Like so many other aspects of our contemporary culture,
historical facts are overlooked in favor of “feelings” and perceived “rights.”
In today’s American high schools and universities, teachers are focused on
aggrieved minorities, and “victims” of all kinds, rather than on historical
truth. For example, many in the media and academia repeatedly herald the
victimization of the Palestinian-Arabs. Some professors and media outlets have
even inferred that the State of Israel was founded on "stolen” Palestinian
land. While others accuse Israel of an illegal “occupation” - a lie that has
become an accepted truth.
April 25
marked a significant historical date - unknown by most. On that date in
1920, members of the League of Nations, the UN predecessor, assembled at the
Italian city of San Remo and signed a deed - the first in two millenniums -
that granted the Jewish people total and exclusive ownership of the Land of
Israel. Leaders of the victorious World War 1 allied countries, including the
United States (observer, not a member), Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan
along with 51 other states representing the League of Nations, signed the
document.
The ostensible
reason for this assembly in San Remo was to deal with the fate of the
territories that were once a part of the defeated empires of Germany,
Austro-Hungary (Hapsburg Empire), and the Ottoman Turkish Empire. As a
result of dismantling these empires (including the Czarist Russian Empire) new
nation states arose in Europe, including Poland (dismantled in 1772 and divided
between Russia, Prussia, and Austro-Hungary), Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia,
and Yugoslavia. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, vast territories in the
Middle East were left with no ownership.
At San Remo,
the allied powers dealt with the disposition of the Ottoman territories in the
Middle East. The League decided to grant Britain and France a mandate to
administer the territories as temporary trusteeships until independent nations
could arise. The allies also reaffirmed the pledge contained in the Balfour
Declaration of November, 1917, that endorsed the establishment of the Jewish
National Home in Palestine. The British delegation to San Remo was led by Prime
Minister David Lloyd George and Lord Curzon, who replaced Lord Balfour as
foreign minister in 1919. The French delegation expressed reservations about
the inclusion of the Balfour Declaration in the peace treaty, but British
persuasion settled the issue and the French agreed.
The Conference
dealt with two specific documents: the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, between
Britain and France, that charted the division of the Middle East between them;
and the Balfour Declaration, that declared the establishment of a national home
for the Jewish People in the Land of Israel, then called Palestine.
The U.S.
Council on Foreign Relations posted the San Remo resolution as such:
“This agreement between post-World War I allied powers (Britain, France, Italy,
and Japan) was adopted on April 25, 1920 during the San Remo Conference. The
Mandate for Palestine was based on this resolution; it incorporated the 1917
Balfour Declaration and the Covenant of the League of Nation's Article 22.
Britain was charged with establishing a "national home for the Jewish people" in
Palestine. Territorial boundaries were not decided until four years after. The
resolution itself reads: “It was agreed to accept the terms of the Mandates Article as given below with
reference to Palestine, on the understanding that there was inserted in the
process - verbal undertaking by the Mandatory Power that this would not involve
the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in
Palestine…”
The late Howard
Grief, an international lawyer and author of The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel Under International law argued that the San Remo resolution gave the
Jewish people exclusive legal and political rights in Palestine. It gave the
Arabs the same legal rights in the remainder of the Middle East. Grief wrote, “The Arabs got the
lion’s share…I mean they got Syria (the Levant), which was
subsequently divided between Syria and Lebanon, they got Mesopotamia, and all
of Arabia. This is what Balfour himself said: ‘Why are they complaining? You
are getting all these lands, and we are granting a niche – he called it a niche
- to the Jewish people who were going to get Palestine.”
According to Grief, the 1920 San Remo resolution superseded later U.N.
resolutions. “There is a doctrine in International Law, that once you recognize
a certain situation, the matter is executed. You can’t change it. The U.N. General
Assembly exceeded its authority, exceeded its jurisdiction. It
did not have the power to divide the country.” Grief was referring to the two
divisions of historical Mandatory Palestine. The first in 1922 when Britain cut
off over 70% of Mandatory Palestine assigned to be the Jewish homeland to
create the Emirate of Trans-Jordan and later the Kingdom of Jordan. The
second partition occurred in 1947, when U.N. Resolution 181 partitioned the
remaining mandate between Arabs and Jews. The Jews accepted the resolution
which suggested a truncated Jewish homeland and they established the State of
Israel, while the Arab-Palestinian leaders rejected the resolution which would
have given them self-determination and statehood. They chose instead a war to
annihilate the Jewish state.
While UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon may reference Israeli settlements in Judea and
Samaria as “illegal,” Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine confers on Jews
the right to settlement. It states: “The administration of Palestine,
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 cooperation 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.” Article 6 does not exclude Jewish
settlement in the West Bank or anywhere else under the Mandate. Moreover, UN
resolution 242 (1967) conditioned Israel relinquishing territories (not all) in
exchange for peace. Since there has been Palestinian terror rather than peace, Israel
remains as the legitimate administrator of the West Bank territories.
Former U.S.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, following a UN Security Council meeting
on March 18, 1994, notably remarked, "We simply do not support the
description of the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war as "occupied Palestinian
territory". In the view of my Government, this language
could be taken to indicate sovereignty; a matter which both Israel and the PLO
have agreed must be decided in negotiations on the final status of the
territories. As agreed between them, those negotiations will begin no later
than two years after the implementation of the Declaration of Principles.”
The quote,
often attributed to Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, “If you
tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to
believe it" is as applicable today as then. The Arab-Palestinians
and their western supporters in academia and the media have been repeating the
mantras of “stolen” Palestinian land, and “illegal occupation” for such a long
time, that many in the world, including Ban Ki-moon, have apparently come to
accept it, if not believe in it. The San Remo resolution of April 25, 1920 is a
reminder of an undeniable truth.
Further reading: