As I was researching my previous article on the myth of "Palestinian territory," I came upon one argument that the territory has been "Palestinian" since the end of the Ottoman Empire.
I found it in a UN document, "The Legal Status of the West Bank and Gaza," written in 1982.
It is quite biased. While it pretends to look at all the legal aspects of who owned the title to Palestine between 1920 and 1948, it doesn't even mention the San Remo Conference, later ratified by the League of Nations, that confirmed the Balfour Declaration and said that the area of Palestine is meant for a Jewish national home.
In fact, the document relies almost exclusively on the legal arguments of a certain Henry Cattan, quoting from a book of his called Sovereignty and Palestine, The Arab-Israeli Conflict.
I couldn't find that book online, but I did find a 1973 book of Cattan's where he gave the same legal arguments that ignored everything the League of Nations did. He conflates the word "Palestine" from before 1948 with the Palestinians of 1973, even though the Arab residents of Palestine showed little interest in a state of their own. An expert that ignores all the counter-arguments is not a real expert but a propagandist.
But what is worse is that Cattan also argued, in 1973, that Israel was an illegitimate state even then. In fact, that is the title of one of his chapters.
Which means that the UN, in 1982, issued a document using the the legal arguments of an antisemite who claimed that most Jews in Israel in 1948 were there illegally and could not be counted as legal residents, and who argued that even the UN was doing something illicit when it recognized Israel, quoted him approvingly about the legal status of the area of the British Mandate.
His arguments that Israel is illegitimate in whole are the arguments that we can expect would be resurrected if the world recognizes a Palestinian state. Such a recognition would not be the end of the conflict, as is fervently hoped by the Western world, but it would be an accelerant.
As soon as the question of "occupation" would be settled, the Israel haters would bring up antisemite Henry Cattan's arguments that Israel itself has no legal basis for existing.
The UN committee that drafted this document of their position of the legal status of the territories certainly also accepted Cattan's more expansive anti-Israel arguments. They just stayed quiet about them because they would not have been accepted in 1982 and in fact would have cast doubt on the rest of the document.
But we can expect that Henry Cattan's anti-Israel opinions will be resurrected very soon.
