WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Links to a powerful webinar on the Palestine Mandate – “a profoundly Zionist document” – made the internet rounds this week. I’d have you listen to it. My own argument has been the historical presence one, that historian Parkes was right that the Yishuv’s continuous presence wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds,” but this webinar makes the strong case that the League’s Mandate is our people’s international law-based title deed.
Listen To This: “Israel’s Original Land Title Deed – The Mandate For Palestine (1922)”
The Jewish homeland case that I argue in these weekly emails and in my book, Israel 3000 Years, is that twentieth-century eminent historian James Parkes was right that the continuous tenacious homeland presence of the Yishuv, the Jewish community that maintained its physical presence in Palestine all through the eighteen centuries of foreign empire rule between Jewish Judaea’s final destruction by Rome in 135 CE and today’s Israel’s independence in 1948 as the land of Israel’s next native state, wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”
While I continue to believe that this historical presence basis of our people’s homeland case is sound, I also recognize that there’s as well an international law document basis – the United Nations-adopted League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate. This week, my inbox included two links to a powerful forty-minute summation of that Mandate’s significance as Israel’s “Land Title Deed.” Here’s those links (only the first one works for me). I urge you to click on one. Below I quote some of that webinar’s key points, along with inserting a couple bracketed comments of my own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zlp0UYGLot4
The webinar begins by asserting that we must use truthful terminology – including that it’s “the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, not “the British Palestine Mandate” – i.e., a commitment of “the nations of the world” to the Jewish people, not just Britain’s Balfour Declaration’s, and that it specifies “reconstituting the Jewish national home,” not Jewish colonization.
The webinar continues: The Palestine Mandate, recognizing the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine, “recognizes ownership of the land of Israel by the Jewish people and by no other people,” recognizing as a matter of international law their exclusive national and political rights to it. It was adopted unanimously by the 51 nations of the League. (The US was not a member of the League, but adopted identical language in a treaty with Britain in 1924, ratified by Congress.) The Palestine Mandate is one of three “Class A” mandates adopted by the League, a category exclusively of former Turkish empire territories considered to be sufficiently advanced to become independent following allied control until they became able to stand on their own. The other two Class A mandates, out of a total of 14 mandates, were for Syria/Lebanon and Iraq.
The webinar calls the Mandate for Palestine “a profoundly Zionist document,” with references to “Jews” and “Zionists” appearing 14 times, thereby creating inalienable Jewish “national and political rights” that remain valid today. The League’s successor UN recognized the continuing validity of such League documents in Article 80 of its Charter.
The Palestine Mandate initially embraced Palestine both west and east of the Jordan River, but contained a clause allowing Britain to suspend or withhold its provisions to part of Palestine, the 78% of it east of the River, which Britain with alacrity did, creating Transjordan, today’s Jordan. [There was no such withholding of the Jewish national home provision regarding any part of Palestine west of the River- i.e., the historic land of Israel.] This excision of Jordan “was the original two-state solution in 1922.” The Mandate for Palestine is thus “the original land title deed for the land of Israel given to the Jewish people by the nations of the world in 1922.” [emphasis added] [The Arabs didn’t fare too badly, receiving all of two of the three Class A mandates plus 78% of the third.]
I recognize that a number of you Gentle Readers of my weekly epistles agree with President Biden [which I vehemently don’t] on a western Palestine Arab state: e.g., Jerusalem Post, 7/15/22, Biden: I Support Two States, Based on Pre-1967 Lines. “Agreed land swaps” from the pre-1967 war ceasefire lines gives the Jewish people zero homeland equity in historic Jerusalem – Temple Mount, Western Wall, City of David and all – and defensible Judea-Samaria, nullifying western Palestine’s, the land of Israel’s, international law disposition in the Palestine Mandate. If you must agree to a Palestinian Arab state in addition to Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan on 78% of Palestine, dissent at least from the infinitely stronger and more meaningful for the Jewish people and Israel post-1967 war ceasefire lines being meaningless and the pre-1967 war [i.e., 1948 war] ceasefire lines being among the Holy Land’s holy places.