by Ted Belman
Israel’s rights to all the land west of the Jordan River have been compromised by the Oslo Accords. Israel has agreed that notwithstanding such rights she will negotiate a settlement with the PA whereby they get an autonomous region with the boundaries to be negotiated. This is yet another reason to terminate the Accords.
Here are some previous articles which affirm such contention.
“The Jewish People’s Rights to the Land of Israel (JPRLI), written by the late Salomon Benzimra, underpinned by the extensive labours of International Law lawyer Howard Grief (of Quebec and Israel,) and issued under the auspices of Canadians for Israel’s Legal Rights.
“I cannot recommend this little book, indexed and lavishly annotated, highly enough. This slim little volume is a tour de force of fat-free precision which, in the words of the foreword, “completely undermines the arguments of the de-legitimizers.”
“JPLRI spans three millennia of Jewish history in Israel, incorporating the recognition of the Jews’ collective, national rights in international law, through the crucial way stations of the 1918 Balfour Declaration, Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points,” the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, The Covenant of the League of Nations, the critically important 1920 San Remo Conference, the Peel Commission, and on up to the UN’s contentious 1947 Partition Resolution No. 181. Everything is boiled down, but nothing of significance is omitted. All key documents of modern international law are examined and explained in simple terms any layperson can grasp. All should be central to any discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict, because the provisions contained therein have never been revoked.”
“Moreover, as the Levy Report points out, the Jewish people still had residual historical and legal rights in the West Bank emanating from the British Mandate that were never cancelled, but rather were preserved by the U.N. Charter, under Article 80 — the famous “Palestine Clause” that was drafted, in part, to guarantee continuity with respect to Jewish rights from the League of Nations.”
San Remo: The forgotten Milestone to the Liberation and Creation of Israel By Solomon Benzimra
The importance of the San Remo Conference with regard to Palestine cannot be overstated:
For the first time in history, Palestine became a legal and political entity;
The Jewish people were recognized as the national beneficiary of the trust granted to Britain in Palestine for the duration of the Mandate — a “sacred trust of civilization” as per the League Covenant;
“While the Middle East peace process has been going on for over two decades, it is astonishing that San Remo and the ensuing Mandate for Palestine have hardly been mentioned. Is it deliberate? Is it a mere omission? How could there be peace and reconciliation without acknowledging fundamental historical and legal facts?”
The Jewish claim to “Palestine” versus the two-state solution By Paul Eidelburg
”On April 24-25, 2010, a number of seminars were delivered by spokesmen from the United States and Canada to commemorate the San Remo Convention. The seminars were followed by a ceremony held in the same house where the signing of the San Remo Convention took place in 1920. The event attracted politicians from around Europe, the U.S., and Canada. Knesset Member and Deputy Speaker Danny Danon attended and delivered greetings from Jerusalem.
“At the conclusion of the event, the conference reaffirmed the San Remo Resolution, which included the Balfour Declaration and reshaped the map of the modern Middle East, as was agreed to by the Principal Allied Powers (Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States acting as an observer), and as was later approved unanimously by the League of Nations. The Resolution remains irrevocable and legally binding to this day:
“[Viewed solely in the context of international law, “the San Remo Resolution, as noted by attorney Howard Grief, “is the principle founding document of the State of Israel [in] recognition of the exclusive national Jewish rights to the Land of Israel under international law”[p. 9] as per the historical connection of the Jewish people to the territory previously known as Palestine;
“The San Remo Resolution laid down the Jewish legal right to settle anywhere in western Palestine, a 10,000 square-miles the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. On July 24, 1922, fifty-one member countries – the entire League of Nations – unanimously affirmed the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine as their grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.
“Any attempt to negate the Jewish people’s right to Palestine-Eretz-Israel, and to deny them access and control over the area designated for the Jewish people by the League of Nations, is a serious infringement of international law.”
Howard Grief, the author of The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law and the leading expert on the subject, co-copied me with three powerful letters in defense of Israel’s rights, in which he writes:
The country of Palestine was created in April 1920 at the San Remo Peace Conference for one purpose only – to be the Jewish National Home, and the term “Occupied Palestinian Territory” is thus an oxymoron since Palestine was never intended to be an Arab land under international law[.]” …
Upon the re-birth of the Jewish State on May 15, 1948, Jewish legal rights to Palestine were devolved upon the State of Israel. Whatever you may think, those rights never lapsed, were never annulled or voided and never validly or legally transferred to an Arab people known as “Palestinians”, as you so wrongly assume. Moreover, subsequent events – such as the 1947 Partition Resolution, Security Council Resolution 242, the Israel-PLO Agreements or the Road Map Peace Plan – have not superseded or curtailed the rights of the Jewish People to former Mandated Palestine[.]
Israel’s Deputy FM Ayalon explained The Truth about the West Bank in a now famous video.
International Law and the State of Israel By Ted Belman
“So, in accordance with international law, the victors of WWI, Great Britain, France and the US negotiated the Versailles Treaty and forced Germany to accept it. This treaty changed borders of the defeated nations and moved populations. Their right to do so was never questioned.
‘Similarly, Britain, France, Italy and Japan met in San Remo in 1920 to dispose of the Ottoman Empire. They decided to break it up into various countries. These countries would start as Mandates under the newly formed League of Nations and would remain so until they were ready for independence.
(Yet, the Palestinians and other Arabs refuse to accept that the victorious powers had the right to create Israel.)
‘In deciding what countries to create, they held hearings, recorded evidence and then made decisions which were set out in the San Remo Resolution. It is argued by leading authorities that the decisions were Res Judicata i.e., legally decided. In other words, they were legally binding.
‘One of those decisions was to create the Palestine Mandate, which would become the Jewish Homeland. In accordance with this intention, the Jews were given the right of close settlement of the land.’
The Legality of Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria according to International Law By Karen Stahl-Don, LLM, MA
“Most important for the purpose of tracing relevant international law, the Principal Allied Powers explicitly defined the realization of the Balfour Declaration as the purpose of the Palestine Mandate. Specifically, on April 25, 1920, at the San Remo Conference, representatives of the four Allied powers of World War I—Britain, France, Italy, and Japan—distributed the Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain, stating that Mandatory (trustee) would be responsible for putting the Balfour Declaration into effect. It should also be emphasized that President Woodrow Wilson approved the Balfour Declaration before it was published, and the French and Italian governments also publicly endorsed the Declaration. Similarly, President Truman expressed approval of the Balfour Declaration, “explaining that it was in keeping with former President Woodrow Wilson’s principle of ‘self-determination.’”
Israel has legal rights, not just historical claims by Ted Belman
“In other words, the government chose to avoid the contest between our rights that their claims and instead presented it as one of completing claims. But why even mention the Arab claims at all?
PM Netanyahu plays the same tune. He always refers to our historical claims rather than to our legal rights.”
This article was originally posted on israpundit.org and can be accessed here.