A Mandate for Israel

National Interest, The, Fall, 1993 by Douglas J. Feith

Note that the creator of the trust--the settlor or grantor, in legal parlance--is not the League of Nations, but the Principal Allied Powers. And it is those Powers, and not the League, which selected Britain to serve as Mandatory (i.e., trustee).

The second clause of the preamble reads:

[T]he Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might 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....

Hence, the Mandate explicitly adopted the Balfour Declaration and quoted its essence in full. In other words, what the Mandate mandated was implementation of Britain's pro-Zionist wartime pledge. When presenting the Mandate to the League of Nations, the British representative, Balfour, declared:

Remember that a mandate is a self-imposed limitation by the conquerors on the sovereignty which they obtained over conquered territories. It is imposed by the Allied and Associated Powers on themselves in the interests of what they conceived to be the general welfare of mankind....[T]he League of Nations is not the author of the policy, but its instrument....

Now, it is clear from this statement, that both those who hope and those who fear that what, I believe, has been called the Balfour Declaration is going to suffer substantial modifications, are in error. The fears are not justified; the hopes are not justified .... The general lines of policy stand and must stand.

The third clause of the preamble is especially significant:

[R]ecognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country...

Here the drafters highlight, as the grounds or source of the Jewish people's rights in Palestine, "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine." The Mandate contains no granting clause by which the Allies or the League say they are giving the Jews a right to a state or homeland in Palestine. Instead the Mandate recognizes pre-existing Jewish rights, rights that flow from Jewish history. The drafters pointedly used the word "reconstituting" to describe the building of the Jewish national home in Palestine. As we have seen, the British government stressed that the Allies obtained certain rights based on conquest, but it did not assert that the Jewish people's rights in Palestine derived from those of the Allies.

Traditional international law would have supported the Allies' right, as victors, to dispose of Palestine as they saw fit. It is noteworthy, however, that Britain and the League took pains to ensure that their "legislative" decision in favor of the Jewish national home was associated harmoniously with the Jews' claims of historical ties to the Land of Israel. They wanted to make clear that the new positive law on Palestine had a definite moral and historical foundation. In this era of Wilsonian idealism, there were those who believed that Zionism legitimated the British administration of Palestine more than the other way around. As Elizabeth Monroe, a British historian with little sympathy for Zionism, put it: "the British climbed on the the shoulders of the Zionists in order to get a British Palestine." Moreover, British officials believed that the practical success of the Jewish national home policy hinged on the Jews' confidence that their rights in Palestine were not a gift from anyone. The British government's 1922 White Paper on Palestine made this point: