A Short Course for Keir Starmer on Israel and the Mandate for Palestine

Here’s the promised first installment of that short course for Keir Starmer on Israel and the Mandate for Palestine.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, the League of Nations proposed to deal with some of its former territories by creating a system of mandates. The European holder of a Mandate was responsible for helping the people covered by the Mandate’s provisions to be prepared for statehood. There were several mandates for the Arabs – mandates in Iraq and Syria (of which Lebanon then formed a part), giving rise to the states of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. There was to be one mandate for the Jewish people – the Mandate for Palestine. In the end, of course, we know the lopsided result: after the mandates, after the end of European colonies in North Africa, after the creation of a half-dozen new states along the Arab Gulf, there are now twenty-two Arab states, and one very small Jewish state, with 0.1% of the land area possessed by the Arabs.

The Mandate for Palestine (1922) was created for the express purpose of establishing a Jewish National Home that would later become a Jewish state. Keir Starmer would do well to study the Mandate’s provisions – especially the Preamble and Articles 4 and 6 – which will give him an understanding of Israel’s legal claim to the West Bank. The Preamble sets out the reason for the Mandate – to right a historic wrong, by allowing Jews to reconstitute their commonwealth in their ancient homeland, while protecting the civil and religious – but not “political” – rights of other communities. Great Britain, as holder of the Mandate, was committed to fulfilling certain tasks. Article 6 of the Mandate lays out the most important of them: “The Administration of Palestine [that is, the British officials administering the Mandate] while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.”

What were the territories assigned, under the Palestine Mandate, to the Jewish National Home? Early on, it was thought that historic Palestine, on both sides of the Jordan River, ought to be included. But the British then decided unilaterally not to “facilitate Jewish immigration” throughout the Mandate, but instead to prevent such immigration into any part of historic Palestine east of the Jordan River. That area now declared off-limits to Jewish immigrants, which included not just eastern Palestine, but also other territory as well “out to the desert,” constituted 78% of the land originally intended to become part of the Mandate’s territory.

The 22% of the territory that was left for the Mandate included all of historic Palestine west of the Jordan River. It was that territory that was subject to the Mandate’s provisions; it was on that territory that “close settlement by Jews on the land” was to be encouraged by the British. The Mandate maps show clearly where the Jews were to create their national home, and then their state. Their territory ran from the Golan Heights in the north to the Red Sea in the south, and from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. This was the legal claim, under the Mandate, of the Jews. It was, of course, based on the historical connection of Jews to this land, a connection that no other people had. When in 1949 the Jordanians managed to capture the West Bank, and held it until 1967, the “Palestinian people” had not yet been invented, and the territory was kept by Jordan not because it had a legal claim, but because it was the “military occupier,” without right or title.

After the Six-Day War, Israel could at long last enforce the legal claim to the West Bank that it had always held, since the beginning of the Mandate, and never relinquished. That legal claim derives from the Mandate for Palestine, which like the other League of Nations mandates, was part of, not a violation of, international law. The moral and historic claim to this land, from which the legal claim derived, was based on the more than 3,000 years of continuous Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, the place where Jewish history was made, and which Jews, even in exile, held fast to, in their hearts and minds, bending their thoughts “to Zion and Jerusalem.”

Nor did the claim under the Mandate for Palestine end when the League of Nations itself dissolved. As the successor organization to the League, the United Nations included in Article 80 of its charter a recognition that any still-existing mandates had to be brought to their intended conclusion. Thus did this Article 80, known as the “Jewish people’s article,” make clear that the Palestine Mandate’s purpose and provisions – to create the Jewish National Home, on the territory assigned in 1922 to be open to “close settlement by Jews on the land” – still remained.