Palestine
should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognized
to rest upon ancient historic connection.’
The White Paper that limited Jewish immigration in Palestine
is the 1939 White Paper.
Enzo
I am sorry but you are TOTALLY wrong. The 1917 Balfour
Declaration enshrined verbatim in the 1920 San Remo Resolution by the League
of Nations, very clearly states:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment
in Palestine of a NATIONAL HOME FOR THE JEWISH PEOPLE, and will use their best
endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly
understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice THE CIVIL AND
RELIGIOUS RIGHTS OF THE EXISTING NON-JEWISH COMMUNITIES IN PALESTINE or the
rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.
So, in answer to your WRONG arguments 1) the 1920 Resolution
assigned the WHOLE MANDATE OF PALESTINE, including present day Kingdom
of Jordan, to the establishment of
a NATIONAL HOME for the Jewish people. Only in 1922 under pressure from Great
Britain, the Land assigned to a future Jewish State was limited on the east, to
the River Jordan, to accommodate east of the River in the approx. 75% remainder
of the Mandate of Palestine, a Sheikhdom of Trans-Jordan given as reward to
Hussein, the Sharif of the Mecca and King of Hedjaz (Arabia) who was escaping
the advancing hordes of the desert marauder Ibn Al-Saud.
2) The Balfour Declaration enshrined in both 1920 and 1922
League of Nations Resolutions speaks of a NATIONAL HOME only for the Jewish
People, while for the NON-JEWISH COMMUNITIES in Palestine
it only guarantees and specifically mention their CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS RIGHTS
but not their National Rights.
A NATIONAL HOME of a people is quite obviously its NATIONAL
STATE. Civil and Religious Rights
have nothing to do with National Rights in Palestine
that are reserved ONLY for the Jews of the world. Kapish?
W E Brand
“…without affecting the civil or religious rights of the non
Jewish communities…” The French wanted to amend the savings clause to add
political rights but the others objected. The collective political rights were
recognized as belonging to the Jews. But “civil rights” includes the right to
vote in an election held by a government set up by the Jews and administered by
them. That is the meaning of “national rights” or “collective rights to
political self-determination”. So the Jews were recognized as owning the
collective political rights and both the Jews and non Jews kept their
individual political rights.
W E Brand
It would have been foolish for the British to explicitly
provide for A Jewish state when all it needed to do was place the collective
political rights in trust to vest when the Jews attained what they needed to
become a stable democratic Jewish state. A trust agreement is normally
self-executing. Why unnecessarily stir up the Arabs?
sp
A few days ago Australia’s
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop released an interview to The Times of Israel
suggesting that, contrary to conventional diplomatic wisdom, the settlements
may not be illegal under international law. In these last few years a growing
number of politicians and scholars have expressed similar positions. Many of
them argue that the results of the 1920’s San Remo Conference and more than
this the inclusion of the principles contained in the Balfour Declaration in
the text of the Mandate of Palestine, assured to the Jewish people the
exclusive right to create their “national home” on “the whole country of
Palestine, not a mere part of it”.
In this respect, the Levy Report – released on 9 July 2012 by a special committee
appointed in late January 2012 by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu –
has represented a sort of “watershed”. It clarified that “with the
establishment of the United Nations in 1945, the principle of recognizing the
validity of existing rights of states acquired under various mandates,
including of course the rights of Jews to settle in the Land of Israel by
virtue of the above documents, was determined in article 80 of its charter”.
According to the Levy Report, Article 80 of the UN Charter implicitly
recognizes the Mandate for Palestine.
The late Eugene Rostow, former dean of Yale Law School, also
known for being a key draftee of the UN resolution 242, further clarified these
aspects explaining that “a trust” – as in Article 80 of the UN Charter – “does
not end because the trustee dies”. Rostow’s argument, which is repeated in the
Levy report, is that although the League of Nations had
ceased to exist, the commitments of the League of Nations
remain binding.
These claims are marred by several inaccuracies, starting
from the fact that the term “national home” had no mutually agreed upon
meaning or scope and that the British government was under no definite
obligation, since the Mandate made any Jewish immigration subject to “suitable
conditions” and contained safeguards for the rights and position of the
non-Jewish communities.
Furthermore, as David Ben-Gurion clarified in July 1947 in
front of the UNSCOP commission: “The Mandate, in fact, does not exist because
it was violated by the Mandatory. We are not in favor of renewing it. […] we
say that the original intention and the need, and what in our conviction is
just, should be decided upon by the United Nations […] I said we do not ask for
a Mandate any more, so it is not a question. The question does not arise on the
Mandate”.
Also the assertion that article 80 of the UN Charter
implicitly recognizes the Mandate for Palestine
is more complex than often claimed. One of the legal advisors to the Jewish
Agency, Jacob Robinson, published a book in 1947 that presented a historical
account of the Palestine Question and the UN. He explained that when the Jewish
Agency learned that the Allied Powers had discussed at the Yalta Conference
(February 1945) a new system of international supervision to supersede the
system of mandates, the Agency decided to submit a formal request to the San
Francisco Conference (April-June 1945) to obtain a safeguarding clause in the
UN Charter. The proposed clause would have prevented a trusteeship agreement
from altering the Jewish right to nationhood secured by the Balfour Declaration
and the Mandate for Palestine. The
UN Conference ignored the Agency’s request and stipulated in article 80 of the
Charter that the UN organization did have the necessary power to conclude
trusteeship agreements that could alter existing rights held under a mandate.
Robinson tried to portray a legal setback as a victory and
make everyone think that Article 80 of the Charter accomplished the Agency’s
stated objective. Indeed, the final text adopted by the working paper for international
trusteeship contained an exception that allowed trusteeship agreements to do
exactly what the Jewish Agency had tried to prohibit. In Article 80’s words:
“Except as may be agreed upon in individual trusteeship arrangements placing
each territory under the trusteeship system, nothing in this chapter should be
construed in and of itself to alter in any manner the rights of any state or
any peoples in any territory”.
Article 1 of General Assembly resolution 24(I) reserved the
right of the UN to decide not to assume any function or power of the League
of Nations. On the 19th March 1948, during the 271st meeting of
the Security Council, US Ambassador Warren Austin cited UN General Assembly
resolution 24(I) and pointed out: “The United Nations does not automatically
fall heir to the responsibilities either of the League of Nations or of the
Mandatory Power in respect of the Palestine Mandate. The record seems to us
entirely clear that the United Nations did not take over the League of Nations
Mandate system”.
On top of all these considerations, the above mentioned
thesis of “exclusivity”, besides being unjustified from an historical point of
view – Palestine did not belong in
an exclusive way to one single population in its entire history – is incorrect
also from the legal perspective imposed since the early stage by London.
Hubert Young, an important figure of the Foreign Office, wrote in November 1920
that the commitment made by London
“in respect of Palestine is the
Balfour Declaration constituting it a National Home for the Jewish People”.
Lord Curzon corrected him: “No. ‘Establishing a National Home in Palestine
for the Jewish people’ – a very different proposition”.
The British White Paper of June 1922 – the first document
that officially clarified the interpretation of the Mandate’s text – clarified
that the Balfour Declaration does “not contemplate that Palestine as a whole
should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be
founded ‘in Palestine'”. Furthermore, it stressed – and this is perhaps the
most relevant aspect – that the “Zionist congress” that took place in Carlsbad
in September 1921 had officially accepted that “the determination of the Jewish
people to live with the Arab people on terms of unity and mutual respect, and
together with them to make the common home into a flourishing community, the up
building of which may assure to each of its peoples an undisturbed national
development”.
It is only in light on these clarifications that the
preamble as well as Article 2 of the Mandate text can and should be understood.
It is noteworthy that Zionist consent to such interpretation was requested, and
received, before the Mandate was confirmed in July 1922. In Weitzman's words:
“It was made clear to us that confirmation of the Mandate would be conditional
on our acceptance of the policy as interpreted in the White Paper [of 1922],
and my colleagues and I therefore had to accept it, which we did, though not
without some qualms”.
Israel’s
right to defend itself against fanaticism is something that any person
interested in peace cannot but support. Equally true is that the growing
attempt to justify the colonization of the Palestinian territories through a
problematic interpretation of history, international law, and international
consensus is a dangerous threat that requires better public understanding.
(e-IR)
Jouni Suninen
>>>>since the Mandate made any Jewish
immigration subject to “suitable conditions” and contained safeguards for the
rights and position of the non-Jewish communities. <<<
The Mandate however did only give Britain
the right to facilitate Jewish immigration – not hinder it. So, if
"suitable conditions" did not exist then Jews had to do immigration
without Britain's
support. It would still be legal.
The Jewish national home was of course the Palestine Mandate
where Jews had self-governing institutions within its borders. Arabs did not
have the same autonomy within Palestine Mandate. How could it be possible to
have autonomy in the same area for two different peoples? Impossible. Autonomy
needs an area where it can be exercised.
Doreen murgatroyd
Lots of words. None of them explain why it would be that the
Allies would reward the very people whom they fought against – most ottoman Arabs
in Palestine – with Palestine
itself. Makes absolutely no sense.
George Peters
Dr. Abraham Seinfeld. No not true. Hagar was a concubine not
a wife. Ishmael is descendant but not inheritor.
But the lineage, and all that was associated with it – was passed on to Isaac,
and not to Ishmael. My belief is that the Muslims never got over this (they
have very long memories), and so have constantly and venally appropriated much
of Jewish history as their own.
It is not a co-incidence that one of the most common Muslim names is Ibrahim.
Catrin Stella
Ishmael was the son of agar the slave of Sarah, wife of
Abraham. For the unbeliever of Sarah she had give Agar to Abraham for have the
Son of the promise. But this was not the Will of God. God gave them Isaac HE
was the Son of the Promise and he generated the People of God “Israel”.
if you read in the Bible, the filastin and many nations that was in the promised
Land, to Israel
was commanded to destruct them completely, But they don't, and know They have
the results! this nations was the descendents of Ishmael son of agar.
Natasha Langman
Dear Abraham Weizfeld,
Jewish Rights spelled clearly!
There is NO room for misinterpretation what “the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people” other then creating of a Jewish
Nation means!
In Article 22 in the “Covenant of the League of Nations”
it says:
“Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish
Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence
as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering
of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they
are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal
consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.”
The “Mandate for Palestine”
was created on 24th April 1922
from the LEAGUE OF NATIONS and referring directly to Article 22 of the
“Covenant of the League of Nations”. The Mandate was
given over on 15th May 1948
to the modern State of Israel. Israel
started to exist again. The intentions and International Law of the LEAGUE OF
NATIONS to build a Nation “Eretz Israel”
were fulfilled.
Abraham Weizfeld wrote “A national home for the Jewish
people is not a Nation-State.”
Chad
IN Palestine,
not ALL and certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish
Empire does not say Jewish communities.
Abraham Weizfeld is right. There is no mention of state
Hartley Macklin
Chad,
The mandate system was set up to have more experienced countries help birth new
states.
Certainly the anti Semitism in Britain
gave birth to many illegal obstacles, but the mandate was clearly that homeland
would come to mean state. In fact the treaty often refers to “development of
the country”.
It also clearly states that (article 5) “The Mandatory shall
be responsible for seeing that no Palestine
territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control
of, the Government of any foreign Power.”
No Palestine Territory.
That is very clear.
The Allies, and later Britain
were to hold the land in a sort of “Trust”, with the end result that the
Mandatory would hand over the administration to the Zionist, or clearer the new
government they helped set up.
You seem to be stuck on the word “in” when your read “in favor
of the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people”.
They don’t say “inside” Palestine,
or “within”, they write “in”. That is clearly meaning the land that maps
referred to as the territory of Palestine.
You know that in 1920, Mandatory Palestine included what is
now Jordan.
That 76% portion of the land mandated to be returned to the Jews was broken off
and ceded (illegally) to the Arabs. So even if we take your meaning, the tiny
sliver, the minority portion of the larger Palestine
was all that was returned to the Jews.
You also seem to want to center on the protection of the
rights of the existing non-Jewish communities.
You must know that unique to Israel
and in contrast to the most advanced democracies — the Jewish state gives the
languages and religions of its various minorities official status. Thus, Arabic
is an official language alongside Hebrew, and Muslim and Christian holidays are
considered official holidays.
Non-Jews in Israel
enjoy the exact same civil rights as Jews. Israel
is unique among the middle east countries created by the Mandate system, and
kept that promise.
dr. abraham Weizfeld
“A Pan-Syrian Congress, meeting in
Damascus,
had declared an independent state of
Syria
on 8 March 1920.[6] The new state included
Syria,
Palestine, Lebanon
and portions of northern
Mesopotamia which had been set
aside under the Sykes-Picot Agreement for an independent Arab state, or
confederation of states. King Faisal was declared the head of state. At the
same time Prince Zeid, Faisal’s brother, was declared regent of
Mesopotamia.
The
San Remo conference was hastily
convened.
Great Britain
and
France both
agreed to recognize the provisional independence of
Syria
and
Mesopotamia, while “reluctantly” claiming mandates
for their administration.
Palestine
was composed of the Ottoman administrative districts of southern
Syria.
Under customary international law, premature recognition of its independence
would be a gross affront to the government of the newly declared parent state.
It could have been construed as a belligerent act of intervention without any
League
of Nations sanction.[7] In any event, its provisional independence
was not mentioned although it continued to be designated as a Class A Mandate.
… The decisions of the
San Remo
conference confirmed the mandate allocations of the First Conference of London
(February 1920). The San Remo Resolution adopted on
25 April 1920 incorporated the Balfour Declaration of
1917. It and Article 22 of the Covenant of the
League of Nations
were the basic documents upon which the Mandate for
Palestine
was constructed.[9]
Britain
received the mandate for
Palestine
and
Iraq;
France
gained control of
Syria
including present-day
Lebanon.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Remo_conference
San Remo
conference – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org
Abraham Weizfeld Evidently there is no mention of a “Jewish
Israel”.
Abraham Weizfeld: San Remo Resolution – April 25, 1920
It was agreed –
(a) To accept the terms of the Mandates Article as given below with reference
to Palestine, on the understanding that there was inserted in the
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 … The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into
effect the declaration originally made on November 8, 1917, by the British
Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favor of the
establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights
and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Abraham Weizfeld A national home for the Jewish people is
not a Nation-State. Even under the provisions of the Partition Plan Resolution
181 of the UN GA, the self-proclaimed State of Israel violates the boundaries
set forth under the resolution. As for the recognition of the Palestine
State, now acknowledged, if the Palestine
State is not to be considered legal
then the State of Israel would also have to be considered illegal, under
international law.
Abraham Weizfeld: Furthermore what is called ‘Eretz-Israel’
is not a State in itself but quite specifically a Land, upon which there has always
been multiple Nations co-existing.
W E Brand
The rights to statehood were put in trust until the Jewish
population in Israel
was ready to use them. They were intended by the settlers of the trust to vest
when the Jews had attained a population majority in the territory they would
rule, and the capability of exercising sovereignty. See 1933 Montevideo
convention on the rights and duties of states that codifies required
capabilities.
Jehudah Ben-Israel
Clearly, the fundamental elements of international law that
were set, at first, to avoid a conflict between Arab and Jew and then to resolve
the Arab Israeli conflict have been:
San Remo Conference decisions, 1920
League of Nations decision, 1922
UN Charter, Article 80, 1945
The way to implement these have been designed and presented
to the UN which passed, at its Security Council unanimously, UN Security
Council 242, 1967
One only wonders, if the Muslim-Arabs are so adamant against
these elements of international law, do they actually seek peace or rather Israel’s
demise…??
david hanson
yes u hit the nail on the head. Now add the fact that G-D
gave this land, all of it, to us. It is in the bible.
Also there is no such thing as a Palestinian, only an Arab
who happens to be living in Israel.
Tell it to Pres Obama.
dr. abraham Weizfeld
For sure David Hanson has not actually read the Torah (part
of the old testament of the Protestant Bible).
The covenant with the prophet Abraham was for the descendents to live on the
Land forever, and that includes the Arabs, since the first born Ishmael was of
an Egyptian mother, Hajjar. Since polygamy was fashionable at the time, there
is no priority to be given to the first wife Sarah, who was Sumerian in any
case.
Yochanan M Hummasti
The Ishmaelites never were “Arabs” and in fact Ishmaelites
intermarried with Arabs therefore it is erroneous to assert that the Arabs are
Ishmael’s descendants. It is more appropriate to say that some Arabs are
descended from Ishmael than it is to say the all Arabs are descended from
Ishmael. Guillaume’s “The life of Muhammad”, p. 46.
As to the Jewish National Home and the establishment of the modern state of
Israel in Palestine under international law, the fact is when one reads the
minutes from the San Remo Conference and the Anglo-American Treaty of 1924 the
only conclusion one can come to is that the Mandate for Palestine was intended
to facilitate the reconstitution of the ancient Jewish National Home and an
Independent Jewish State in the area designated under the Faisal-Weitzman
Agreement which included portions of the East “Bank” of the Jordan River up to
the Hedjaz Railway with a buffer zone between the railway and the Border of the
Jewish National Home. Simply read Article 25 inserted in the Mandate for Palestine
which was a temporary measure until such time as local conditions warranted
Jewish settlement in the Eastern Portion of the Mandate Area. Emir Faisal
specifically excluded the Western portion (west of the Hedjaz Railway) of
“Trans-Jordan” from the boundaries of the proposed Jewish State which he agreed
to under the Faisal-Weitzman Agreement. Moreover, all he requested for his
assistance in overthrowing the Ottoman Empire was an Independence for the Arabs
from any foreign sovereign which he was given along with his family in the
Mandate Areas of Iraq and Syria and included the Modern Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia, from which they were kicked out since his Hashemite Family had ruled
from Mecca since the 10th Century. Howard Grief has properly International Law
on the subject and no one to date has presented a cogent argument which refutes
his position!!!
truthseeker
If you think that the bible is an actual historical document,
you need to have your head examined.
Seina Owen
This historical facts is absolutely necessary to release to
those countries in favor of a Palestinian state. Even it is necessary
information for the general public especially regarding the Jewish land rights
to their Biblical land.
rename goldhar-gemeiner
As I wrote to Howard upon receipt of this letter a few days
ago: “Yeah Howard!”
Thank you for publishing this! Thank you Barry!
Renanah
