The recent request by Palestinian Arabs for the Arab League’s assistance in preparing a legal brief against the British government for issuing the Balfour Declaration almost 100 years ago, is another blatant attempt to publicize one of the most persistent canards against the Jewish state--that Israel stole Palestinian Arab land. [1]
The late Edward Said, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Palestinian Arab activist, postulated that the underlying cause of “the conflict between the two peoples has always been about possession of and sovereignty over the land... It is by no means an exaggeration to say that the establishment of the Israel as a state in 1948 occurred partly because the Zionists acquired control of most of the territory of Palestine, and partly because they had already won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representations, rhetoric, and images were at issue.” [2]
Palestinian Arab activist Mazin Qumsiyeh, a professor at Bethlehem University, goes even further in accusing Israel of stealing “most of the land and now controls some 93 percent of the land of Palestine. Before the British invasion and the Balfour Declaration, native and Zionist Jews collectively owned only 2 percent of Palestine.” [3]
Not to be out done in his criticism of Israel is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who charges Israel with “devouring Palestinian farms and homes in the West Bank in ways that are ugly, brutal, selfish and deceitful, so much worse than its supporters will ever admit.” [4]
Exacerbating the problem is that Israelis are viewed as infidels who seized control of dar el-Islam, sacred Muslim land. Their dominion over Islamic holy sites presents a risk to the holiness of these sites, arousing the religious emotions of many Muslims. As a result, Israelis are seen as part of Islam’s historical battle against heretics, principally those attempting to conquer Jerusalem and the land of Israel. [5]
A number of Israeli leaders have ridiculed this proposed law suit. Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Avi Dichter wondered “If PA President Abu Mazen can sue Great Britain on the Balfour Declaration from 99 years ago, then who is next in line, the Egyptian Pharaoh?” Perhaps the charge could read: “You sent the Jews out of Egypt 3,500 years [ago] and since then there has been only trouble in the land of Israel.”
Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan facetiously advised the Palestinian Arabs to consider suing G-d for promising Abraham in the book of Genesis, Bereshit, that he would give the Land of Israel to his descendants. [6]
Given the attempts to distort Israel’s historic, legal and moral right to the land of Israel, it is imperative to tell the truth and restate the legal and moral justification for the re-establishment of the Jewish state as well as the legal rights of other populations. Read on.
San Remo Conference: Where Israel Was Born: “The Magna Carta of the Zionists.”
At the San Remo Conference in San Remo, Italy in April 1920, the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers, Britain, France, Italy and Japan met to define the precise boundaries of the lands they had conquered at the end of the First World War. As part of a broad peace agreement, the Council decided that the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, would be incorporated in The Treaty of Peace with Turkey.
The Balfour Declaration, sent by British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour in a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, on November 2 read: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may 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.” [7]
The government chose to address the declaration to Rothschild, who held no official position in the English Zionist Federation or in the World Zionist Organization, rather than to the leading Zionist Jewish leaders in Britain, because he had the most “potent name In Jewry.” [8]
In his response, Lord Rothschild thanked Balfour on November 4, 1917 that “I can assure you that the gratitude of ten millions of people will be yours, for the British government has opened up, by their message, a prospect of safety and comfort to large masses of people who are in need of it. I dare say,” he added, “that you have been informed that already in many parts of Russia renewed persecution has broken out.” [9]
Why the British Supported the Balfour Declaration
What precipitated British support? In the autumn if 1917, the British frantically wanted Russian Jews to urge their government to revive Russia’s deteriorating war effort, and believed a future Jewish Palestine would be a compelling incentive for them to act. On October 24, 1917, Balfour told the War Cabinet: “The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America, as, indeed, all over the world, now appeared to be favourable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America.” It did inspire American Jews, especially those born in Russia, to volunteer to fight in Palestine against the Turks as part of the British Army. [10]
On September 20, 1918, Balfour explained the unique nature of Zionism: “Zionism differs in kind from ordinary philanthropic efforts and that it appeals to different motives. If it succeeds, it will do a great spiritual and material work for the Jews, but not for them alone…..It is, among other things, a serious endeavor to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. Surely, for this if for no other reason, it should receive our support.” [11]
“The ultimate end,” of British support, as Lord L.S. Amery a leading Conservative politician and Cabinet Minister recorded in his diary on July 1928, “is to make Palestine the centre of a western influence, using Jews as we have used the Scots, to carry English ideal through the Middle East and not merely to make an artificial oriental Hebrew enclave in oriental country. Secondly that we wish Palestine in some way or other to remain within the framework of the British Empire….” [12]
Though the Balfour Declaration had been approved by the U.S., France and Italy, Britain alone had granted the declaration, and the British Government would decide whether the national home would be the means to establish a Jewish state. [13]
When on July 24, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George accepted a British Mandate for Palestine, he informed the San Remo Conference that the responsibility of governing Palestine “would not be rendered less difficult by the fact that it was to be the national home of the Jews, who were an intelligent race but not easy to govern.” Recognition had thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with the land of Israel and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home there. [14]
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis believed the San Remo Resolution marked a new chapter in the Zionist movement: “The work of the great [Theodore] Herzl was completed at San Remo… (the nations of the world) have done all that they could do. The rest lies with us.” [15]
Turkey and the Holy Land
Turkey yielded jurisdiction over the land which it had ruled from 1517 to 1917 including the Holy Land. Israel and two dozen other countries were created from the states of the former Ottoman Caliphate. The Ottoman Empire had been the home many peoples: Albanians, Greeks, Slavs, Copts, Armenians, Maronites, Alawis, Druze, Kurds, Arabs and Jews. For centuries, Jews lived throughout the Ottoman Empire including Constantinople, Salonika, Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, Baghdad, Basra, Tiberias, Hevron, Tsfat, Jaffa, Gaza and Jerusalem. [16]
For Christians, even those who spoke Arabic, the Holy Land was "Palestine," which as Allen Hertz, formerly senior advisor in the Privy Council Office serving Canada's Prime Minister and the federal cabinet, points out was “for centuries nothing more than an historical reference i.e. a fond memory of the early seventh century CE, when Palestine was still a province of the Roman-Byzantine Empire, where Christianity was then the official faith. Thus, a visit to the Holy Land prompted Mark Twain to observe (1869): Palestine is no more of this work-day world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition -- it is dream-land." [17]
Throughout this time, European and American maps of “Palestine” included territory east of the Jordan River. From the late fourth century CE until 1946, "Palestine" included part or all of the land of what is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica correctly noted that "Western Palestine" was separated by the Jordan River from "Eastern Palestine" and stretched to the beginning of the Arabian Desert. In other words, there was never any single Turkish administrative entity that clearly corresponded with Western Palestine. [18] Palestine residents were generally referred to as “Southern Syrians.” [19]
Political scientist Gabriel Scheinmann explains that Syria, Libya, and Palestine were given names used during Roman times. Libya reappeared in 1934, when the Italians combined Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fezzan. The first time “Syria” had been used as the name of a state followed the establishment of the French mandate. Iraq had been a medieval province of the caliphate, while “Lebanon” referred to a mountain and “Jordan” to a river.
Significantly, these the borders were not created by topography and did not take demography into account. A large Kurdish population—totaling as many as 25 million—was divided between four states: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Shiite Arabs were split between Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia. The Alawites, a heterodox Shiite Arab sect, reside today along the northern Lebanese, Syrian, and southwestern Turkish coasts.
The Druze were spread between Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. Lebanon, theoretically a Christian stronghold, comprised large populations of Sunni and Shiites, and Alawites and Druze. Sunni Arabs, who formed the dominant population of the Middle East, were divided into numerous states. Pockets of Turkmen, Circassians, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Chaldeans were isolated throughout. [20]
Before Jews began referring to themselves as Israelis in 1948, the term Palestine applied almost entirely to institutions founded established by Jews: The Jerusalem Post, founded in 1932, was called The Palestine Post; Bank Leumi L’Israel, incorporated in 1902, was called the Anglo Palestine Company until 1948; Israel Electric Corporation, founded in 1923 by Pinhas Rutenberg, was initially called The Palestine Electric Company; and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1936, was originally called the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. [21]
The San Remo Resolution stated that the “Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the [Balfour]declaration originally made on November 2, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people….” [22]
Trusteeships and the Right of Self-Determination
The League of Nations handed international trusteeships to the French and British to prepare those liberated from the Turks for independence. Once the indigenous populations demonstrated their ability to assume control, the mandates were supposed to be self-terminating. [23]
Jewish self-determination thus became part of a process that decolonized the Middle East leading to Jewish and Arab independence. Repeated associations of Israel with colonialism – an ahistorical canard that erases the millennia-long association of Jews with the Land of Israel as an indigenous people – ignores the benefit that Zionism actually brought to the Arabs through the process of decolonization. Though the Turkish Government did not ratify the treaty signed at Sèvres, France on August 10, 1920, it later agreed to renounce its sovereignty over Palestine, which 
Winston Churchill in the House of Commons on May 23, 1939: “To whom was the pledge of the Balfour Declaration made? It was made to world Jewry...”
the Allies would administer as they determined by the treaty of Lausanne, ratified on September 28, 1923. [24]
Therefore the decision at San Remo and the treaty with Turkey agreed to “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” under the terms of the Balfour Declaration. The Balfour Declaration accepted the position that there is a Jewish people and spoke of establishing a national home “for the Jewish people.” Thus the Declaration embraced a basic premise of Zionist ideology, and went beyond providing protection for the small community in Palestine by expanding the promise to Jews throughout the world. Winston Churchill made this point in the House of Commons on May 23, 1939: “To whom was the pledge of the Balfour Declaration made? It was made to world Jewry...” [25]
Allen Z. Hertz contends that those drafting the Balfour Declaration and the San Remo declaration didn’t use the words “establishment of Palestine as the national home for the Jewish people” because the British government “never intended to give the Jewish People all of historic Palestine i.e. the whole territory both east and west of the Jordan River. The Balfour Declaration and the San Remo treaty were drafted to reflect the intention that there would be the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, but not that all of Palestine (which extended to the Arabian Desert, ed.) would be created as the national home for the Jewish people.” [26]
From 1922, Transjordan had been under the authority of the British High Commissioner in Jerusalem. In 1946, Abdullah I bin al-Hussein, the second of three sons of Hussein bin Ali, Sharif and Emir of Mecca, became the ruler. In keeping with British policy regarding Transjordan, all of the Jewish National Home conditions were explicitly excluded from all of Transjordan. [27]
The policy of the Balfour Declaration and the terms to implement its provisions were written into law in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine by the members of the League of Nations on July 24, 1922, and in the Anglo-American Palestine Convention of 1924. [28] Though the U.S. was not yet a member of the League of Nations, the American government did not want Palestine disposed of without its approval. America had contributed its military, weapons and funding to secure the victory which resulted in the Turks ceding their rights to Palestine. [29]
It is important to note that the Mandate and the Balfour Declaration only state that the "civil and religious" rights of the inhabitants of Palestine are to be protected. There is no mention of the national rights of the Arab people. Article 22 of the Mandate declares:
The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self -governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion. [30]
The claims that the Palestine Mandate is a contravention of the right to self-determination or “the ‘sovereignty’” of those residing in Palestine and a violation of Article 22 of the Covenant are false James Crawford Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge points out. The people living in Palestine were not “sovereign” with regard to their territory, and before the Mandate were “not a subject of international law.”
Moreover, in 1920 there was no basic right of self-determination in international law. That principle was applied at the Versailles Conference “as an exception to the mandated territories, but did not apply independently of Article 22 of the Covenant.” [31]
The Palestinian Arabs rejected the Balfour Declaration and Mandate and point to paragraph 4 of Article 22 as the basis of their claim that it refutes the Balfour Declaration and makes it insignificant: “Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.” [32] (Isaiah Friedman, British Pan-Arab Policy, 1915-1922 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, Publishers, 2010), 188.) Absent from the text are the words “self-determination ”of nationalities, a term used by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson as the foundation for prosecuting the war, otherwise, England, France and Italy, Russia asserted, would be condemned as “Imperialists.” [33]
Walter Lippmann, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and political commentator, believed that “to invoke the general principle of self-determination, and to make it supreme law of international life, was to invite sheer anarchy. For the principle can be and has been used to promote the dismemberment of practically every organized state. None knew this better than Hitler himself.” [34]
Years later, Professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and former Dean of the Kennedy School, also stressed that “a foreign policy of unqualified support for self-determination could result in world disorder.” [35]
The Arabs did not grasp the concept of trusteeship and thought that the colonial arrangement had simply been camouflaged in a new form. This assessment was incorrect. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George declared Mesopotamia, Syria and Armenia and Palestine were authorized to “recognition of their separate national conditions,” and Woodrow Wilson in “Fourteen Points” address said that the former Turkish Adriatic provinces “should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” [36]
Emir Feisal, who represented the Arabs at the Paris Peace Conference, and the son of Sharif Hussein, the leader of the Arab world during World War I, demanded that the Peace Conference acknowledge “ an immediate and complete political independence for Syria (which included Palestine and Lebanon) without protection or tutelage” by a foreign government. The General Syrian Congress meeting on July 2, 1919 adopted the resolution to present to the Commission of Inquiry (the King-Crane Commission). They also rejected Article 22, a repudiation of the League of Nations and an insult to President Wilson. [37]
In the eighth clause of the resolution, they proclaimed: “We desire that there should be no dismemberment of Syria and no separation of Palestine or the coastal region in the west or the Lebanon from the mother country; and we ask that the unity of the country be maintained under any circumstances.” [38]
After a visit to Syria in December 1918, David Hogarth, British archaeologist, realized that if the Syrians were not given complete independence, they would “rather have the Turk back and will scheme to get him.” While serving on the King Crane Commission, Captain William Yale, a Military Observer to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Palestine from June 1918 to January 1919, and then served as an expert on Arab affairs in Paris, presciently concluded that the Young Arab movement in Syria and Palestine would “turn into fanatical Islamism.” [39]
Yale understood that Arab and Syrian nationalists were adamantly against the French and British serving as their defenders or tutors. As Muslims, they were anti-Christian and anti-European. In Palestine, they wanted to end the British government’s role and completely abolish the Zionist venture. Major Hubert Young, an advisor to Winston Churchill, who served in the British Foreign Office in London until he became an assistant secretary in the Middle East Department in 1922, responded that Article 22 referred to the Mandatory and not the right for them to establish a government according to the will of the population. [40]
In his letter of March 1, 1922, Sir John Shuckburgh, Deputy Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies and head of its Middle East Division since 1921 when the Colonial Office assumed responsibility for Palestine from the Foreign Office, [41] also affirmed that Article 22 did not apply to Palestine. The letter, which was signed by Winston Churchill, then-Secretary of State for the Colonies, further stated that the British was obligated by a pledge that predated the Covenant and would not permit the writing of a constitution annulling the execution of “a solemn undertaking given by themselves and their Allies “ to world Jewry. [42]
Hubert wrote to Churchill on August 1, 1921 that he supported a policy involving ‘the gradual immigration of Jews into Palestine until that country becomes a predominantly Jewish State.” Young argued that the phrase ‘National Home’ as used in the Balfour Declaration implied no less than full statehood for the Jews of Palestine. There could be ‘no half-way house’, he wrote,” between a Jewish State and ‘total abandonment of the Zionist programme.” [43]
Allen Hertz asserts “the Jewish people’s claim to Western Palestine is solidly based in the post-WWI settlement. Though [their] aboriginal rights arguably extend further than Western Palestine, they might not include the Negev. Moreover, today the Jewish people’s self-determination rights apply to wherever Jews are now the majority of the local population. Furthermore, there are also some rights of Israel as a sovereign state.” [44]
At the end of WWII, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, the chief political officer for Palestine, summed up the case for the Jews. He observed that all the countries in Asia and Europe had sacrificed considerably including Britain, which was now exhausted. Only the Arabs had not had to give up anything.
"It is gross injustice that they should be refused a home which once was theirs. This simple act of justice is held up for fear of the Arabs and hatred of the Jews."During both world wars, the Arabs had “gained everything and contributed nothing….” “Why,” he asked, “should not the Arabs give up something to suffering humanity? Palestine is but a small part of the Arab countries. On the other hand the Jews have contributed a great deal during both wars and have suffered more than any other nation. It is gross injustice that they should be refused a home which once was theirs (emphasis added). This simple act of justice is held up for fear of the Arabs and hatred of the Jews. A policy of fear leads nowhere; it is no policy.” [45]
To those who suggested that Jews immigrate to countries other than Palestine, he responded: “Zionism without Zion is nothing at all. The Jews want a Home, not an Apartment.” [46]
Israel’s first Prime Minister Ben Gurion knew of “…no other people that was exiled from its land and dispersed among the nations of the world to be hated, persecuted, expelled and slaughtered…that did not vanish from history, did not despair or assimilate (though many individual Jews did), but yearned incessantly to return to its land, believing for two thousand years in its messianic deliverance—and that indeed did return and… renew its independence.” [47]
Furthermore, as Dore Gold, Director-General of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs observed, in the last century, Israel is the only state established whose legitimacy was officially acknowledged by the League of Nations and the U.N. The League of Nations Mandate did not grant the Jewish people the rights to establish a national home in Palestine, it simply recognized a pre-existing right that had never been surrendered or forgotten. The Jewish people had been sovereign in their own land for a thousand years before many were forced into exile. The establishment of the State of Israel did not represent a creation ex nihilo. These rights were upheld by the U.N. under Article 80 of the UN Charter after the U.N. replaced the League of Nations. [48]
Footnotes
[1] The Times of Israel Staff “Palestinians gear up to sue the UK – over 1917 Balfour Declaration,” The Times of Israel (July 25, 2016).
[2] Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (New York: Verso, 1988), 1, 7-8; Moshe Aumann, “Land ownership in Palestine, 1880-1948,” in The Middle East Reader Michael Curtis, Ed. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1986), 247-254.)
[3] Mazin Qumsiyeh, “Palestinians do have options for change and resistance,” Ma’an News Agency (August 10, 2013); Hussein Abu Hussein and Fiona McKay, Access Denied: Palestinian Access to Land in Israel (New York: Zed Books, 2003); Alexander Safian, “Can Arabs Buy Land in Israel?” Middle East Quarterly (December 1997).
[4] Thomas Friedman, “Something for Barack and Bibi to Talk About,” The New York Times (November 16, 2013).
[5] Joseph Dan, “Jewish Sovereignty as a Theological Problem,” Azure Number 16 (Winter 2004).
[6] Adam Rasgon and Tovah Lazaroff, “Palestinians seeking to sue Britain over 1917 Balfour Declaration,” The Jerusalem Post(July 26, 2016).
[7] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/balfour.asp); Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1978), 92-108; Viscount Samuel, MEMOIRS: Viscount Samuel (London: The Cresset Press, 1945), 147-148.
[8] Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1961), 548.
[9] Gilbert, op.cit. 108-109.
[10] Martin Gilbert, “Article by Sir Martin Gilbert to Commemorate the 94th Anniversary of the Balfour Declaration Which Was Given to the Zionist Federation (November 10, 2011), http: //zionistfederation.blogspot.com/2011/11/article-by-sir-martin-gilbert-to.html.
[11] INTRODUCTION to The History of Zionism by Nahum Sokolow Longmans, By the Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour, M. P. (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1969) LVI; Isaiah Friedman, Palestine: A Twice-Promised Land? The British, the Arabs & Zionism, 1915-1920 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2000); Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version: And Other Middle Eastern Studies (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England 1984), 55.
[12] John Barnes and David Nicholson, Eds. Leo Amery Diaries Volume I: 1896-1929, (London, Hutchinson, 1980), 559.
[13] Gilbert, op.cit. 109; J. C. Hurewitz, The Struggle for Palestine (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 19.
[14] Martin Gilbert, Exile and Return (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1978), 130); John Grigg, Lloyd George, War Leader 1916-1918 (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 348-357).
[15] Ben Halperin, The Idea of A Jewish State Second Edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969), 184.
[16] http://www.allenzhertz.com/2011_10_01_archive.html.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London, England: Readers Union LDT, 1939), 352.
[20] Gabriel Scheinmann, “The Map that Ruined the Middle East,” The Tower Magazine Number 4 (July 2013).
[21] Eli E. Hertz, This Land Is My Land: The Legal Aspects of Jewish Rights (New York: Myths and Facts), 2008), 22.
[22] San Remo Resolution,” Council on Foreign Relations (April 25, 1920); Simon H. Rifkind, et. al. The Basic Equities of the Palestine Problem (New York: Arno Press, 1977):26-27; Howard Grief, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law (Jerusalem: Mazo Publishers, 2008): 18-19; David Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase (Oxford University Press, 1987), 280-293; Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine, 1914-1918: Britain-Jewish-Arab Relations (London: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1973), 259-281; Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1961).
[23] Gilbert, op.cit. 132; Rifkind, op.cit. 27-28; Hertz, op.cit; Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882—1948: A Study of Ideology (New York: Oxford, 1987): 82; Michael J. Cohen, The Origins and Evolution of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1987):64-65; S. Ilan Troen, Imagining Zion: Dreams, Designs, and Realities in a Century of Jewish Settlement (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003), 44.
[24] Rifkind, op.cit. 27-28; Elliot A. Green, “Were Jews who came to Israel in the 19th century colonists, colonizers or colonialists?” The Times of Israel (February 13, 2014).
[25] Simon H. Rifkind, op.cit.26-27; Grief, op.cit. 18-19.) Stein, op.cit; Joshua Teitelbaum, “Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People: From the San Remo Conference (1920) to the Netanyahu-Abbas Talks,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (September 15, 2010).
[26] Email from Allen Hertz to author January 28, 2014.
[27] Gilbert, op.cit. 132; Rifkind, op.cit. 27-28; Hertz, op.cit; Gorny, op.cit. 82; Michael J. Cohen, op.cit.64-65; Troen, op.cit. 44.
[28] The preamble of the Mandate states that the primary Allied Powers had agreed: "Whereas recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country." Rifkind, op.cit.27-28.
[29] Ibid. 28.
[30]http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace%20Process/Guide%20to%20the%20Peace%20Process/The%20Mandate%20for%20Palestine.
[31] James R. Crawford, The Creation of States in International Law Second Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 248-249; Julius Stone, Israel and Palestine: Assault on the Law of Nations (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 14-15.
[32] Isaiah Friedman, British Pan-Arab Policy, 1915-1922 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction, Publishers, 2010), 188.
[33] Ibid.185.
[34] Walter Lipmann, U.S. War Aims (Boston, Massachusetts Little, Brown and Company, 1944), 173.
[35] Friedman, British Pan-Arab Policy, op.cit. 195.
[36] Ibid. 189.
[37] Ibid. 190.
[38] George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), 441.
[39] Friedman, British Pan-Arab Policy, op.cit.191.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Evyatar Friesel, “British Officials on the Situation in Palestine, 1923,” Middle Eastern Studies, volume 23 number 2 (April1987): 194.
[42] Friedman, op.cit. 191-192.
[43] Martin Gilbert, “An Overwhelming Jewish State- From the Balfour Declaration to The Palestine Mandate,” jcpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Kiyum-gilbert.pdf, 30.
[44] Email from Hertz, op.cit.
[45] Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary 1917-1956 (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959), 197).
[46] Ibid.171.
[47] David Ben Gurion, “Ben-Gurion and De Gaulle: An Exchange of Letters,” Midstream (February 1968): 12.
[48] Dore Gold and Jeff Helmreich, Jerusalem Viewpoints Number 507 Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (November 16, 2003).
Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, has written three new books on Israel: BDS: The Movement to Destroy Israel; Erosion: Undermining Israel through Lies and Deception; and Cultivating Canaan: Who Owns the Holy Land? He is a consultant to the America-Israel Friendship League, a member of the Council of Scholars for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), and a member of the Academic Council of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.