Partition and The Law
In front of Congress on January 1918, US President Woodrow Wilson proposed 14 points for a Programme of Peace. The 5th and 12th points of this Programme related to territories which were placed under the Mandates systems.
Point 12 stated: “The Turkish portion of the Ottoman Empire [now Turkey] should be assured a secure sovereignty….the other nationalities which are under Turkish rule, should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous developments…”.
In February of the same year, President Wilson addressed Congress thus: “Peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were chattels and pawns in a game. National aspirations must be respected; people may be dominated and governed ONLY by their consent. Self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their own peril”.
In July of the same year, he formulated the following: “The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement or of political relationship, [must be] upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery”.
After the end of WW1, at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (PPC), the principles of nationality and self-determination of peoples was advocated by President Wilson with two dozen other world leaders marking the beginning of the end of Colonialism. It proclaimed that no new territories should be annexed by the victors, and that such territories should be administered solely for the benefit of their indigenous people and be placed under the trusteeship of the mandatories acting on behalf of the League of Nations, until the true wishes of the inhabitants of those territories could be ascertained.
The PPC decided to recognise the territories under the mandatory system as “provisionally independent nations subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand by themselves”. It follows from this phrase that the mandatory mission is not intended to be prolonged indefinitely, but only until the peoples under tutelage are capable of managing their own affairs.
Class A mandates (Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and Transjordan) recognised the peoples of these territories to have reached advanced stage of development and their independence could be recognised once they have achieved a capacity to govern themselves. It is universally and legally accepted that sovereignty in the mandatory territories lie in the inhabitants of the territory in question (Article 22 of the Covenant of The League of Nations).
Under International Law, Palestine, throughout the Mandatory period, was, therefore, to receive administrative assistance and advice from the Mandatory to help it set up its own government. Palestine already had its fixed boundaries, its government institutions, its own currency and, in 1934, its national anthem.
Palestine’s legal position under International Law was clear: it was a provisionally independent state receiving administrative assistance and advice from the Mandatory. The sovereignty was vested in the people of Palestine. It was a dormant sovereignty exercised by the Mandatory power on behalf of the people of Palestine.
Article 28 of the Mandate stipulated that at the end of the Mandate, the territory of Palestine would pass on to the control of ‘the Government of Palestine’. The termination of the Mandate on 15 May 1948 was to signal the birth of a free and sovereign Palestine in fulfilment of Paragraph 4 of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. It was supposed to pave the way for the establishment of an independent and sovereign government in Palestine without the intervention of either the United Nations or any other foreign government for that matter.
It was under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 that Turkey finally renounced its administration of the Middle East territories after nearly 500 years of occupation. Britain was the Mandatory power in Palestine and the guardian and the trustee of Palestine. Its duty was to guarantee the interest and well-being of the country’s inhabitants until the termination of the Mandate and the assumption by Palestine of its independence as a sovereign nation. When that happens, the newly independent nation would then be admitted to the League of Nations. This was the case with Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. They became sovereign nations . Indeed, this was Britain’s intention in Palestine when it issued its White Paper in 1939.
But that was not to be the fate of Palestine.
The UN had no right in 1947 to even debate the idea of partitioning the country or to dispose of any part of it, or deprive the majority of its indigenous population of their territory or to transfer it to the exclusive use of illegal immigrants. The General Assembly had no right or jurisdiction to destroy the territorial integrity of Palestine or to propose its partition. The British Government, perhaps under the weight of its guilt for abusing the trust the League of Nations had bestowed upon it to protect, guide and assist Palestine achieve its independence at the end of its mandatory period, opted, when it was time to vote, to abstain from voting.
The United Kingdom did not own Palestine and had no relationship whatsoever with it in 1916 when it agreed with Zionist leaders to issue the Balfour Declaration in November 1917. This Declaration remains illegal, invalid and inapplicable even though it was injected into the Mandate for Palestine through power politics.
The International Law Digest defines a state as “ a people permanently occupying a fixed territory, bound together by common law, habits, and customs into one body politic, exercising, through the medium of organised government, independent sovereignty and control over all persons and things within its boundaries”. In the area labelled Israel today, the majority of the people, at the time of the Balfour Declaration and later when Palestine was partitioned in 1947, were indigenous Palestinians. In International Law, the territory of any state must belong to the people of that state. The possession of the territory must be a legitimate possession and could not have been acquired by war, conquest or through annexation.
BUT:
It was at the Paris Peace Conference that Chaim Weizman put forward Zionist claims to Palestine calling for the imposition of the Mandate over all of Palestine including areas up to the Litani River in Lebanon (to the north) and to the Hijaz Railway line which is well east of the Jordan River. He then famously declared his wishes for a Palestine to be “as Jewish as England is English”.
A declared state should have a sovereign government but waht existed in the so-called Jewish state in 1948 were illegal immigrants from Europe and Russia, and three Zionist terrorist organisations: the Irgun, the Hagana and the Stern gang. They could not be considered a government. They were military organisations supported by western funds and left to roam the land and dispossess its people of their right to live there.
Despite this miscarriage of justice, the so-called State embarked on a massive military project to ensure the total and final expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland.
To achieve this objective, they had their Village Files ready.