Israel as Legal entity
What is most insidious in the ongoing disinformation campaign to delegitimise the State of Israel by academics and demagogues alike, is the presentation of small untruths which, if they go unchallenged, become part of a larger false narrative re. Israel and the “Palestinians”. They become accepted by an uncritical readership as historical fact.
In an opinion piece in Al Jazeera, John Bell, a former United Nations Political Adviser to the Personal Representative of the UN Secretary-General for southern Lebanon, states that “In the case of Mandate Palestine, the division into two states was never completed and, instead, the matter settled into chronic conflict.”
This, of course, is quite inaccurate.
That is to say, insofar as a legal determination under international law had been made, the newly-created State of Israel accepted the borders given it while the Arabs initiated a war of “annihilation”.
In reply, as David Singer so succinctly stated, “Transjordan became an independent sovereign State in 78% of Mandate Palestine on 22 March 1946 and Israel an independent sovereign State in the remaining 22% of Palestine on 15 May 1948.” (Singer).
Much as he would like to revise or bypass history, the facts for Bell will always remain unchanged.
The San Remo Conference of 1920 drafted the map of the Middle East as we know it today. It was later confirmed in the Mandate for Palestine, 1922, and approved by the 52 members of the League of Nations to highlight and protect the pre-existing rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.
If, as Israel’s “peace partner” the PA and the chattering anti-Israel lobby would have you believe, the creation of the State of Israel was always an illegal creation in the first instance, then by that same token, the exclusively Arab states of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan are illegitimate entities as well.
On the other hand, if the above-mentioned Arab states are legal, then so too is the creation of the State of Israel because it too arose out of the same 1920 disposition of the Middle East territories previously held by the defeated Ottoman Empire.
Those who would see Israel de-legitimised and/or dismembered claim that the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers had no authority in the first place to create a new political entity in the geographical area of Palestine. That line of thinking would prove problematic for countries like Serbia, Bosnia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland which were created in the wake of WWI by that same Supreme Council………….
Enshrined in international law and supported by both charters from the League of Nations AND the United nations, the modern State of Israel has an unequivocal/unambiguous legal claim to the Land of Israel in the 3 % allocated it by the San Remo Conference way back in 1920.
And it is this anchoring in the internationally acknowledged and unequivocal legality of the right of the Jewish State to exist dating back to 1920, that so bothers those who would like to see the confounding of the Jewish State.
What is most insidious in the ongoing disinformation campaign to delegitimise the State of Israel by academics and demagogues alike, is the presentation of small untruths which, if they go unchallenged, become part of a larger false narrative re. Israel and the “Palestinians”. They become accepted by an uncritical readership as historical fact.
In an opinion piece in Al Jazeera, John Bell, a former United Nations Political Adviser to the Personal Representative of the UN Secretary-General for southern Lebanon, states that “In the case of Mandate Palestine, the division into two states was never completed and, instead, the matter settled into chronic conflict.”
This, of course, is quite inaccurate.
That is to say, insofar as a legal determination under international law had been made, the newly-created State of Israel accepted the borders given it while the Arabs initiated a war of “annihilation”.
In reply, as David Singer so succinctly stated, “Transjordan became an independent sovereign State in 78% of Mandate Palestine on 22 March 1946 and Israel an independent sovereign State in the remaining 22% of Palestine on 15 May 1948.” (Singer).
Much as he would like to revise or bypass history, the facts for Bell will always remain unchanged.
The San Remo Conference of 1920 drafted the map of the Middle East as we know it today. It was later confirmed in the Mandate for Palestine, 1922, and approved by the 52 members of the League of Nations to highlight and protect the pre-existing rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.
If, as Israel’s “peace partner” the PA and the chattering anti-Israel lobby would have you believe, the creation of the State of Israel was always an illegal creation in the first instance, then by that same token, the exclusively Arab states of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan are illegitimate entities as well.
On the other hand, if the above-mentioned Arab states are legal, then so too is the creation of the State of Israel because it too arose out of the same 1920 disposition of the Middle East territories previously held by the defeated Ottoman Empire.
Those who would see Israel de-legitimised and/or dismembered claim that the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers had no authority in the first place to create a new political entity in the geographical area of Palestine. That line of thinking would prove problematic for countries like Serbia, Bosnia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland which were created in the wake of WWI by that same Supreme Council………….
Enshrined in international law and supported by both charters from the League of Nations AND the United nations, the modern State of Israel has an unequivocal/unambiguous legal claim to the Land of Israel in the 3 % allocated it by the San Remo Conference way back in 1920.
And it is this anchoring in the internationally acknowledged and unequivocal legality of the right of the Jewish State to exist dating back to 1920, that so bothers those who would like to see the confounding of the Jewish State.
