The San Remo Resolution of 1920 on Palestine combined the Balfour Declaration of 1917 as international treaty with Article 22 of the League Covenant.

The San Remo Resolution of 1920 on Palestine combined the Balfour Declaration of 1917 as international treaty with Article 22 of the League Covenant. 

This meant that the general provisions of Article 22 applied to the Jewish people exclusively, who would set up their home and state in all of Palestine aka The Land of Israel. There was no intention whatsoever to apply Article 22 to the Arabs of the country, as was mistakenly concluded by the Palestine Royal Commission which relied on that article of the Covenant as the legal basis to illegally justify the partition of Palestine, apart from the other reasons it gave. The proof of the applicability of Article 22 to the Jewish people, including not only those in Palestine at the time, but those who were expected to arrive in large numbers in the future, is found in the Smuts Resolution, which became Article 22 of the Covenant. It specifically names Palestine as one of the countries to which this article would apply. There was no doubt that when Palestine was named in the context of Article 22, it was linked exclusively to the Jewish National Home, as set down in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, a fact everyone was aware of at the time, including the representatives of the Arab national movement, as evidenced by the agreement between Emir Feisal and Dr. Chaim Weizmann dated January 3, 1919 as well as an important letter sent by the Emir to future US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter dated March 3, 1919. In that letter, Feisal characterized as “moderate and proper” the Zionist proposals presented by Nahum Sokolow and Weizmann to the Council of Ten at the Paris Peace Conference on February 27, 1919, which called for the development of all of Palestine into a Jewish commonwealth with extensive boundaries. The argument later made by Arab leaders that the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine were incompatible with Article 22 of the Covenant is totally undermined by the fact that the Smuts Resolution – the precursor of Article 22 – specifically included Palestine within its legal framework.

The San Remo Resolution of 1920 on Palestine became Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 which was intended to end the war with Turkey, but though this treaty was signed by all the Supreme Allied Powers including the U.S., was not ratified by the Turkish National Government of Kemal Ataturk, the Resolution retained its validity as an independent act of international law when it was inserted into the Preamble of the Mandate for Palestine and confirmed by 52 states. The San Remo Resolution of 1920 (and the Faisal Weizmann Agreement of January 1919) is the base document upon which the Mandate was constructed and to which it had to conform. It is therefore the pre-eminent foundation document of the revived State of Israel and the crowning achievement of pre-state Zionism. It has been accurately described as the Magna Carta of the Jewish people. It is the best proof that the whole country of Palestine aka The Land of Israel belong exclusively to the Jewish people under international law.

The Mandate for Palestine implemented both the 1917 Balfour Declaration and Article 22 of the League Covenant, i.e. implemented some of the San Remo Resolution of 1920 (and the Faisal Weizmann Agreement of January 1919). All four of these acts were building blocks in the legal structure that was created for the purpose of bringing about the re-establishment of an independent sovereign Jewish state. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 followed Napoleon 1799 intent to reconstitute The Jewish National Home in Palestine; in essence stated the principle or object of a Jewish state. The San Remo Resolution of 1920 gave it the stamp of international law. The Mandate furnished all the details and means for the realization of the sovereign Jewish state. As noted, Britain’s chief obligation as Mandatory, Trustee and Tutor was the creation of the appropriate political, administrative and economic conditions to secure the sovereign Jewish state. All 28 articles of the Mandate were directed to this objective, including those articles that did not specifically mention the Jewish National Home. The Mandate for Palestine created a right of return for the Jewish people to Palestine aka The Land of Israel and the right to establish settlements and communities on the land throughout the country of Palestine in order to recreate and reestablish the envisaged Jewish state.

YJ Draiman

Defending Israel's Divine and Legal Rights to Jerusalem and Israel

Defending Israel's Divine and Legal Rights to Jerusalem and Israel

It is a known fact that Israel has Divine and legal rights to retain a united Jerusalem as its capital, there is a sense that its claim is being challenged more than ever due to Arab disinformation and falsification of history. It is further supported that in addition to the divine rights and historical rights of the Jewish people to Jerusalem and the continued habitation that were voiced in the 19th century. There are consistent archaeological finds that verify the Jewish eternal connection to Jerusalem and the rest of the Land of Israel. There is a whole new layer of legal rights that Israel acquired in modern times that need to be fully elaborated upon. When territories are captured and or liberated in a war, the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of the conflict directly affect the legal rights of the two sides, upon its termination (Jordan was an illegal occupier of Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria). The UN Charter has Article 51 which applies to self defense which is what Israel reacted in defense of its citizens in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973; including the consistent terror attacks by the Arabs since 1948 and continues through today. It seems that many choose to ignore the April 1920 San Remo Conference Resolution by the Supreme Allied Powers which incorporated the Balfour Declaration as international law granting Palestine as the reconstituted National Home of the Jewish people with no restrictions on boundary (The British took away over three quarters of the territory and gave it to the local Arabs as the new Arab state of Jordan and expelled the Jews). At the same time the Arabs were allocated over 6 million square miles of territory with a wealth of oil reserves. If you question and contest Jewish state borders and sovereignty it stands to questions the borders and sovereignty of the 22 Arab states that were at the same time by the same Supreme Allied Powers. To add to this, is the tragic expulsion of over a million Jewish families from Arab countries, the Arabs confiscated all their assets homes and over 47,000 sq. mi. of Jewish owned Real estate for over 2,600 years (valued in the trillions of dollars) and those expelled Jewish families from Arab countries were resettled in Israel and to date comprise over half the population. There is also the fact of possession is nine tenths of the law.  YJ Draiman


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Author:
Dore Gold
Publication:
Israel's Rights as a Nation-State in International Diplomacy
Schwebel wrote his article, which was entitled "What Weight to Conquest," in response to a statement by then Secretary of State William Rogers that Israel was only entitled to "insubstantial alterations" in the pre-1967 lines. The Nixon administration had also hardened U.S. policy on Jerusalem as reacted in its statements and voting patterns in the UN Security Council. Schwebel strongly disagreed with this approach: he wrote that the pre-war lines were not sacrosanct, for the 1967 lines were not an international border. Formally, they were only armistice lines from 1949. As he noted, the armistice agreement itself did not preclude the territorial claims of the parties beyond those lines. Significantly, he explained that when territories are captured in a war, the circumstances surrounding the outbreak of the conflict directly affect the legal rights of the two sides, upon its termination. Israel defended itself against Jordan's artillery that had opened fire and re-pounding civilian neighborhoods in Jerusalem which is an armed attack, despite repeated warnings issued by Israel.

Two facts from 1967 stood out that influenced his thinking:
First, Israel had acted in the Six-Day War in the lawful exercise of its right of self-defense. Those familiar with the events that led to its outbreak recall that Egypt was the party responsible for the initiation of hostilities, through a series of steps that included the closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and the proclamation of a blockade on Eilat, an act that Foreign Minister Abba Eban would characterize as the ring of the first shot of the war. Along Israel's eastern front, Jordan's artillery had opened fire and re-pounding civilian neighborhoods in Jerusalem, despite repeated warnings issued by Israel.
Given this background, Israel had not captured territory as a result of aggression, but rather because it had come under armed attack. In fact, the Soviet Union had tried to have Israel labeled as the aggressor in the UN Security Council on June 14, 1967, and then in the UN General Assembly on July 4, 1967. But Moscow completely failed. At the Security Council it was outvoted 11-4. Meanwhile at the General Assembly, 88 states voted against or abstained on the first vote of a proposed Soviet draft (only 32 states supported it). It was patently clear to the majority of UN members that Israel had waged a defensive war.6
A second element in Schwebel's thinking was the fact Jordan's claim to legal title over the territories it had lost to Israel in the Six-Day War was very problematic. The Jordanian invasion of the West Bank - and Jerusalem - nineteen years earlier in 1948 had been unlawful. As a result, Jordan did not gain legal rights in the years that followed, given the legal principle, that Schwebel stressed, according to which no right can be born of an unlawful act (ex injuria jus non oritur). It should not have come as a surprise that Jordan's claim to sovereignty over the West Bank was not recognized by anyone, except for Pakistan and Britain. Even the British would not recognize the Jordanian claim in Jerusalem itself.
Thus, by comparing Jordan's illegal invasion of the West Bank to Israel's legal exercise of its right of self-defense, Schwebel concluded that "Israel has better title" in the territory of what once was the Palestine Mandate than either of the Arab states with which it had been at war. He specifically stated that Israel had better legal title to "the whole of Jerusalem."
Schwebel makes reference to UN Security Council Resolution 242 from November 22, 1967, which over the years would become the main source for all of Israel's peace e orts, from the 1979 Egyptian Israeli Treaty of Peace to the 1993 Oslo Accords. In its famous withdrawal clause, Resolution 242 did not call for a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from all the territories it liberated and captured in the Six-Day War. There was no efort to re-establish the status quo ante, which, as noted earlier, was the product of a previous act of aggression by Arab armies in 1948.
As the U.S. ambassador to the UN in 1967, Arthur Goldberg, pointed out in 1980, Resolution 242 did not even mention Jerusalem "and this omission was deliberate." Goldberg made the point, reacting the policy of the Johnson administration for whom he served, that he never described Jerusalem as "occupied territory," though this changed under President Nixon.7 What Goldberg wrote about Resolution 242 had added weight, given the fact that he previously had served as a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Indeed, among the leading jurists in international law and diplomacy, Schwebel was clearly not alone. He was joined by Julius Stone, the great Australian legal scholar, who reached the same conclusions. He added that UN General Assembly Resolution 181 from 1947 (also known as the Partition Plan) did not undermine Israel's subsequent claims in Jerusalem. True, Resolution 181 envisioned that Jerusalem and its environs would become a corpus separatum, or a separate international entity for 10 years and after ten years its citizens can vote and pass a referendum that establishes the status of Jerusalem, which the Jewish people voted that Unified Jerusalem is The Capital of Israel. But Resolution 181 was only a recommendation of the General Assembly. It was rejected by the Arab states forcibly, who invaded the nascent State of Israel in 1948.
Ultimately, the UN's corpus separatum never came into being in any case, which makes that resolution null and void. The UN did not protect the Jewish population of Jerusalem from invading Arab armies. Given this history, it was not surprising that Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, announced on December 3, 1949, that Resolution 181's references to Jerusalem were "null and void," thereby anticipating Stone's legal analysis years later.8
There was also Prof. Elihu Lauterpacht of Cambridge University, who for a time served as legal advisor of Australia and as a judge ad hoc of the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Lauterpacht argued that Israel's liberation and reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 was legally valid. 9 He explained that the last state which had control and sovereignty as occupier over Jerusalem was the Ottoman Empire, which ruled it from 1517 to 1917.
After the First World War, the Ottoman Empire formally renounced its sovereignty over Jerusalem as well as all its former territories south of what became modern Turkey in the Treaty of Sevres from August 1920. This renunciation was confirmed by the Turkish Republic as well in the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923. According to Lauterpacht, the rights of sovereignty and control in Jerusalem were vested with the Principal Allied and Associated Powers, which transferred them to the League of Nations with instructions to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in Palestine (with no restrictions) as stated in the 1917 Balfour Declaration. There was no mention of a new Arab state in Palestine. The Arabs received over six million sq. mi. of territory after WWI. The British violated the treaty and allocated over 77% of Palestine to the Arabs as the new State of transJordan, which is all the territory east of the Jordan River.
But with the dissolution of the League of Nations, and the British abandoning their responsibility and withdrawal from Mandatory Palestine, along with the failure of the UN to create a corpus separatum or a special international regime for Jerusalem, as had been intended according to the 1947 Partition Plan, which was only a non-binding recommendation that the Arabs rejected. Lauterpacht concluded that sovereignty had been put in suspense or in abeyance. In other words, by 1948 there was what he called "a vacancy of sovereignty" in Jerusalem.
It might be asked if the acceptance by the pre-state Jewish Agency of Resolution 181 constituted a conscious renunciation of Jewish claims to Jerusalem back in 1947. However, according to the resolution, the duration of the special international regime for Jerusalem would be "in the first instance for a period of ten years." The resolution envisioned a referendum of the residents of the city at that point in which they would express "their wishes as to possible modifications of the regime of the city."10 The Jewish leadership interpreted the corpus separatum as an interim arrangement that could be replaced, which from a legal stand point is valid. They believed that Jewish residents could opt for citizenship in the Jewish state in the meantime. Moreover, they hoped that the referendum would lead to the corpus seperatum being joined to the State of Israel after ten years; and that is what occurred de-facto. 11
Who then could acquire sovereign rights in Jerusalem given the "vacancy of sovereignty" that Lauterpacht described? Certainly, the UN could not assume a role, given what happened to Resolution 181. Lauterpacht's answer was that Israel filled "the vacancy in sovereignty" in areas where the Israel Defense Forces had to operate in order to save Jerusalem's Jewish population from destruction and/or ethnic cleansing. The same principle applied again in 1967, when Jordanian forces opened fire on Israeli neighborhoods and the Israel Defense Forces entered the eastern parts of Jerusalem, including its Old City, in self-defense.
A fourth legal authority to contribute to this debate over the legal rights of Israel was Prof. Eugene Rostow, the former dean of Yale Law School and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the Johnson administration. Rostow's point of departure for analyzing the issue of Israel's rights was that the Mandate for Palestine, which specifically referred to "the historic connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" providing "the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."
These rights applied to Jerusalem as well, for the Mandate did not separate Jerusalem from the other territory that was to become part of the Jewish national home.
Rostow contrasts the other League of Nations mandates with the mandate for Palestine. Whereas the mandates for Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon served as trusts for the indigenous populations, the language of the Palestine Mandate was entirely different. It supported the national rights of the Jewish people while protecting only the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in British Mandatory Palestine.12 It should be added that the Palestine Mandate was a legal instrument in the form of a binding international treaty under instruction by the Supreme Allied Powers, between the League of Nations, on the one hand, and Britain as the mandatory power as trustee, on the other.
Rostow argued that the mandate was not terminated in 1947. He explained that Jewish legal rights to a national home in this territory of Palestine aka The Land of Israel, which were embedded in British Mandatory Palestine as international law, survived the dissolution of the League of Nations and were preserved by the United Nations in Article 80 of the UN Charter.13 Clearly, after considering Rostow's arguments, Israel was well-positioned to assert its rights in Jerusalem and fill "the vacancy of sovereignty" that Lauterpacht had described.                                                                          (Also See Julius Stone: http://jewishinstituteprogress.blogspot.com/2016/04/international-law-and-arab-israel.html) (And Howard Grief: http://israelinternationallaw.blogspot.com/2015/12/howard-grief-legal-foundation-borders.html
Publisher:
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), Israel