Part I
“British policy in Palestine was a bold experiment dealing with a unique situation in the manner wholly without precedent in history”—Lord Arthur James Balfour
Great Britain was granted a Mandate for Palestine on April 25, 1920, at the San Remo Conference, and on July 24, 1922, the Mandate was approved by the League of Nations. Signed by 52 member states, the Mandate granted Britain the responsibility to administer non-self-governing territories. The mandatory power was to consider the mandated territory a temporary trust and to oversee the welfare and development of its people.
The Jewish and Arab communities were given the right to manage their own civic affairs. The Yishuv (Jews living in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel) established the Elected Assembly and the National Council.
Jewish Rights
The Allies justified the right of the Jews to establish the Jewish national home in Palestine because of the historical connection of the Jewish people with the land of Israel, asserts Douglas J. Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Though the Allies granted a number of powers to the British Mandatory government, the Allies did not give the Jews the right to a national home in Palestine. This is an important distinction, especially when Israel’s adversaries claim the League of Nations or the U.N. granted Palestine to the Jewish people. They did not. Israel’s enemies argue that since the international community conferred the rights of the Jews to Israel, the U.N. can just as easily rescind their rights at any time.
Feith adds the Mandate does not include a clause granting the Jews a right to a state or homeland in Palestine by the Allies or the League of Nations. Instead, the Mandate recognizes preexisting Jewish rights, stemming from “the Jewish historical connection with Palestine.” Those drafting the Mandate purposely used the term “reconstituting” to define the creation of the Jewish national home in Palestine. The British government wanted to make sure that although the Allies gained specific rights as a result of their military victory, they did not claim that the Jewish people’s rights in Palestine emanated from their rights.
According to international law, Feith said, the victorious Allies were justified in disposing of Palestine as they wished. Instead, Britain and the League took pains to ensure that their “legislative” decision in favor of the Jewish national home was consistent with Jewish claims of historical links to the land of Israel. They wanted to make clear that the law on Palestine had a distinct and unequivocal moral and historical foundation.
The British understood the importance of Palestine to the Jews and the enormous contributions they had made to mankind on this land. The Palestine Royal Commission concluded: “The history of Jewish Palestine … had been enacted for the most part in a country about the size of Wales; but it constitutes one of the great chapters in the story of man-kind. By two primary achievements—the development of the first crude worship of Jehovah into a highly spiritual monotheism, and the embodiment of this faith and of the social and political ideals it inspired in immortal prose and poetry—the gift of Hebraism in ancient Palestine to the modern world must rank with the gifts of ancient Greece and Rome. Christians, moreover, cannot forget that Jesus was a Jew who lived on Jewish soil and founded His gospel on a basis of Jewish life and thought.”
Arab Claims
With regards to the Arabs, the Commission found: “In the twelve centuries or more that have passed since the Arab conquest, Palestine has virtually dropped out of history. … In economics as in politics Palestine lay outside the mainstream of the world’s life. In the realm of thought, in science or in letters, it made no contribution to modern civilization. Its last state was worse than its first.”
The Permanent Mandates Commission, which from 1924-1939 was charged with supervising the Mandates, discussed the issues involved in the Palestine Mandate each year, and was also well informed of Arab legal claims, which they dismissed, Hebrew University Law Professor Nathan Feinberg points out.
Despite having fought against the Allies, the Arabs expected to be rewarded with conquered Ottoman territory. Sol Linowitz, who served as President Jimmy Carter’s personal representative to the Middle East peace negotiations, suggests that the Arabs should protest against the Allies, not the Jews, “who in solemn proclamation recognized prior Jewish rights to Palestine.”
In other words, “Jewish and Arab claims in the vast area of the former Ottoman Empire came to the forum of liberation together, and not (as is usually implied) by way of Jewish encroachment on an already vested and exclusive Arab domain,” affirms Julius Stone, a leading international legal scholar.
The Permanent Mandates Commission
Monsieur Pierre Orts, chairman of the Permanent Mandates Commission, reiterated the sentiment: “Was not consent to the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine the price—and a relatively small one—which the Arabs paid for the liberation of lands extending from the Red Sea to the borders of Cilicia on the one hand, Iran and the Mediterranean on the other, for the independence they were not winning or had already won, none of which they would ever have gained on their own efforts, and for all of which they had to thank the Allied Powers and particularly the British forces in the Near East?”
The Permanent Mandates Commission recognized the unique plight of the Jews. “It should be remembered,” a U.N. report states, “that the collective sufferings of Arabs and Jews are not comparable, since vast spaces in the Near East … are open to the former, whereas the world is increasingly being closed to settlement by the latter.”
*Dr Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
*This article was first published by The Jewish Link, June 19, 2015.