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The Palestine Mandate
It has been reported that the Palestine
Commission, whose decisions are to be published this week, has
been critically examining the text of the mandate by which Great
Britain became Mandatory for Palestine.
It is to be hoped that this report may prove to be true, for
upon a full understanding of the origins and value of this
document depends to a large extent the possibility of a just
estimate of what has been called the Palestinian problem.
Let us summarize briefly the events that preceded the
acceptance of the Mandate provisions by the Council of the
League of Nations in September, 1923.
It will be remembered that in 1915, when Great Britain was at
war with Turkey, an agreement was made, through a series of
letters between King Hussein and Sir Henry McMahon, High
Commissioner of Egypt, that in return for the military
assistance of King Hussein the Arab territories contained in an
area extending from Turkey to the Indian Ocean, and from Persia
to the Mediterranean should, when victory was over, acquire
independence. A minor exception was agreed upon as regards those
parts of Syria "lying to the west of the districts of
Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo" on the grounds that they
were not purely Arab. But there was no question until two years
later but that Palestine was included in the area of Arab
Independence.
In 1917, however, the Balfour Declaration drove a wedge into
this agreement by promising the establishment in Palestine of a
national home for the Jewish people. This declaration was
drafted by the Zionist Federation, a political Jewish body of
vast ambitions but possessing little backing from Jewry as a
whole, and received only minor emendations by the English
Cabinet.
The vagueness of the term "national home" was
progressively interpreted by the Zionists to mean a greater and
greater control of Palestine by the Jewish immigrants who began
later to pour into the country as the result of the declaration.
It was made to supercede the pledge given to King Hussein in
1915, and for this purpose the wording of the pledge was
construed as expecting the whole of Palestine from the area of
Arab independence. The years between the end of the war and the
final acceptance from the end of the war and the final
acceptance by the League Council of the text of Great Britain's
Mandate for Palestine were filled with industrious intriguing on
the part of the Zionists so to arrange the wording of the
Mandate as to ensure that the Arabs should be cheated of the
fruits of the promise made to them, and that the new Jewish
settlers should obtain complete ascendancy in Palestine.
The British Government during these years played into the
hands of the intriguers.
The origin of the Mandate text is to be found in the formal
Zionist pronouncement made to the Peace Conference in February,
1919, presenting the Zionist view of how the Balfour Declaration
should be put into force in Palestine. That this is so may be
gathered from the naive remark in the Peel Report on Palestine,
which says: "From these and other documents and records it
is clear that the Zionist project had already in those early
days assumed something like the shape of the mandate as we know
it."
But this was only a beginning. in June, 1919, a Commission,
representing the principal Allied and Associated powers, was
appointed with Lord Milner, a strong supporter of Zionism, as
chairman. this Commission soon became whittled down to exchanges
of views between the British Delegation and representatives of
the Zionist Organisation, and for some time the work of drafting
the Mandate was carried on by a political committee, the names
of whose first members--Sir Herbert Samuel, Dr. Jacobson, Dr.
Feiwel, Mr. Sacher, Mr. Landman and Mr. Ben Cohen--sufficiently
designate who were the real authors of the first drafts.
At about this time it was decided that the Council of the
League (which meant representatives of a few Great Powers) and
not the Assembly, comprising representatives of all member
States, should be responsible for drawing up Mandates. This
meant in the case of Palestine that the Government of Great
Britain--materially assisted, as we have seen, by the
Zionists--should both present the case and approve it.
In spite of sporadic and ineffectual criticism of this
procedure by the United States, and in spite of the fact that
the representatives of Australia and Canada in the League
Assembly took strong exception to the high-handed action of the
Council in refusing the Assembly time even to examine properly
the Mandate document, the final draft was accepted by a
resolution of the Council and thus became the guiding principle
of the relations with Palestine.
In these circumstances it is not surprising to find that the
preamble and articles of the mandate are wholly in favor of
Zionist aspirations and that the pledge to the Arabs finds no
place in the Mandate document. In the second paragraph of the
preamble, for example, the Balfour Declaration is repeated, and
in the third the Zionist-coined phrase "historical
connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" is invented
to give a specious justification for the emphasis laid upon the
"national home."
But in the articles of the Mandate
lies the most striking proof that these were the work, not of
any international body, but of the Zionist themselves. Nine of
these articles are either an exact reproduction or a slightly
varied setting of texts taken from the voluminous outpourings of
Zionist propaganda to the peace Conference. Here, for example,
is Article 6: "The administration of Palestine . . . shall
facilitate Jewish immigration . . . and shall encourage close
settlement by Jews on the land." And here is the Zionist
statement of views to the Peace conference: "The Mandatory
Power shall, inter alia, promote Jewish immigration and
close settlement on the land."
From what has been said--and we have only touched the fringe
of Zionist intrigue--it is clear that the Mandate for Palestine,
which is taken as authoritative in all matters connected with
that country, is little more than a statement of Zionist policy
composed by Zionists. It is utterly biased, and the rights of
the Arabs to the country they have inhabited for 20 centuries
and more are entirely omitted. Nor, of course, is Great
Britain's pledge of 1915 ever referred to.
For those who would understand the whole problem of Palestine
since 1919 we would strongly recommend study of Mr. J.M.N.
Jeffries authoritative work, "Palestine the Reality" (Longmans),
to which we are indebted for many of the facts we have noted
above.
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updated 20 October
2011 |
