Palestine - Jews and Arabs, the Mandate and the law

The Mandate for Palestine was solely targeted. It was no longer a "fraud" - it was "null and void".

In one fell swoop the Arabs had dismissed as "null and void" not only the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine - but also the resolutions of the San Remo Conference and the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, article 80 of the United Nations Charter in 1945 and Security Council resolution 242 in 1967.

Such double standards and hypocrisy seem to have escaped the international community or to have been deliberately overlooked by it.

The Arabs were perfectly entitled to ignore this body of international law if they wished - but they should have been forced to pay a high price for doing so in the form of suspension from membership of the United Nations and its other organs - until they acknowledged and agreed to accept the rule of law in the conduct of international relations between member states of the UN.

Instead - the international community pandered to the whim of these serial law-deniers for a variety of reasons - mainly oil, terrorism and geopolitical jockeying for influence in the Arab world.

Ignoring Israel's legal rights under the Mandate at the United Nations has proved disastrous for the cause of peace in the Middle East - has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Arabs - and has wreaked untold suffering and trauma on millions of others.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its 2004 decision on the legality of Israel‘s security barrier - gave an air of legal respectability to the irrelevance of the Mandate - referring to it only once in the following statement.

Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. At the end of the First World War, a class A. Mandate for Palestine was entrusted to Great Britain by the League of Nations,pursuant to paragraph 4 of Article 22 of the Covenant, which provided that:

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.’

That this statement was demonstrably wrong was made clear by the following statement in the Palestine Royal Commission Report of 1937 - following its exhaustive consideration of the Mandate for Palestine:

The Mandate is of a different type from the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon and the draft Mandate for ‘Iraq. These latter, which were called for convenience “ A ” Mandates, accorded with the fourth paragraph of Article 22. Thus the Syrian Mandate provided that the government should be based on an organic law which should take into account the rights,interests and wishes of all the inhabitants,and that measures should be enacted ”to facilitate the progressive development of Syria and the Lebanon as independent States“. The corresponding sentences of the draft Mandate for ‘Iraq' were the same. In compliance with them National Legislatures were established in due course on an elective basis.

Article I of the Palestine Mandate, on the other hand, vests “full powers of legislation and of administration“, within the limits of the Mandate, in the Mandatory.”

The Commission further asserted: