The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel
under International Law and Treaties
With The Legal
Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law (Mazo Publishers,
Jerusalem) Canadian-born Israeli constitutional scholar and lawyer Howard Grief
has given us a book that shatters every myth, lie, misrepresentation and
distortion employed over the 61 years of Israel’s existence to negate the
sovereign rights of the Jewish People to their national home.
It is a lengthy treatise – 660 pages plus a 50-page appendix – but the Jewish people’s long and tortuous struggle to retrieve their stolen patrimony deserves nothing less than full disclosure. Anyone who has ever been at a loss to counter the slanders and calumnies that are the stock in trade of the Israel-bashers and anti-Semites on both the Left and Right will treasure every one of its 20 illuminating chapters.
It is a lengthy treatise – 660 pages plus a 50-page appendix – but the Jewish people’s long and tortuous struggle to retrieve their stolen patrimony deserves nothing less than full disclosure. Anyone who has ever been at a loss to counter the slanders and calumnies that are the stock in trade of the Israel-bashers and anti-Semites on both the Left and Right will treasure every one of its 20 illuminating chapters.
Rooted in the
premise that the best antidote to a myriad of small and medium sized
fabrications is the exposure of the whole cloth from which they’ve been woven,
The Legal Foundation lays bare two dominant myths that have shaped popular
perspectives on Israel . The first is the fallacy that Jewish
sovereignty over the land of Israel was the joint product of the 1947 United Nations Partition
and the May 15th, 1948 termination of the British Mandate for Palestine .
In fact, as Grief points out, Jewish sovereignty inPalestine had been validated under international law
28 years earlier.
“The legal title of the Jewish People to the mandated territory of Palestine in all of its historical parts,” he informs us, was first recognized on April 24, 1920 when the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council (Britain, France, Italy and Japan), meeting in San Remo, Italy, “converted the 1917 ‘Balfour Declaration’ into a binding legal document.” This was confirmed by the 1920 Treaty of Sevres andLausanne .
How “binding” may be construed from the fact that its wording gave effect to the provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of theLeague of Nations and became incorporated into the Mandate
for Palestine .
Indeed, the “San Remo Resolution,” within which the Allied Supreme Council’s decision is contained, constitutes what the author terms “the foundation document of the State of Israel, the legal existence of which is directly traceable from that document.”
That the Jewish People were unable to exercise their sovereignty inPalestine for 28 years – it being assigned to the
British Mandatory power as their de facto agent and trustee – did in no way
detract from their ‘de jure’ rights to the land under international law during
that interregnum.
In this thesis, Grief is ironically supported by both a passionate Zionist, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and one of Zionism’s most implacable opponents, post World War I British Foreign Secretary Lord George Nathaniel Curzon.
Brandeis believed that with the passage of the San Remo Resolution, the debate over who ownedPalestine was effectively over. Curzon called the Resolution the
“Magna Carta” of the Jewish People.
From the initial miss-attribution of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to the 1947 Partition Plan rather than the 1920 San Remo Resolution, it was just a hop and a skip to a second major miss-representation of Israel’s international legal status – the erroneous assumption that the Partition Plan and the May 1948 termination of the British Mandate somehow erased the Jewish People’s rights to Palestine in all its historical parts and dimensions enunciated at San Remo, and implemented under the terms of the League of Nations Covenant.
Those “parts and dimensions” were defined inter alia, as including the
northwestern portions of the Golan and most of present dayJordan by the “Franco-British Boundary
Convention” in Paris .
The presumptive cancellation of those rights, Grief submits, is thoroughly discredited by “the principle of acquired rights,” codified in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the “Law of Treaties,” and the “doctrine of estoppel.”
The first, he asserts, insures that “the fundamental rights of the Jewish people did not lapse with the international process which brought them into existence. The second further guarantees that these rights cannot simply be abrogated or denied by those states which previously recognized their existence.”
Taken together, they provide what the author terms a “definitive answer anyone who claims that Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty over all of Palestine and the land of Israel did not continue after the end of the Mandate for Palestine…except in the allotted boundaries of the UN Partition Plan…”
Noteworthy among the states that wholeheartedly endorsed Jewish sovereignty overPalestine in all its “historical parts and
dimensions” was the United States of America – the same U.S.A that today regards Israel ’s presence in Judea and Samaria as an illegal “occupation” of lands upon
which it favors the creation of a Palestinian State .
The Obama administration and the Bush administration that preceded it are either unaware or have chosen to be unaware of the fact that the 1924 Anglo-American Convention on Palestine made the U.S. a “contracting party” to the Mandate, further reinforcing a unanimously passed Joint Resolution of the 67th Congress two years earlier, signed by President Warren G. Harding, recognizing a future Jewish State in “the whole of Palestine.”
It needs to be borne in mind, Grief notes, that the Mandate forPalestine that was ceremoniously incorporated into U.S. law in 1924 “was a constitution for the
projected Jewish state that made no provision for an Arab state and which
especially prohibited the partition of the country.”
Thus, he concludes, the fierce exception theU.S. has taken to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and its unremitting pressure for creation
of a “Palestinian State ” amount to a repudiation of its signature
to the Anglo-American Convention on Palestine . It is in violation of American law and America ’s obligations under international law.
In fact, as Grief points out, Jewish sovereignty in
“The legal title of the Jewish People to the mandated territory of Palestine in all of its historical parts,” he informs us, was first recognized on April 24, 1920 when the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council (Britain, France, Italy and Japan), meeting in San Remo, Italy, “converted the 1917 ‘Balfour Declaration’ into a binding legal document.” This was confirmed by the 1920 Treaty of Sevres and
How “binding” may be construed from the fact that its wording gave effect to the provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of the
Indeed, the “San Remo Resolution,” within which the Allied Supreme Council’s decision is contained, constitutes what the author terms “the foundation document of the State of Israel, the legal existence of which is directly traceable from that document.”
That the Jewish People were unable to exercise their sovereignty in
In this thesis, Grief is ironically supported by both a passionate Zionist, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and one of Zionism’s most implacable opponents, post World War I British Foreign Secretary Lord George Nathaniel Curzon.
Brandeis believed that with the passage of the San Remo Resolution, the debate over who owned
From the initial miss-attribution of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to the 1947 Partition Plan rather than the 1920 San Remo Resolution, it was just a hop and a skip to a second major miss-representation of Israel’s international legal status – the erroneous assumption that the Partition Plan and the May 1948 termination of the British Mandate somehow erased the Jewish People’s rights to Palestine in all its historical parts and dimensions enunciated at San Remo, and implemented under the terms of the League of Nations Covenant.
Those “parts and dimensions” were defined inter alia, as including the
northwestern portions of the Golan and most of present day
The presumptive cancellation of those rights, Grief submits, is thoroughly discredited by “the principle of acquired rights,” codified in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the “Law of Treaties,” and the “doctrine of estoppel.”
The first, he asserts, insures that “the fundamental rights of the Jewish people did not lapse with the international process which brought them into existence. The second further guarantees that these rights cannot simply be abrogated or denied by those states which previously recognized their existence.”
Taken together, they provide what the author terms a “definitive answer anyone who claims that Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty over all of Palestine and the land of Israel did not continue after the end of the Mandate for Palestine…except in the allotted boundaries of the UN Partition Plan…”
Noteworthy among the states that wholeheartedly endorsed Jewish sovereignty over
The Obama administration and the Bush administration that preceded it are either unaware or have chosen to be unaware of the fact that the 1924 Anglo-American Convention on Palestine made the U.S. a “contracting party” to the Mandate, further reinforcing a unanimously passed Joint Resolution of the 67th Congress two years earlier, signed by President Warren G. Harding, recognizing a future Jewish State in “the whole of Palestine.”
It needs to be borne in mind, Grief notes, that the Mandate for
Thus, he concludes, the fierce exception the
UN has no power and authority over the
treaty and over the Mandate for Palestine, even according to the UN's Charter -
see Article 80 for example. One may have wrong idea that some paragraphs (in
Article 25 or else) allows Britain to change the requirements and provisions
for The Mandate for Palestine-Israel, but the Preamble, Article 1, Article 27,
as well as British law for a Mandatory strictly prohibit from such
misunderstandings.
The Mandate for Palestine was issued to the Jews as owners,
and Britain as the Mandatory (a volunteer bodyguard-trustee and money guard
with no revenue, no benefits, no recompense, no reward for these particular
activities, as this term described in all the sources of British law).
The findings include new strategy and
tactics to perform military operations and other remarkable results.
No comments:
Post a Comment