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| Battle of Jerusalem (1917) | |
The Battle of Jerusalem occurred during the British Empire's "Jerusalem Operations" against the Ottoman Empire, when fighting for the city developed from 17 November, continuing after the surrender until 30 December 1917, to secure the final objective of the Southern Palestine Offensive during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of World War I. Before Jerusalem could be secured, two battles were recognized by the British as being fought in the Judean Hills to the north and east of the Hebron–Junction Station line. These were the Battle of Nebi Samwill from 17 to 24 November and the Defence of Jerusalem from 26 to 30 December 1917. They also recognised within these Jerusalem Operations, the successful second attempt on 21 and 22 December 1917 to advance across the Nahr el Auja, as the Battle of Jaffa, although Jaffa had been occupied as a consequence of the Battle of Mughar Ridge on 16 November.
This series of battles was successfully fought by the British Empire's XX Corps, XXI Corps, and the Desert Mounted Corps against strong opposition from the Yildirim Army Group's Seventh Army in the Judean Hills and theEighth Army north of Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast. The loss of Jaffa and Jerusalem, together with the loss of 50 miles (80 km) of territory during the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) advance from Gaza, after the capture of Beersheba, Gaza, Hareira and Sheria, Tel el Khuweilfe and the Battle of Mughar Ridge, constituted a grave setback for the Ottoman Army and the Ottoman Empire.
As a result of these victories, British Empire forces captured Jerusalem and established a new strategically strong fortified line. This line ran from well to the north of Jaffa on the maritime plain, across the Judean Hills to Bireh north of Jerusalem, and continued eastwards of the Mount of Olives. With the capture of the road from Beersheba to Jerusalem via Hebron and Bethlehem, together with substantial Ottoman territory south of Jerusalem, the city was secured. On 11 December, General Edmund Allenby humbly entered the Old City on foot through the Jaffa Gate instead of horse or vehicles to show respect for the holy city. He was the first Christian in many centuries to control Jerusalem, which is a very important site for many faiths. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Lloyd George described the capture as "a Christmas present for the British people". The battle was a great morale boost for the British Empire. more from Wikipedia | |
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Battle of Jerusalem (1917)
History of Gaza 4000 years
| History of Gaza | |
The known history of Gaza spans 4,000 years. Gaza was ruled, destroyed and repopulated by various dynasties, empires, and peoples. Originally a Canaanite settlement, it came under the control of the ancient Egyptians for roughly 350 years before being conquered and becoming one of thePhilistines' principal cities. Gaza fell to the Israelites in about 1000 BCE and later became part of the Assyrian Empire. Alexander the Great besieged and captured the city in 332 BCE. Most of the inhabitants were killed during the assault, and the city, which became a center for Hellenisticlearning and philosophy, was resettled by nearby Bedouins. The area changed hands regularly between two Greek successor-kingdoms, theSeleucids of Syria and the Ptolemies of Egypt until it was besieged and taken by the Hasmoneans in 96 BCE.
Gaza was rebuilt by Roman General Pompey Magnus, and granted to Herod the Great thirty years later. Throughout the Roman period, Gaza maintained its prosperity, receiving grants from several different emperors. A 500-member senate governed the city, which had a diverse population ofGreeks, Romans, Jews, Egyptians, Persians and Nabateans. Conversion toChristianity in the city was spearheaded and completed under Saint Porphyrius, who destroyed its eight pagan temples between 396 and 420 CE. Gaza was the first city in Palestine to be conquered by the Muslim general Amr ibn al-'As in 634 CE. During early Muslim rule, most Gazans adopted Islam as their religion, and the city went through periods of prosperity and decline. The Crusaders wrested control of Gaza from theFatimids in 1100, but were driven out by Saladin. Gaza was in Mamlukhands by the late 13th-century, and became the capital of a province that stretched from the Sinai Peninsula to Caesarea. It witnessed a golden age under the Ottoman-appointed Ridwan family in the 16th century.
Gaza experienced destructive earthquakes in 1903 and 1914. In 1917,British forces captured the city during World War I. Gaza grew significantly in the first half of the 20th-century under Mandatory rule. The population of the city swelled as a result of the Palestinian exodus during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Gaza came under Egyptian rule until it was occupied by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War. Gaza became a center of political resistance during the First Intifada, and under the Oslo Accords of 1993, it was assigned to be under the direct control of the newly establishedPalestinian Authority. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005. In 2007, Hamas emerged as the victor in Palestinian factional fighting withFatah in the city and in the wider Gaza Strip and has since been the solegoverning authority. Israel has blockaded the Strip since then and has launched assaults against it in 2008–2009, 2012 and 2014, which it characterized as a response to rocket attacks. more from Wikipedia
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Aboriginal Rights to Israel (Aboriginal Native Jews to Israel "Palestine") Indigenous Jews are Israelis
Aboriginal Rights to Israel (Aboriginal Native Jews to Israel "Palestine")
Indigenous and Aboriginal Rights to Israel
By Allen Z. Hertz · April 23, 2009
For over sixty years, there has been a bitter dispute over the unwillingness of most Muslims and Arabs to accept the legitimacy and permanence of Israel as an independent Jewish State in the Middle East. In this connection, Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have denied that the Jews are a People within the context of the modern political and legal doctrine of the self-determination of Peoples. However, there is an enormous body of archaeological and historical evidence demonstrating that the Jewish People -- like the Greek People or the Han Chinese People -- is among the oldest of the world's Peoples.
Thus, it is well known that the Jewish People has more than 3,500 years of continuous history, with a subjective-objective national identity that, in each century, has kept a link to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. For example, the Jewish Bible, the Christian Gospels and the Koran all specifically testify to the connection between the Jewish People and its historic homeland.
Like other Peoples, the Jewish People has a right to self-determination. Though the self-determination of the Arab People is expressed via twenty-one Arab countries, Israel is the sole expression of the self-determination of the Jewish People, which of all extant Peoples, has the strongest claim to be considered aboriginal to the territory west of the Jordan River.
Thus, the Jewish People is aboriginal to Israel in the same way that, in Canada, certain First Nations are deemed aboriginal to their ancestral lands. And, it is noteworthy that the Supreme Court of Canada has decided that, where aboriginals maintain their historical connection with the land, aboriginal title can survive both sovereignty changes and influx of new populations resulting from foreign conquest.
In this regard, it is essential to recognize that the Middle East has always had a significant Jewish population, including some Jews who, in each century, continued to live west of the Jordan River. Today, many of the sons and daughters of these Middle Eastern Jews are citizens of Israel, where they have been joined by Jews from many other countries. Though some Western thinkers are now uncomfortable with the idea of a nation-State as the homeland of a particular People, that is no reason to target Israel, because the overwhelming majority of modern States are the homeland of a particular People, e.g., Japan, Italy, or the twenty-one countries of the Arab League.
Israel and thirty-odd modern countries are all successor States of the Muslim Ottoman Empire which for four hundred years (1516-1920) was the principal Power in the Near and Middle East. Apart from the ruling Turks, the Ottoman population was composed of several large ethnic groups, including Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Arabs and Jews. For centuries, these Jews lived in large numbers in a variety of Ottoman venues -- including Constantinople, Salonika, Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, Baghdad, Basra, Tiberias, Hebron, Safed, Jaffa and Jerusalem.
In late October 1914, the Ottoman Empire opted to enter the First World War to fight against the United Kingdom and its Allies. As the fortunes of war began to favour the British Army, the United Kingdom Government addressed the question of what to do with the multi-national Ottoman lands both in the light of current British interests and the nineteenth-century liberal doctrine of the self-determination of Peoples. In this regard, the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, in his 1896 manifesto The Jewish State, had already proclaimed that Jews, though living in many different places around the globe, constitute one People for the purpose of self-determination.
In October 1917, the British Cabinet adopted, as a declared war aim, the creation of an entirely new country called “Palestine” to serve as “a national home for the Jewish People.” This was done to help realize the Jewish People’s self-determination on its ancestral lands; to shore up Jewish support for the Allied war effort in revolutionary Russia and the USA; and to help the British better cover the eastern flank of the Suez Canal, which was then the crucial gateway to British India. The intention to create this Jewish-National-Home Palestine was announced to the world in the November 1917 Balfour Declaration.
As Great Britain worked to defeat the Ottoman Turks, the world also began to learn about the national claims of the Arab People. Here recall the wartime exploits of Lawrence of Arabia and the Hashemite Prince Feisal ibn Hussein, both of whom were present at the 1919-1920 Paris Peace Conference. There, a powerful international searchlight was trained on the self-determination of Peoples, including the claims of the Arab People.
However, no one there had ever heard anything about a distinct Palestinian Arab People. Had there then been such a distinct Palestinian Arab People, Prince Feisal, USA President Woodrow Wilson, France’s Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and others would have known about it. This assessment is confirmed by extensive local testimony and petitions collected, in 1919, by the USA King-Crane Commission which told President Wilson that Arabs around the Jordan River specifically rejected any plan to create a new country called Palestine. To the contrary, local Arabs then enthusiastically sought creation of a new, unitary Arab State matching the then Ottoman Province of Syria, which for centuries had included modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.
The 1919-1920 Paris Peace Conference was concerned with the task of accommodating the political interests of the victorious Allied and Associated Powers with the claims to self-determination of well-known Peoples which had long histories of national self-affirmation and bitter suffering under foreign oppression. Thus, considered were difficult and entangled issues touching the self-determination of such famous Peoples as the Chinese, the Poles, the Germans, the Finns, the Letts, the Latvians, the Estonians, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Serbs, the Slovenes, the Croats, the Italians, the Hungarians, the Romanians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Turks, the Kurds, the Armenians, the Arabs and the Jews. In this larger context, just one decision among many was creation of an entirely new country called “Palestine” as “a national home for the Jewish People”.
The international decision to establish “a national home for the Jewish People” was the sole rationale for the 1922 creation of Jewish-National-Home Palestine which, under the aegis of the League of Nations, was administered by the British until May 1948, when Israel declared independence. Decision-makers at the 1919-1920 Paris Peace Conference knew that Jewish-National-Home Palestine would initially lack a Jewish majority population. However, the international decision to create Palestine “as a national home for the Jewish People” was made not so much on the basis of local demographics, but in recognition of the Jewish People’s aboriginal title and continuing links to the land around the Jordan River, as well as with regard to broader considerations of demography, history, politics and social justice that were both global and Middle Eastern. Thus, there was a conscious choice to refer -- not just to the 85,000 Jews then living locally -- but also to the past, present and future of 14 million Jews worldwide, including the one million Jews then living in the Near and Middle East.
Failure to create Jewish-National-Home Palestine would have meant denying the Jewish People a share in the partition of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, where Jews had lived for centuries, including some west of the Jordan River. Failure to create Jewish-National-Home Palestine would also have meant that the Arab People would have received almost the whole of the Ottoman inheritance. That result would have been unacceptable to David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and their peers, because they clearly understood that the claim to self-determination of the Jewish People was no less compelling than that of the Arab People.
The Paris decision-makers strongly believed that they had also done justice to the claims of the Arab People whom they had freed from 400 years of Turkish rule and helped on the road to independence via the creation or recognition of almost a dozen new Arab States on territory that had formerly belonged to the Ottoman sultan.
Moreover, the decision to create Jewish-National-Home Palestine did not result in the displacement of any Arabs. To the contrary, from 1922 until 1948, the Arab population of Jewish-National-Home Palestine almost tripled, while the Jewish population multiplied eight times. The later problem of Arab refugees (about 736,000) from Jewish-National-Home Palestine and Jewish refugees and their families (over 950,000) from Arab countries only emerged from May 1948, when local Arabs allied with several neighboring Arab States to launch a war to exterminate the Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Like the Greek People or the Han Chinese People, the Jewish People has kept the same name and subjective-objective national identity, in each and every century, since ancient times. By contrast, the first steps towards a distinct, subjective-objective Palestinian Arab identity were taken only after the international community had already created a new country called “Palestine” to serve as “a national home for the Jewish People”. Thus, the continuing subjective-objective national identity of the Jewish People and the creation of Jewish-National-Home Palestine were both preconditions for the subsequent evolution of a distinct, subjective-objective Palestinian Arab identity. This logical sequence reminds us that the history of Jewish-National-Home Palestine (1922-1948) and the factual existence of modern Israel are only explicable because the subjective-objective national identity of the Jewish People, and its continuous link to the lands west of the Jordan River, precede by around 3,500 years the formation of a distinct, subjective-objective Palestinian Arab identity and any articulated Palestinian Arab claim to a hypothetical Palestinian Arab State that has, in fact, never existed.
Thus, deep into the 20th century, Arab leaders themselves failed to recognize the right to self-determination of a distinct Palestinian Arab People. For example, as principal Arab leader at the 1919-1920 Paris Peace Conference, Prince Feisal specifically accepted the plan to create Palestine as “a national home for the Jewish People” and his father, the Hashemite King of the Hedjaz (later part of Saudi Arabia) was party to the 1920 Sevres Treaty that explicitly stipulated that the newly-created Palestine would be “a national home for the Jewish People.”
And, decades later, the governments of Egypt and Jordan showed how little regard they had for the self-determination of a distinct Palestinian Arab People; first, by rejecting the 1947 UN plan to partition Jewish-National-Home Palestine into two new independent States, the one Jewish and the other Arab; and second, by themselves failing to create a new Palestinian Arab State, between 1949 and 1967, when Egypt held the Gaza Strip and Jordan administered East-Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Such analysis does not deny the current existence of a distinct Palestinian Arab People; nor does it claim that such a Palestinian Arab People is today without rights. Rather, the conclusion is that there are rights on all sides, and that there should be a peaceful process that respectfully reconciles the rights of the Palestinian Arab People with the prior rights of the Jewish People.
The Mandate for Palestine aka Greater Israel as it Pertains to Jerusalem and the Old City - YJ Draiman
The Mandate for Palestine aka Greater Israel as it Pertains to Jerusalem and the Old City
The rights granted to the Jewish people in the 1920 San Remo Conference confirmed by the 1920 Treaty of Sevres and Lausanne, and adopted and incorporated by the Mandate forPalestine relating to the establishment of the Jewish national home were to be given effect in all parts and regions of the Palestine territory. No exception was made for Jerusalem and its Old City, which were not singled out for special reference in either the Balfour Declaration, the 1920 San Remo Treaty or the Mandate for Palestine, other than to call for the preservation of existing rights in the Holy Places. As concerns the Holy Places, including those located in the Old City, specific obligations and responsibilities were imposed on the Mandatory.
It follows that the legal rights of the claimants to sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem similarly derive from the decisions of the Principal Allied Powers in the 1920 San Remoconference and from the terms of the Mandate for Palestine adopted and approved by the Council of the League of Nations. In evaluating the validity of the claims of Israel relating to the Old City, the Council decision is of great significance from the perspective of the rights and obligations that it created under international law which the UN cannot supersede or modify without the consent of the parties.
The League of Nations and the UN can only recommend a resolution, in order for a resolution to be binding it must be agreed to and executed by the parties, since the Arabs rejected outright the partition and most other resolutions, all those resolutions are void and have no standing whatsoever.
In the view of Oxford international law professor Ian Brownlie, “in many instances the rights of parties to a dispute derive from legally significant acts, or a treaty concluded very long ago”. As a result of these “legally significant acts”, there are legal as well as historical ties between the State of Israel and the Old City of Jerusalem.
The intellectual ties were further solidified by the official opening of the Hebrew University on 1 April 1925 in Jerusalem, attended by many dignitaries, including the University’s founding father, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, Field Marshall Allenby, Lord Balfour, Professor William Rappard and Sir Herbert Samuel, among many other distinguished guests. According to Dr. Weizmann, addressing the dignitaries and some twelve thousand other attendees at this memorable event, the opening of the University in Jerusalem was “the distinctive symbol, as it is destined to be the crowning glory, of the National Home of the Jewish people which we are seeking to rebuild”. The Faisal Weitzmann agreement ofJanuary 3, 1919 stated and agreed that the Jews would have Jerusalem and that the Muslim places of worship would be protected.
In addition to the legal, historical and intellectual heritage, in the words of Canadian scholar Dr. Jacques Paul Gauthier: “To attempt to solve the Jerusalem / Old City problem without taking into consideration the historical and religious facts is like trying to put together a ten thousand piece puzzle without the most strategic pieces of that puzzle”. In his monumental work entitled Sovereignty Over the Old City of Jerusalem: A Study of the Historical, Religious, Political and Legal Aspects of the Question of the Old City, Dr. Gauthier offers an exhaustive review of these historical/spiritual/
Indeed, with respect to the question of the Old City, the historical facts and the res religiosae (or things involving religion) are rendered legally relevant by the decisions taken at the 1920 San Remo sessions of the Paris Peace Conference, together with the terms of the Mandate for Greater Israel aka Palestine. Notwithstanding the fact that historical, religious or other non-legal considerations may not be considered relevant or sufficient to support a legal claim normally in international law cases, these aspects of the issue of the city of Jerusalem are relevant in evaluating the claims of Israel and the Arab-Palestinians relating to sovereignty over the Old City, just as much or perhaps even more than over the entire State of Israel and the Holy Land, as noted.
YJ Draiman
It follows that the legal rights of the claimants to sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem similarly derive from the decisions of the Principal Allied Powers in the 1920 San Remoconference and from the terms of the Mandate for Palestine adopted and approved by the Council of the League of Nations. In evaluating the validity of the claims of Israel relating to the Old City, the Council decision is of great significance from the perspective of the rights and obligations that it created under international law which the UN cannot supersede or modify without the consent of the parties.
The League of Nations and the UN can only recommend a resolution, in order for a resolution to be binding it must be agreed to and executed by the parties, since the Arabs rejected outright the partition and most other resolutions, all those resolutions are void and have no standing whatsoever.
In the view of Oxford international law professor Ian Brownlie, “in many instances the rights of parties to a dispute derive from legally significant acts, or a treaty concluded very long ago”. As a result of these “legally significant acts”, there are legal as well as historical ties between the State of Israel and the Old City of Jerusalem.
The intellectual ties were further solidified by the official opening of the Hebrew University on 1 April 1925 in Jerusalem, attended by many dignitaries, including the University’s founding father, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, Field Marshall Allenby, Lord Balfour, Professor William Rappard and Sir Herbert Samuel, among many other distinguished guests. According to Dr. Weizmann, addressing the dignitaries and some twelve thousand other attendees at this memorable event, the opening of the University in Jerusalem was “the distinctive symbol, as it is destined to be the crowning glory, of the National Home of the Jewish people which we are seeking to rebuild”. The Faisal Weitzmann agreement ofJanuary 3, 1919 stated and agreed that the Jews would have Jerusalem and that the Muslim places of worship would be protected.
In addition to the legal, historical and intellectual heritage, in the words of Canadian scholar Dr. Jacques Paul Gauthier: “To attempt to solve the Jerusalem / Old City problem without taking into consideration the historical and religious facts is like trying to put together a ten thousand piece puzzle without the most strategic pieces of that puzzle”. In his monumental work entitled Sovereignty Over the Old City of Jerusalem: A Study of the Historical, Religious, Political and Legal Aspects of the Question of the Old City, Dr. Gauthier offers an exhaustive review of these historical/spiritual/
Indeed, with respect to the question of the Old City, the historical facts and the res religiosae (or things involving religion) are rendered legally relevant by the decisions taken at the 1920 San Remo sessions of the Paris Peace Conference, together with the terms of the Mandate for Greater Israel aka Palestine. Notwithstanding the fact that historical, religious or other non-legal considerations may not be considered relevant or sufficient to support a legal claim normally in international law cases, these aspects of the issue of the city of Jerusalem are relevant in evaluating the claims of Israel and the Arab-Palestinians relating to sovereignty over the Old City, just as much or perhaps even more than over the entire State of Israel and the Holy Land, as noted.
YJ Draiman
Fundamentals of the International Legal Rights of the Jewish People and the State of Israel - Palestine aka Greater Israel - YJ Draiman
Fundamentals of the International Legal Rights of the Jewish People and the State of Israel - Palestine aka Greater Israel
Introduction
There is perhaps no area in the world more sensitive or strategic to world security and peace than the Middle East, and arguably no country or city more central to this sensitivity than The Jewish State of Israel its capital and most revered Holy City "Jerusalem".
There are as many opinions on the corresponding issues—even legally speaking—as there are proposed solutions. This is not only true of Israel itself and the territories it liberated and administers, but it extends to the city of Jerusalem and the many different views concerning its legal status. Israel in general and Jerusalem in particular represent unique circumstances and, in many ways, do not fit into the normal legal parameters.
Taking Jerusalem, for example, there is no city anywhere in the world that holds such deep-seated roots of religious and spiritual heritage and emotional and cultural passionate bonds. These deep roots and the potential threats to their sanctity play an extraordinarily vital role in that city’s significance and can seem to "trump" even national and international law norms in terms of relevance.
Why is this so vitally significant?
The Jewish heritage reaches back more than three thousand years, Jerusalem itself having been established perhaps more than 2,000 years before it was captured from the Jebusites by King David about 1,000 BC. The Temple Mount in the Old City (in now so-called "East Jerusalem") is the site of the First and Second Jewish sacred Temples, containing the "Holy of Holies"— the most hallowed of all spiritual sites for the Jews. As regards the whole of the Land, expressed in their own words:
The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. After majority of Jews being forcibly exiled from their land numerous times, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion (Diaspora) and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political and religious freedom.
Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient ancestral homeland.
Jerusalem is mentioned in the Bible by name more than six hundred times in the Old Testament alone, as well as throughout the New Testament, and has always been considered the "capital" for the Jewish people.
The Muslim connection dates back to the oral tradition of Mohammed’s "miraculous night journey" ("Miraj"), in AD. 621, on a "winged creature" from Mecca to the Temple Mount, accompanied by the Angel Gabriel, thus making it—with today’s Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock—for many (though not all ) Muslims, the third holiest site of Islam, after Mecca and Medina (which were formerly developed and occupied by the Jews and expelled by the Muslims). At the same time, even this "night ride", as referenced in verse 1 of Sura 17 of the Koran, does not mention Jerusalem at all, only "the farthest [al-Aqsa] mosque". Since there was no mosque in Jerusalem at that time, the "farthest" mosque cannot have been the one now bearing that name on the Temple Mount in the Old City of ("East") Jerusalem. Still, Islamic tradition holds fast to this claim. In actual fact, early commentators interpreted the further place of worship as heaven. The city of Jerusalem is not once mentioned in the Koran, nor has Jerusalem ever served as the capital of Islam or of Arab-controlled Palestine, under that or any other name.
The Christians date their heritage from the time of Christ, the Jewish "Founder" of their faith, as well as reaching back to take in the entire history of the Jewish people, which was Christ’s own heritage and which Christians regard as their own, mutually with the Jews. For Christians, the Holy Land is "holy" because that is where Jesus Christ was born, grew up, performed His ministry, was crucified, resurrected and ascended from the Mount of Olives, to which He promised to return.
But while the Christians are "at home" in every land in which they choose to dwell, and while the Arabs enjoy jurisdiction over vast areas of territory (twenty-one sovereign Arab States consisting over 5,000 sq. miles), the Jewish people have only one area of territorial “homeland": the small State of Israel, which is less than one percent of the Arab territories of 5 million square miles.
For the Jewish people, Israel is their only national home and Jerusalem their only Holy City and proclaimed "indivisible" capital. The very term Wailing Wall —- as the Western Wall of the Temple was commonly called prior to the 1967. Jewish recapture of the Temple Mount, under Arab control since 1949—indicates the depth of the emotionally charged significance of this most sacred place for the Jewish people. As regards the whole of the Land, in the words of Dr. Chaim Weizmann (later president of the World Zionist Organization):
As to the land that is to be the Jewish land there can be no question. Palestine aka Greater Israel alone, of all the countries in which the Jew has set foot throughout its long history, has an abiding place in his national tradition and a long historical connection.
The recognition of the Jewish people’s singularly ancient historic, religious, political, and cultural link with an ancestral home has more legal significance than it may at first appear, and is easily bypassed in the current heated and polarized debate. These religious and spiritual claims are what have thus far made attempted solutions to territorial and other questions of international law in this area particularly delicate. The real issues are often lacking in clear definition and consensual interpretation of the relevant "law", at times even attributing to it a kind of sui generis (one of a kind, unique or "peculiar") character.
International law, in itself, does not rely on religious or cultural ties but rather on accepted international law norms and standards, which is why the legal recognition of these historical aspects, in a binding international legal instrument, is so highly significant. It is precisely these age-old historic ties that remain the most compelling reason for maintaining sovereignty over all the territory the Jewish people are legally entitled to under international law and treaties, confirmed by the International Court of Justice.
The particular sacredness of this Land to such differing faiths is clearly demonstrated by the ongoing dispute over the governance of the Holy City of Jerusalem, from theVatican to the United Nations, including periodic initiatives to give it violating International law a separate international legal status as a so-called corpus separatum. Indeed, because of the delicate and sensitive nature of these "spiritual" connections, Jerusalem is frequently left out altogether from discussions over other so-called disputed territories such as the "West Bank aka Judea and Samaria" and (earlier) Gaza.
The legal arguments will go on and on, with differing interpretations often even on the same side of the arguments. But the fundamental fact that the historical claims of the Jewish Zionist Organization, based on centuries-old continuous connections between the Jewish people and "Palestine aka Greater Israel", were given recognition in a small town on the Italian Riviera named San Remo, in 1920 which incorporated the 1917 Balfour Declaration and confirmed by the 1920 Treaty of Sevres and Lausanne, thus, adopted and confirmed unequivocally by the terms of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine aka Greater Israel in 1922, takes on enormous significance when questions of territorial rights persist.
The ongoing and never-ending legal arguments and political posturing on both sides of the question of the "Palestine aka Greater Israel" statehood issue will not be resolved in these pages. Yet if the above basic truths with regard to ancestral territory are ignored, all the legal arguments in the world will not bring about an equitable solution. Thus it is important to see in what way(s) this most significant factor of historical ties has been endowed with a legal character and status that undermine Israel’s legitimate rights in its Land as it confronts today’s territorial conflicts.
While there is no way that the complex current political issues, a culmination of centuries of conflict and legal ambiguities, can be adequately dealt with in one brief exposé, one thing is certain: laws may change, perceptions may vary, but historical fact is immutable. Therefore, for the special case of Israel and Arab-Palestine, we need to look at fact rather than opinion or emotions and seek to avoid the promulgation of law that can result from persistent pressures of often misguided, misinformed, fabricated and/or skillfully manipulated public opinion.
Thus our mission here is not to attempt to pronounce legal judgments or to offer legal opinions, where even the best legal minds have not been able to achieve consensus, but rather to proclaim international legal truths in a largely political environment that is too frequently polluted with distortions of the truth and outright untruths and fabrications.
A correlated intent here is to show where Israel’s age-old historic links with the land intersect with legal parameters to give effect to its international legal status in the face of current and often misguided political initiatives.
Accordingly it should be understood from the outset that the following is in no way intended to present itself as an exhaustive coverage of the many-faceted and age-long disputed issues relating to this territory. It is meant primarily as a wakeup call and/or reminder of the fundamental international legal rights of the Jewish people that were conferred beginning at the San Remo Conference in 1920 which incorporated the 1917 Balfour Declaration and that had threatened to all but slip into obscurity in the current debate, despite the fact that these rights have never been rescinded and the UN has no authority to supersede or modify them. There was also an Arab Jewish agreement executed and signed by King Faisal for the Arabs and Chaim Weizmann for the Jews in London on January 3, 1919 and this agreement has not been annulled.
Furthermore, The 1920 San Remo International Conference of The Supreme Allied Powers confirmed the Jewish peoples rights to its historical ancestral land of Israel goin
To accomplish these aims, we have only to revert back to the milestone international legal instrument, the Mandate for Palestine of 1922, which emerged from the 1920 San Remo sessions of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and in effect transformed the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (the “Magna Carta” of the Jewish people) into a legally binding international agreement that changed the course of history forever for the Jewish people worldwide.
Legal Rights of the Jewish People and the State of Israel
Before examining the all-important international legal decisions made at San Remo in 1920, it is useful to trace back a few years to get a sense of the legal and political environment that followed in the wake of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, leading up to these significant legal and diplomatic events that both emerged from historical roots and went on to shape Jewish contemporary history.
The 1917 Balfour Declaration
The history of the international legal turning point for the Jewish people begins in 1917. World War I was exposing a growing need of Jews dispersed all over the world to have a "national home", and in 1917 Prime Minister David Lloyd George expressed to the British War Cabinet that he "was convinced that a Jewish National Home was an historic necessity and that every opportunity should be granted to reconstitute the Jewish State". This ultimately led to Great Britain issuing, on 2 November 1917, a political declaration known as the "Balfour Declaration". This Declaration stated that:
"His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country".
As confirmed by Lord Balfour to Prime Minister Lloyd George:
Our justification for our policy is that we regard Palestine as being absolutely exceptional; that we consider the question of the Jews outside Palestine as one of world importance and that we conceive the Jews to have an historic claim to a home in their ancient land; provided that a home can be given them without either dispossessing or oppressing the present inhabitants.
This position was shared by the other Principal Allied and Associated Powers who, in the words of Lord Balfour, "had committed themselves to the Zionist program which inevitably excluded numerical self-determination". Still, a declaration is not law, and a British declaration is not international. So while it is arguable that certain obligations of the Balfour Declaration were attributable to the British Government, it was neither applicable to other States nor a binding instrument under international law.
U.S. President Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” and the League of Nations
To be continued
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