Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Jewish People Provided With Exclusive Political Rights to Palestine

Howard Grief deals with someone who raises a point I find anti-Zionists raising in comments sections wars:

...I am a bit baffled by your principal point that there is nothing in the Mandate for Palestine that explicitly gives the Jewish People exclusive national or collective political rights to Palestine.

For that matter, you may also say the same thing about the Mandate for Syria and the Draft Mandate for Mesopotamia concerning the explicit lack of identifying who were the national beneficiaries of those Mandates. You appear to take both sides of the question in apparent contradiction...you say that “the existence of a grant of collective political or national rights [to the Jewish People] is not clear. Nowhere in the Mandate for Palestine does it expressly or explicitly say that the WWI Allies are granting the ‘Jewish People of the world’ [you should say here ‘World Jewry’] exclusive collective political or national rights to Palestine. But it suggests it.”

...May I first point out that the country of Mandated Palestine was created by the Principal Allied Powers for one reason only: to be the Jewish National Home and future independent Jewish State. It was not created to award national rights to the local Arab inhabitants of Palestine in any part of the country...It follows directly from the Allied decision to create Palestine to implement the Balfour Declaration in conjunction with Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which is the basis of the San Remo Resolution upon which the Mandate for Palestine was constructed...
The only rights that individual non-Jews and existing non-Jewish religious communities in Palestine were granted under the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Resolution and the Mandate for Palestine were “civil and religious rights” but definitely not national and collective political rights. This should be evident to you upon reading and examining the aforementioned documents as well as the minutes of the San Remo Peace Conference for the two sessions of April 24 and April 25 1920. No tortured interpretation is required to realize what was the intent of the Principal Allied Powers in creating Palestine.

While the Jewish People received exclusive national rights to Palestine, the Arabs, on the other hand, were given exclusive national rights to Syria and Mesopotamia though, as already noted, this was never specifically mentioned. Such rights were also extended to the states of the Arabian Peninsula. There was no injustice done to Arabs since they were given the lion’s share of the former Ottoman territories and actually took over land meant for other nations such as the Kurdish People who were deprived of their own state though the Treaty of Sèvres provided for it.

...Further evidence that Palestine was meant only for the Jewish People is furnished by the Smuts Resolution, the precursor of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Weizmann-Feisal Agreement, the Franco-British Boundary Convention of December 23, 1920 and the Anglo-American Convention of December 5, 1924 respecting the Mandate for Palestine as confirmed by the negotiations or preparatory work that took place.

...However, the British Government subsequently sabotaged the Mandate and deviously pretended that national rights to Palestine were also given to Arabs which was absolutely false. As you well know there is no mention of Arabs directly or indirectly as a national community in the Mandate Charter which is not surprising since it was drawn up at the outset by both British and Zionist delegates. In point of fact, the first draft of the Mandate Charter were formulated by the Zionists themselves.

In my opinion, the evidence for exclusive Jewish national rights to Palestine as originally conceived, is overwhelming, a fact that bears no doubt or ambiguity as you seem to think.

(from a letter, a copy of which was conveyed to me)

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