Occupied Territory Try to Prove It

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Israelity! with Mark Kaplan

by Mark B. Kaplan

Mark Kaplan delivers his TV commentaries in the only way he knowscandidly, with a pinch of

sarcasm, and straight from the heart.Email Me

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Mark is the director of the Office for Israeli Constitutional Law (OFICL), advocating Jewish rights to

all the Land of Israel under International and Domestic law and lectures and educates about Jewish

legal rights.

From 20022006, Mark was INN-TV'snews editor, producer, and studio anchor, and he served as the

General Manager of Israel Independent TV news from 2006-2009.

Visit the OFICL web site at

www.JusticeNow4israel.com

e-mail me:[email protected]

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Cheshvan 11, 5772, 11/8/2011

Occupied Territory? Try to Prove It!

British Foreign Secretary William Hague continues the British policy of defaming Israel by labeling

construction in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas "illegal." His accusation was in response toIsrael's plans to build 2,000 housing units in Jerusalem, Gush Etzion, and Maalei Adumim.

Let's see if Hague can defend himself against someone actually knows International Law and is not

afraid to demand the world honor Jewish legal rights to our National Home.

(Note: Just after uploading this video, I received a letter that was forwarded to me from attorney

Howard Grief, author ofThe Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law. It is aresponse to a reply someone in the UK received from the same Foreign Commonwealth Office Near

East Group. Howard is always very thorough in answering letters, so this is a little long, but

excellently written.)
mailto:[email protected]://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Rss.aspx?blog=25http://www.justicenow4israel.com/http://www.justicenow4israel.com/http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4801#http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4801#http://www.justicenow4israel.com/mailto:[email protected]://www.israelnationalnews.com/More/Forecast.aspxhttp://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4801http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4801#http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Rss.aspx?blog=25http://www.justicenow4israel.com/http://www.justicenow4israel.com/http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4801#http://www.justicenow4israel.com/mailto:[email protected]://www.israelnationalnews.com/More/Forecast.aspxhttp://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4801http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/4801#mailto:[email protected]


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Jerusalem

4 Marheshvan 5772

November 1, 2011

Dear David,

Thanks for forwarding me the letter you received from Mr. Barry Griffiths of the Near East Group,

who responded to your earlier letter to the British Foreign Secretary William Hague about the latters

idiotic remark that Israel is illegally occupying Arab lands, upon which false assumption Mr.Griffiths bases his entire letter to you. The Griffiths letter is replete with misleading statements and

nonsensical interpretations of the actual meaning of UN resolutions on the Question of Palestine and

the Land of Israel. I can only deal here with some of the points he raised in his letter that, however,

unfortunately represents official long-standing British thinking.

Griffiths asserts that the Mandate for Palestine, which he incorrectly terms the Palestinian Mandate,

was awardedby the League of Nations to Britain. This statement reveals that Griffiths never read theminutes of the San Remo Peace Conference for April 24 and April 25, 1920, nor the final text of the

San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920, that resulted from that Conference, otherwise he would know

that the League of Nations did not do what he says it did. It was the Supreme Council of the PrincipalAllied Powers that conferred or entrusted the Mandate for Palestine to Great Britain in order to create

the political, administrative and economic conditions in the country to secure the establishment of the

Jewish National Home and future independent Jewish State, as set out in Article 2 of the Mandate. TheLeague, which had just come into existence only three months earlier upon the ratification of the

Treaty of Versailles on January 10, 1920 and had barely begun to operate, had no role whatsoever in

either conferring the Mandate upon Britain or in selecting Britain as the Mandatory Power. Before heattributes unfounded powers to that body, Mr. Griffiths can verify this important point by simplyreading the Preamble to the Mandate for Palestine, particularly Recitals One and Four. He would also

do well to read Lord Balfours statement on the subject of Mandates and the exact role played by the

League in regard to them:

The Mandates are neither made by the League nor can they in substance be altered by

the League a Mandate is imposed by the Allied and Associated Powers themselves

in the interests of what they conceived to be the general welfare of mankind; and theyhave asked the League of Nations to assist them in seeing that this policy should be

carried into effect. But the League of Nations is not the author of the policy but its

instrument (Charles H. Levermore, Third Book of the League of Nations, p. 137; citedon p. 47 of the bookBritish Rule in Palestine by Bernard Joseph, published by Public

Affairs Press, Washington DC, 1948).

Griffiths makes the astounding statement that the Balfour Declaration ceased to have legal effect

when the UK discharged its Mandate. Britain never executed the Mandate for Palestine in accordancewith the original purpose noted above. In truth, the Balfour Declaration, as a British policy statement
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in 1917 that Prime Minister David Lloyd George described as a bargain or contract between World

Jewry and Britain, was converted into a document of binding and irreversible international law by theadoption of the San Remo Resolution by the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers on April

25, 1920, that subsequently became Articles 94 to 97 inclusively plus Article 132 of the Treaty of

Svres. This Resolution, insofar as Palestine was concerned, was then incorporated into the first threerecitals of the Preamble of the Mandate for Palestine, subsequently approved by all 52 members of the

League in 1922 and separately by the United States. The San Remo Resolution is the foundingdocument not only for the State of Israel under international law, but also for that of Iraq and Syria. Asstated in my previous letter to you, it continues in legal force today, mutatis mutandis, contrary to what

Griffiths asserts, and no action taken by the United Nations today or by Britain itself can nullify this

binding act of international law upon which the State of Israel draws its legal existence. If it were

otherwise, the states of Israel, Syria and Iraq would have no legal right to exist under international law,and the Ottoman Empire would not have been disbanded. For Mr. Griffiths information, the San Remo

Resolution means that allof Palestine is Jewish land, not Arab land, and that any partition of this land

is perforce illegal and null and void. For his further edification, I would advise him to read ChapterOne of my book, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, that discusses

in detail the juridical significance and import of the San Remo Peace Conference and the San Remo

Resolution on Palestine, as well as Chapter Four on the Meaning of the Balfour Declaration. He maythen learn to his dismay about the existence of Jewish legal rights to allof Palestine and furthermore

that such information and knowledge is stored and found in the British diplomatic archives to which he

presumably has access. As a Foreign Office staffer, he certainly has a duty to be cognizant of what the

British archives reveal on the Question of Palestine as it emerged in the early period before Britainadopted a different direction beginning with the ascension of Winston Churchill to the Colonial Office

on February 14, 1921 and the convening of the Cairo Conference in mid-March 1921.

Griffiths then cites UN Security Council Resolution 242 regarding the inadmissibility of theacquisition of territory by war, a sound principle of law which, however, does not apply at all to

Israels liberation or repossession in June, 1967 of territory that constitutes the Jewish National Home.

What Griffiths fails to understand is that Israel never acquired title to Judea, Samaria and Gaza by war,and it is therefore under no obligation to withdraw from those regions that the Allied Powers accorded

to or recognized as belonging to the Jewish People. As the devolee or assignee of the Jewish People,

the State of Israel has inherited all the legal rights derived from the San Remo Resolution and theMandate for Palestine that were vested in the Jewish People by the unanimous decision of the Supreme

Council of the Principal Allied Powers. As a direct result of this decision, Palestine, to use Griffiths

term, was awarded to World Jewry represented by the Zionist Organization to establish theirNational Home there with the full agreement of Britain, while the great bulk of former Ottoman

territory in the Middle East (over 90%) was set aside for the Arabs for their own national self-

determination. In the Six-Day War of June 1967, Israel was only recovering territories that were

originally designated or intended for the Jewish State by the Principal Allied Powers. The same

situation obtained when France recovered Alsace-Lorraine in 1918 from Germany that had annexedthe French territory in 1871 as a result of the Franco-Prussian War in which France was soundly

defeated. Would Griffiths have called Alsace-Lorraine French-occupied Germany, as he does forIsraels recovery of Jewish land in the Six-Day War, and would he say that it was inadmissible for

France to re-acquire its former territory by war?

Griffiths stands on very shaky ground when he claims that Judea and Samaria (misspelled by him as

Sumaria) are held by Israel in belligerent occupation, to which the Fourth Geneva Convention

applies. It is only because Griffiths and the British Foreign Office he represents are so completely


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ignorant of the significance of the San Remo Resolution and the provisions of the Mandate forPalestine that he can with a straight face say that the territories liberated or repossessed by Israel in

1967 are under belligerent occupation. If Griffiths were right, that would mean that such territories,

i.e., Judea, Samaria and Gaza, had never been part of Mandated Palestine and the Jewish National

Home.

He is also misleading regarding the position of the Israeli Supreme Court in this matter, which is morecomplex than what he thinks. The Court has never decided on the merits or accepted as a provenargument that Judea and Samaria are occupied territories under international law, but merely adopted

the position of the Government of Israel, that it adjudicate all cases before it as if Judea and Samaria

were governed by the laws of war embodied in the Hague Regulations and Fourth Geneva Convention,without ruling on the actual legal status of these territories. In adopting this egregious policy based on

the erroneous legal advice of then Military Advocate-General Meir Shamgar, the Government of Israel

violated its own constitutional law and caused foreign states to believe that this indeed was the legalstatus of those regions, even though, ironically enough, Shamgar himself, later President of the

Supreme Court, issued a disclaimer stating that he did not consider these military administered

territories to be necessarily occupied territories. Despite his disclaimer, he did refer to them in that

incorrect sense in an article he wrote and then published in a book he himself edited (seeMilitaryGovernment in the Territories Administered by Israel 1967-1980: The Legal Aspects, Hemed Press

[Jerusalem], Reprint Edition, 1988, pp. 13; 28; 31).

To call Judea, Samaria and Gaza the Occupied Palestinian Territories is not only an oxymoron butalso an abuse of the English language in the service of the imperialistic Arab cause, as well as an

outright denial or attempted erasure of the legal, political and diplomatic history of the Palestine

Question. For Griffiths, this history only begins in 1967, which is why he and Foreign SecretaryWilliam Hague can duplicitously proclaim that Judea, Samaria and Gaza are or have been under

belligerent occupation ever since that year. There is no doubt that all of the State of Israel constitutes

Palestinian territory and that no part of former Mandated Palestine including Judea, Samaria and

Gaza, whether included or not in the borders of the State of Israel can be considered Israeli occupiedterritories. If that were truly the case, such an appellation would make a mockery of the San Remo

Resolution and Mandate for Palestine since, as already noted, all of Palestine was meant to be includedin the Jewish State. The claim made by the British Foreign Office, especially in the wake of the illegal

and now-lapsed Oslo Accords, that Judea, Samaria and Gaza belong to a fictitious Palestinian

Nation that was invented circa 1969 by the Arab League with the assistance of the United Nations is

a complete falsification of international law. If Mr. Griffiths and his superiors were more honest or didmore of their homework, both he and they would come to the same conclusion I have reached that

Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not and have never been Israeli occupied territories.

Britain, as the country most responsible for the adoption of the San Remo Resolution as a result of

which it received the Mandate for Palestine to create the Jewish State has slipped into amnesia in

regard to what it was committed to do but never did. Any facetious argument that an independentJewish State was not the intended goal of these basic documents is belied by the evidence in the

British archives and the statements made by the British and French leaders at the time of their

formulation. When Foreign Secretary George Nathaniel Curzon called the San Remo Resolution theMagna Carta of the Zionists in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Lloyd George dated October 29,

1920, he spoke the absolute truth. In that letter, Curzon was certainly referring to all of the land of

Palestine, including undoubtedly Judea, Samaria and Gaza.


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The British Foreign Office has a duty to review its own diplomatic archives and records during theBalfour-Curzon period, to learn how Palestine came into being as the thorough Jewish National Home

before it acts on the pro-Arab, anti-Zionist conception that Judea, Samaria and Gaza should become

the 22nd Arab state in the world. Moreover, it should bow its head in contrition for assenting to theartificial claims of the so-called Palestinians to appropriate internationally recognized Jewish land

for that nefarious purpose and for turning its back on the noble cause of Zionism that it once so eagerly

supported when doing so suited the goals of the British Empire. No less a great British statesman asDavid Lloyd George accused his own country, upon hearing of the 1939 White Paper, of committingan act of national perfidy vis-a-vis the Jewish People for not keeping its plighted word to the Jews,

who, he said, had honourably kept their part of the bargain to help the Allied cause in World War I (see

my book, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, pp. 406-408). Mr.Griffiths should reflect on Lloyd Georges condemnation of this British perfidy which continues

unabated even today.

David, you have my permission to send a copy of this letter to Mr. Griffiths and to Foreign Secretary

Hague, as well as the letter I wrote on the San Remo Resolution to the Prime Minister of Canada, Mr.

Stephen Harper, and my letter to Ilkka Uusitalo, as you see fit. Let us hope that they will not only read

these letters, but appreciate their significance.

Best regards,

Howard

Occupied Territory Try to Prove It

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