Israel has legal claims to everything West of the Jordan

Peloni:  Simple facts which should be revisited more often than they are which is nearly never.

Dan Linnaeus tweeted the following:

Israel’s consistent position is that when Jordan illegally annexed Judea and Samaria between 1948 and 1950, the United Nations failed to protect Israel’s claims established under the San Remo Resolution (1920) and Israel’s Declaration of Independence (1948).

The San Remo Resolution of 1920, part of the post-World War I settlement incorporated the Balfour Declaration of 1917, mandating that the British oversee the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” within the British Mandate for Palestine. This was formally adopted by the League of Nations in 1922—the post-Ottoman framework under which the Balfour Declaration and the San Remo Resolution were to be implemented.

However in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in 1920, the British had their hands full with fractious military forces restive in the region.

The 1921 Cairo Conference and Winston Churchill’s subsequent meeting with Abdullah I in Jerusalem eventually led to the inclusion of Article 25 in the Mandate, and allowed for the establishment of the Emirate of Transjordan under British oversight and under the leadership of Abdullah I, the son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca.

The widespread starvation in Lebanon during World War I resulting from the collapse of Ottoman supply lines, British and French naval blockades, and a locust plague that ravaged crops in the region, had led to the deaths of an estimated 200,000 people. Between 1915 to 1918, with the most severe starvation and deprivation experienced in 1916 and 1917 nearly half of the population of Mount Lebanon, died as a result of starvation, disease, and malnutrition during this period in what became known as The Great Famine in Lebanon.

The Ottoman Empire had surrendered in October 1918, leading to the British and French occupation of former Ottoman territories, including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel.

Much of the former Ottoman territory was in similar disarray, although the Great Famine in Lebanon stands apart as a particularly painful note in the history of the great wars of the 20th century until today. The British needed to manage the territories they had taken control of, overseeing vast expanses of land with displaced and traumatized populations left without adequate administration by the years of war which the Ottomans had joined in October of 1914.

Therefore, when in early 1921 Abdullah I arrived in the region with an army, intending to support his brother Faisal, who had been ousted from Syria by the French, then Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill was tasked with securing the peace. After discussions at the Cairo Conference, Churchill met with Abdullah in Jerusalem to negotiate a solution. Churchill convinced Abdullah to accept the leadership of Transjordan as a semi-autonomous zone, to be separated from the British Palestine Mandate but remain under British oversight, while Faisal was made King of Iraq.

Article 25 of the Mandate, the provision adopted in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine reflecting the agreements of the Cairo Conference and Jerusalem meeting, allowed Britain to “withhold” certain parts of Palestine from the provisions that supported the establishment of a Jewish national home. As a result, Transjordan was carved out east of the Jordan River, with 77% of the British Palestine Mandate allocated to it and in 1921 it became an autonomous region under the leadership of Emir Abdullah but remained under British control.

This, in principle, satisfied the dual mandate of the San Remo Treaty of 1920, but when it was incorporated in 1922, Article 25 (pursuant to the Cairo Conference) was incorporated without acknowledgment of this agreement.

In 1946 Transjordan gained full independence. A year later in 1947, the UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181) was presented, further dividing the British Palestine Mandate in order to fulfill its purpose, with Jerusalem under international administration. Resolution 181 passed with 33 in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions after considerable opposition and debate. In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of UN Resolution 181, Dr. Dore Gold, President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, aimed to correct a common misconception. He explained that it was not the UN’s November 29, 1947, resolution that established the State of Israel, but rather David Ben-Gurion’s declaration on May 14, 1948, at the end of the British Mandate.

Resolution 181 was extension of the Balfour Declaration and enhanced international legitimacy for the Jewish state. While it was a significant moral action, it was not legally binding under Chapter 7 of the UN Security Council, contrary to claims that have been made by Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Notably, while the resolution was adopted, it was never fully implemented. The Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) accepted the plan, despite it proposing a much smaller territory than the Jewish leadership had hoped for. But the Arab states and the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected it, including the newly formed Transjordan, opposing the creation of a Jewish state and the partition plan outright. After gaining independence in 1946 and opposing the 1947 UN Partition Plan, Transjordan played a major role in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War following Israel’s declaration of independence, notably in occupying Judea and Samaria which became known as the West Bank of Jordan thereafter, and East Jerusalem including the Old City.

On the eve of the Arab invasion of the newly declared State of Israel, Azzam Pasha, the Secretary-General of the Arab League in 1948 declared, “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”[?? Howard M Sachar, A History of Israel (New York: Knopf, 1979)p. 333]

In the 19 years Jordan held Jerusalem not a single Jew was permitted on the land, 55 of the 58 synagogues were destroyed with the surviving three converted into horse stables and the Western Wall was turned into a garbage dump. Israelis would come to the Notre Dame or nearby hotels and rooftops to see the wall and pray as Jordanians dumped trash on their holiest site for almost 20 years.

Despite this, after the Six Day War of 1967 Israel permitted the Waqf of Jordan to manage Al-Aqsa and even offered King Hussein to take most of the land back, but he refused instead stripping the Arabs in these territories of their Jordanian passports in 1988, and ceded all claims to the territories.

Israel’s official position is that the territories of Judea and Samaria are disputed rather than occupied as these lands did not belong to a recognized sovereign state before Israel repatriated them during the 1967 Six-Day War. In accordance with the principle of ‘uti possidetis juris,’ since the last accepted borders of the region are the 1921 division, Judea and Samaria and Gaza were both Israeli territories at the time of the Declaration of Independence. Accordingly, Transjordan’s annexation of these territories was not recognized as legal. For example, the UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (passed in 1948) did not recognize the annexation and instead focused on the right of return for Palestinian refugees and the internationalization of Jerusalem, indicating the UN’s view that the status of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem remained unresolved. Even the The Arab League did not fully endorse the annexation, although it accepted Transjordan’s administrative role over the area.

Israel points to the Treaty of San Remo of 1920 and to the 77% of the British Palestine Mandate that was allocated to TransJordan satisfying its dual mandate.

Israel has legal claims to everything West of the Jordan and has disputed the UN resolutions made in 2016 under Obama and the earlier resolution under Carter in 1979, regarding the territories of Judea and Samaria as disputed, and which it maintains posses prime historical and security importance to Israel.

— EXHIBITS [Photos above]

A. Megilat Ha’atzmaut, presented Friday, May 14, 1948 by the Jewish People’s Council, gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum, declaring the establishment of the State of Israel.

B. On May 14, 1948 a mere 11 minutes after Israel’s Declaration of Independence in a historic move, the United States, under President Harry S. Truman, officially recognized the provisional Jewish government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel.