A Mandate for Israel

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

Meanwhile, representatives of the leading Arab families of Palestine sent Churchill a memorandum of their own. Though they rejected the notion that the Arabs of Palestine are a nationality different from that of the Arab people in general, they organized themselves politically to fit within the "imperialist" boundaries they hoped to erase. Hence, it was in the name of the Palestinian Arab Congress that they wrote to Churchill declaring the Balfour Declaration invalid, stating that "Palestine belongs legally to the Arabs" and contending not only that the Jews have no rights in the land, but that they have no rights at all as a national group: "[T]hey have no separate political or lingual existence." The Arab leaders creatively used the phenomenon of antisemitism as an argument against Zionism:

If Russia and Poland, with their spacious countries, were unable to tolerate them, how could Europe expect Palestine to welcome them...[W]ill the Jew, on coming to Palestine, change his skin and lose all those qualities which have hitherto made him an object of dislike to the nations?

The memorandum invoked the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion as evidence of Jewish "pernicious motives." Finally, it denied that Palestine is a distinct national homeland and insisted on independence for a single national entity for the Arabs: "[T]he Arabs are convinced that this unnatural partitioning of their lands must one day disappear....Palestine should not be separated from her sister States."(2)

Notwithstanding the pleas of his various correspondents, Churchill met with Abdullah in Jerusalem and, without the participation of the Zionists, the two men struck a deal by which Eastern Palestine was, at least temporarily closed to Jewish settlement, excluded from the Mandate's Jewish national home provisions, and put under an administration to be headed by Abdullah, subject to supervision by the British High Commissioner for Palestine. Churchill took pains to clarify that his government was "constituting Trans-Jordania Arab province of Palestine." In return, Abdullah pledged to keep his hands off French Syria and to support the Mandate, which meant suppressing anti-Zionist activity: another land-for-peace deal that failed to produce peace.

The agreement with Abdullah raised legal problems because Trans-Jordan is in Palestine. The Mandate required, in Palestine, the encouragement of "close settlement by Jews" and the establishment of a Jewish national home. Churchill recognized that Trans-Jordan could not legally be transformed into an Arab emirate closed to the Jews unless the Mandate were amended. His staff urged him to finesse the problem by asserting that the necessary authority inhered in the famous Balfour Declaration proviso about protecting the "civil and religious rights" of the non-Jewish communities. But Churchill rejected the ploy and insisted on a formal amendment. Thus, in the Spring of 1921, came into being Article 25 of the Palestine Mandate, which declares:

In the territories lying between the Jordan [River] and the eastern boundary of Palestine...the Mandatory shall be entitled, with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations, to postpone or withhold application of such provisions of this mandate as he may consider inapplicable to the existing local conditions....