Sunday, October 2, 2011

Evidence that the Mandate was a Trust of Political Rights


Evidence of Purpose that the Mandate was a trust for Political or National Rights to Palestine reserved for the Jews. 

1.             Why did the League of Nations create a Palestine Mandate and give it to the British to run, if it were intended for the local population majority to have political rights – as President Wilson had preferred in his 14 points?  See Point XII. “The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development . . .”  The League had created 19 other nation states without any mandate.

2.            Ever since the Treaty of Westphalia, at the end of the Thirty Years War, the concept of nation-states had come into being, with the ability to have differing religions – at first only Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist.  The requirements of a nation-state at a minimum were A. Definite boundaries,  B. Unified control of the people within them, and C. The capacity to conduct foreign relations.  See generally: Hill, Trial of a Thousand Years, World Order and Islamism (2011)
3.           In Palestine, the local Palestine Arab majority had wanted to remain under Turkish rule as indicated by their fighting in WWI on the side of the Ottomans – there was no desire for political self determination in the Arabs local to Palestine and never had been as later observed in 1948 by Count Folke Bernadotte as investigator for UNSCOP, by Zahir Muhsein in 1973, a member of the executive board of the PLO, and by the fact that in the 19 years of Jordanian and Egyptian control of the West Bank and Gaza, between 1948 and 1967, no nationalism movement was exhibited. The interests of the Jews were primary in the Balfour Declaration as it set up a Jewish National Home in Palestine for them with a stated motive of reconstituting their national home.  The non-Jews were mentioned only insofar as to say that their civil and religious rights would be preserved.  Why was that latter provision needed if the Jews were not intended to have sovereignty ultimately.
5.     Why was the Zionist Organization named in Paragraph 4 as an advisor to the government of the Mandate and there was no comparable provision for the  Arabs?
6.     There were 19 nation states created out of the Ottoman captured lands in the Middle East and the Maghreb.  Why were mandates not created for all of them unless they were intended to be autonomous? 
7.  Did not the memo of Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier show a purpose to put the political rights in trust until the Jews had a majority population and could exercise sovereignty on their own, viz:
 “In the discussions on the eve of the Balfour Declaration, the British War Cabinet, desperate to persuade the Jews of Russia to urge their government to renew Russia’s war effort, saw Palestine a Jewish rallying cry. To this end, those advising the War Cabinet, and the Foreign Secretary himself, A.J. Balfour, encouraged at least the possibility of an eventual Jewish majority, even if it might – with the settled population of Palestine then being some 600,000 Arabs and 60,000 Jews– be many years before such a majority emerged. On 31 October 1917, Balfour had told the War Cabinet that while the words ‘national home…did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State’, such a State ‘was a matter for gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution’.224
How these laws were to be regarded was explained in a Foreign Office memorandum of 19 December1917 by Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier, the latter a Galician-born Jew, who wrote jointly:
‘The objection raised against the Jews being given exclusive political rights in Palestine on a basis that would be undemocratic with regard to the local Christian and Mohammedan population,’ they wrote, ‘is certainly the most important which the anti-Zionists have hitherto raised, but the difficulty is imaginary. Palestine might be held in trust by Great Britain or America until there was a sufficient population in the country fit to govern it on European lines. Then no undemocratic restrictions of the kind indicated in the memorandum would be required any longer.’3 [fns omitted] 
8.     Why did Balfour  refer to the population numbers for all of Palestine rather than just a part unless he was considering putting all of Palestine in trust; as noted by Sir Martin Gilbert, at the time of the consideration of the trust, he had mentioned  the population ratio of all of Palestine and not just a part?   The Jews had had a population plurality in the greater Jerusalem metropolitan area since 1845 and a population majority in the 1900s. The problem was the population ratio for all of Palestine, not just a part.  Giving the Jews exclusive political rights therefore raised the problem discussed by the Foreign Office, Messrs Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier.