~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law"
Author: Howard Grief
Pub Date: October 2008
ISBN-10: 9657344522,
ISBN-13: 9789657344521
Publisher: Mazo
mazopublishers@gmail.com)
With The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International
Law (Mazo Publishers, Jerusalem) Canadian-born Israeli constitutional
scholar and lawyer Howard Grief has given us a book that shatters
every myth, lie, misrepresentation and distortion employed over the
61 years of Israel's existence to negate the sovereign rights of the
Jewish People to their national home.
It is a lengthy treatise - 660 pages plus a 50-page appendix - but
the Jewish people's long and tortuous struggle to retrieve their
stolen patrimony deserves nothing less than full disclosure. Anyone
who has ever been at a loss to counter the slanders and calumnies
that are the stock in trade of the Israel-bashers and anti-Semites on
both the Left and Right will treasure every one of its 20
illuminating chapters.
Rooted in the premise that the best antidote to a myriad of small and
medium sized fabrications is the exposure of the whole cloth from
which they've been woven, The Legal Foundation lays bare two dominant
myths that have shaped popular perspectives on Israel. The first is
the fallacy that Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel was the
joint product of the 1947 United Nations Partition and the May 15th,
1948 termination of the British Mandate for Palestine. In fact, as
Grief points out, Jewish sovereignty in Palestine had been validated
under international law 28 years earlier. "The legal title of the
Jewish People to the mandated territory of Palestine in all of its
historical parts," he informs us, was first recognized on April 24,
1920 when the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council (Britain,
France, Italy and Japan), meeting in San Remo, Italy, "converted the
1917 'Balfour Declaration' into a binding legal document."
How "binding" may be construed from the fact that its wording gave
effect to the provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League
of Nations and became incorporated into the Mandate for Palestine.
Indeed, the "San Remo Resolution," within which the Allied Supreme
Council's decision is contained, constitutes what the author terms
"the foundation document of the State of Israel, the legal existence
of which is directly traceable from that document."
That the Jewish People were unable to exercise their sovereignty in
Palestine for 28 years - it being assigned to the British Mandatory
power as their de facto agent - did in no way detract from their de
jure rights to the land under international law during that
interregnum. In this thesis, Grief is ironically supported by both a
passionate Zionist, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and
one of Zionism's most implacable opponents, post World War I British
Foreign Secretary Lord George Nathaniel Curzon. Brandeis believed
that with the passage of the San Remo Resolution, the debate over who
owned Palestine was effectively over. Curzon called the Resolution
the "Magna Carta" of the Jewish People.
From the initial misattribution of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to
the 1947 Partition Plan rather than the 1920 San Remo Resolution, it
was just a hop and a skip to a second major misrepresentation of
Israel's international legal status - the erroneous assumption that
the Partition Plan and the May 1948 termination of the British
Mandate somehow erased the Jewish People's rights to Palestine in all
its historical parts and dimensions enunciated at San Remo, and
implemented under the terms of the League of Nations Covenant. Those
"parts and dimensions" were defined inter alia, as including the
northwestern portions of the Golan and most of present day Jordan by
the "Franco-British Boundary Convention" in Paris.
The presumptive cancellation of those rights, Grief submits, is
thoroughly discredited by "the principle of acquired rights,"
codified in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the "Law of Treaties," and
the "doctrine of estoppel." The first, he asserts, insures that "the
fundamental rights of the Jewish people did not lapse with the
international process [the San Remo Resolution] which brought them
into existence. The second further guarantees that these rights
cannot "simply be abrogated or denied by those states which
previously recognized their existence." Taken together, they provide
what the author terms a "definitive answer [to] anyone who claims
that Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty over all of
Palestine and the land of Israel did not continue after the end of
the Mandate for Palestine... except in the allotted boundaries of the
UN Partition Plan..."
Noteworthy among the states that wholeheartedly endorsed Jewish
sovereignty over Palestine in all its "historical parts and
dimensions" was the United States of America - the same U.S.A that
today regards Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria as an illegal
"occupation" of lands upon which it favors the creation of a
Palestinian State. The Obama administration and the Bush
administration that preceded it are either unaware or have chosen to
be unaware of the fact that the 1924 Anglo-American Convention on
Palestine made the U.S. a "contracting party" to the Mandate, further
reinforcing a unanimously passed Joint Resolution of the 67th
Congress two years earlier, signed by President Warren G. Harding,
recognizing a future Jewish State in "the whole of Palestine."
It needs to be borne in mind, Grief notes, that the Mandate for
Palestine that was ceremoniously incorporated into U.S. law in 1924
"was a constitution for the projected Jewish state that made no
provision for an Arab state and which especially prohibited the
partition of the country." Thus, he concludes, the fierce exception
the U.S. has taken to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and its
unremitting pressure for creation of a "Palestinian State" amount to
a repudiation of its signature to the Anglo-American Convention on
Palestine. It is in violation of American law and America's
obligations under international law.
The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law is
the product of 25 years of independent research by Grief, a former
adviser on international law to the late Professor Yuval Ne'eman,
Minister of Energy and Infrastructure in the Shamir government and
the father of Israel's nuclear energy program. It is the kind of
seminal work that seems destined to become both an indispensible
source for defenders of Israel's rights under international law and a
mirror on the events and personalities that transformed a November 2,
1917 letter from British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour
to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild into the trumpet call that awakened
Jewish nationhood from a 1,900-year coma.
The author's unsparing portrayal of France's opposition to the
creation of a Jewish state at San Remo and, when thwarted, its
efforts at the Franco-British Boundary Convention to confine it to
the narrowest geographical limits, should dismiss any notion that
French anti-Zionism began with De Gaulle. By the same token, the
Zionist sympathies attributed to Winston Churchill by Martin Gilbert
and other historians withers in the face of the 1922 "White Paper"
attached to his name as then Colonial Secretary. Grief offers
irrefutable evidence of its having not only "negated" the Jewish
state in Palestine that the Mandate "required" of Britain, but of
having elevated "Arab pretensions and aspirations to such an extent
that everything thereafter became muddled...subject to continuous
disputes as to what was really intended in the Mandate for Palestine."
For the actual authorship of that document and the wreckage it made
of the original plan for the establishment of a Jewish state in all
its "historic parts and dimensions" under British tutelage, we have
Herbert Samuel to thankâ?"the same Herbert Samuel who worked closely
with Chaim Weizmann in the Zionist Organization and was later to pack
it in for a "Lordship" and an appointment as British High
Commissioner to Palestine. In ironic contrast, Lord Curzon, Balfour's
successor as Foreign Secretary, who "detested" the idea of a Jewish
state, put loyalty above personal feelings at San Remo and Paris in
arguing manfully for the realization of Prime Minister David Lloyd
George's vision of a Jewish state comprised of all its ancient
Biblical territories.
On the Jewish side, nobody comes off better in this saga than
Brandeis, who Grief portrays as "the only Zionist leader...who
properly understood the natural consequences of the legal recognition
of the Balfour Declaration embodied in the San Remo Resolution." Had
Brandeis headed the Zionist Organization, the author believes, "there
is little doubt that he would have successfully halted Britain's
gross violation of its [Mandatory] obligation ...to rebuild the
Jewish state."
At the end of the day, it was Menachem Begin who provided the most
heartbreaking counterpoint to Lloyd George's vision of a Jewish state
reconstituted in most, if not all of its Biblical parts, Grief
submits. Begin, national Zionism's anointed champion, bearer of the
torch lit by Herzl and passed to Jabotinsky, not only failed to make
Israel constitutionally whole by annexing Judea, Samaria and Gaza (as
he was expected to do), but in what the author describes as an act of
"unimaginable folly," brought to the Knesset in 1977 a plan to
establish Arab "self-rule" over those critical portions of the Jewish
estate. In so doing, he opened the portals wide for their
identification as "unalloted," "disputed" and finally "occupied"
territories.
Nine months later, in September 1978, Begin crowned his "achievement"
by injecting the "self-rule" proposal into the negotiations with
Egypt at Camp David, offering to leave the final determination of
sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Gaza to their inhabitants and
"local representatives. " Thirty one years later, Israel remains
bedeviled by that fateful decision.
William Mehlman is Americans for a Safe Israel (AFSI)'s
representative in Israel. Howard Grief's book is sold on Amazon and
Barnes & Noble. This article appeared in the October 2009 issue of
Mideast Outpost
http://mideastoutpost.com/archives/000590.html
Author: Howard Grief
Pub Date: October 2008
ISBN-10: 9657344522,
ISBN-13: 9789657344521
Publisher: Mazo
mazopublishers@gmail.com)
With The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International
Law (Mazo Publishers, Jerusalem) Canadian-born Israeli constitutional
scholar and lawyer Howard Grief has given us a book that shatters
every myth, lie, misrepresentation and distortion employed over the
61 years of Israel's existence to negate the sovereign rights of the
Jewish People to their national home.
It is a lengthy treatise - 660 pages plus a 50-page appendix - but
the Jewish people's long and tortuous struggle to retrieve their
stolen patrimony deserves nothing less than full disclosure. Anyone
who has ever been at a loss to counter the slanders and calumnies
that are the stock in trade of the Israel-bashers and anti-Semites on
both the Left and Right will treasure every one of its 20
illuminating chapters.
Rooted in the premise that the best antidote to a myriad of small and
medium sized fabrications is the exposure of the whole cloth from
which they've been woven, The Legal Foundation lays bare two dominant
myths that have shaped popular perspectives on Israel. The first is
the fallacy that Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel was the
joint product of the 1947 United Nations Partition and the May 15th,
1948 termination of the British Mandate for Palestine. In fact, as
Grief points out, Jewish sovereignty in Palestine had been validated
under international law 28 years earlier. "The legal title of the
Jewish People to the mandated territory of Palestine in all of its
historical parts," he informs us, was first recognized on April 24,
1920 when the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council (Britain,
France, Italy and Japan), meeting in San Remo, Italy, "converted the
1917 'Balfour Declaration' into a binding legal document."
How "binding" may be construed from the fact that its wording gave
effect to the provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League
of Nations and became incorporated into the Mandate for Palestine.
Indeed, the "San Remo Resolution," within which the Allied Supreme
Council's decision is contained, constitutes what the author terms
"the foundation document of the State of Israel, the legal existence
of which is directly traceable from that document."
That the Jewish People were unable to exercise their sovereignty in
Palestine for 28 years - it being assigned to the British Mandatory
power as their de facto agent - did in no way detract from their de
jure rights to the land under international law during that
interregnum. In this thesis, Grief is ironically supported by both a
passionate Zionist, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and
one of Zionism's most implacable opponents, post World War I British
Foreign Secretary Lord George Nathaniel Curzon. Brandeis believed
that with the passage of the San Remo Resolution, the debate over who
owned Palestine was effectively over. Curzon called the Resolution
the "Magna Carta" of the Jewish People.
From the initial misattribution of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine to
the 1947 Partition Plan rather than the 1920 San Remo Resolution, it
was just a hop and a skip to a second major misrepresentation of
Israel's international legal status - the erroneous assumption that
the Partition Plan and the May 1948 termination of the British
Mandate somehow erased the Jewish People's rights to Palestine in all
its historical parts and dimensions enunciated at San Remo, and
implemented under the terms of the League of Nations Covenant. Those
"parts and dimensions" were defined inter alia, as including the
northwestern portions of the Golan and most of present day Jordan by
the "Franco-British Boundary Convention" in Paris.
The presumptive cancellation of those rights, Grief submits, is
thoroughly discredited by "the principle of acquired rights,"
codified in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the "Law of Treaties," and
the "doctrine of estoppel." The first, he asserts, insures that "the
fundamental rights of the Jewish people did not lapse with the
international process [the San Remo Resolution] which brought them
into existence. The second further guarantees that these rights
cannot "simply be abrogated or denied by those states which
previously recognized their existence." Taken together, they provide
what the author terms a "definitive answer [to] anyone who claims
that Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty over all of
Palestine and the land of Israel did not continue after the end of
the Mandate for Palestine... except in the allotted boundaries of the
UN Partition Plan..."
Noteworthy among the states that wholeheartedly endorsed Jewish
sovereignty over Palestine in all its "historical parts and
dimensions" was the United States of America - the same U.S.A that
today regards Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria as an illegal
"occupation" of lands upon which it favors the creation of a
Palestinian State. The Obama administration and the Bush
administration that preceded it are either unaware or have chosen to
be unaware of the fact that the 1924 Anglo-American Convention on
Palestine made the U.S. a "contracting party" to the Mandate, further
reinforcing a unanimously passed Joint Resolution of the 67th
Congress two years earlier, signed by President Warren G. Harding,
recognizing a future Jewish State in "the whole of Palestine."
It needs to be borne in mind, Grief notes, that the Mandate for
Palestine that was ceremoniously incorporated into U.S. law in 1924
"was a constitution for the projected Jewish state that made no
provision for an Arab state and which especially prohibited the
partition of the country." Thus, he concludes, the fierce exception
the U.S. has taken to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and its
unremitting pressure for creation of a "Palestinian State" amount to
a repudiation of its signature to the Anglo-American Convention on
Palestine. It is in violation of American law and America's
obligations under international law.
The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law is
the product of 25 years of independent research by Grief, a former
adviser on international law to the late Professor Yuval Ne'eman,
Minister of Energy and Infrastructure in the Shamir government and
the father of Israel's nuclear energy program. It is the kind of
seminal work that seems destined to become both an indispensible
source for defenders of Israel's rights under international law and a
mirror on the events and personalities that transformed a November 2,
1917 letter from British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour
to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild into the trumpet call that awakened
Jewish nationhood from a 1,900-year coma.
The author's unsparing portrayal of France's opposition to the
creation of a Jewish state at San Remo and, when thwarted, its
efforts at the Franco-British Boundary Convention to confine it to
the narrowest geographical limits, should dismiss any notion that
French anti-Zionism began with De Gaulle. By the same token, the
Zionist sympathies attributed to Winston Churchill by Martin Gilbert
and other historians withers in the face of the 1922 "White Paper"
attached to his name as then Colonial Secretary. Grief offers
irrefutable evidence of its having not only "negated" the Jewish
state in Palestine that the Mandate "required" of Britain, but of
having elevated "Arab pretensions and aspirations to such an extent
that everything thereafter became muddled...subject to continuous
disputes as to what was really intended in the Mandate for Palestine."
For the actual authorship of that document and the wreckage it made
of the original plan for the establishment of a Jewish state in all
its "historic parts and dimensions" under British tutelage, we have
Herbert Samuel to thankâ?"the same Herbert Samuel who worked closely
with Chaim Weizmann in the Zionist Organization and was later to pack
it in for a "Lordship" and an appointment as British High
Commissioner to Palestine. In ironic contrast, Lord Curzon, Balfour's
successor as Foreign Secretary, who "detested" the idea of a Jewish
state, put loyalty above personal feelings at San Remo and Paris in
arguing manfully for the realization of Prime Minister David Lloyd
George's vision of a Jewish state comprised of all its ancient
Biblical territories.
On the Jewish side, nobody comes off better in this saga than
Brandeis, who Grief portrays as "the only Zionist leader...who
properly understood the natural consequences of the legal recognition
of the Balfour Declaration embodied in the San Remo Resolution." Had
Brandeis headed the Zionist Organization, the author believes, "there
is little doubt that he would have successfully halted Britain's
gross violation of its [Mandatory] obligation ...to rebuild the
Jewish state."
At the end of the day, it was Menachem Begin who provided the most
heartbreaking counterpoint to Lloyd George's vision of a Jewish state
reconstituted in most, if not all of its Biblical parts, Grief
submits. Begin, national Zionism's anointed champion, bearer of the
torch lit by Herzl and passed to Jabotinsky, not only failed to make
Israel constitutionally whole by annexing Judea, Samaria and Gaza (as
he was expected to do), but in what the author describes as an act of
"unimaginable folly," brought to the Knesset in 1977 a plan to
establish Arab "self-rule" over those critical portions of the Jewish
estate. In so doing, he opened the portals wide for their
identification as "unalloted," "disputed" and finally "occupied"
territories.
Nine months later, in September 1978, Begin crowned his "achievement"
by injecting the "self-rule" proposal into the negotiations with
Egypt at Camp David, offering to leave the final determination of
sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Gaza to their inhabitants and
"local representatives. " Thirty one years later, Israel remains
bedeviled by that fateful decision.
William Mehlman is Americans for a Safe Israel (AFSI)'s
representative in Israel. Howard Grief's book is sold on Amazon and
Barnes & Noble. This article appeared in the October 2009 issue of
Mideast Outpost
http://mideastoutpost.com/archives/000590.html
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