Palestine — “The Jewish People’s State” under International Law
T. Belman. I recently posted On the Legitimacy of the Settlements: A Legal and Historical Perspective It contained an argument by Lorejnzo Kamel, a Harvard scholar, and a rebuttal by Salomon Benzimra, the author of The Jewish Peoples Rights to the Land of Israel,
This post by Wallace Brand, Harvard Law, is also in response.
One other thought. The beneficiary of the Palestine Mandate was the “Jewish people” rather than the Jews of Palestine. In part this was to enfranchise all the Jews, not just those in Palestine, thereby creating a majority.
By Wallace Brand (published on Dec 8, 2015)
A few months after the Ottoman Empire joined Germany in World War 1 in 1914 by attacking Russian ships, Herbert Samuel, a British Zionist, later appointed as the first Commissioner of the British Mandate in Palestine, recognized this was likely an opportunity to obtain a Jewish Palestine. But he decided that there were too few Jews in the population in Palestine at that time for immediate statehood to be practical. Although in the Jerusalem area the Jews were two thirds the total population, in the Palestine territory as a whole they only numbered about 100,000 or about one sixth the total of perhaps 600,000 Arab Muslims and Christians.
Herbert Samuel, a British Jew who had risen high in the British Labor Government wrote in a memo to the British War Cabinet entitled “The Future of Palestine”: If Palestine were to be open to unrestricted Jewish immigration, it might become a Jewish majority state. How could they become a Jewish majority state? It would need a majority to be able to command obedience from the Arab ethnic population; also a larger population to protect the state against Arabs or other enemies external to the state. A failed Jewish state might set back Zionism for 100 years.
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There are lots of types of wars and conflicts, and many examples of victories and defeats throughout history.
