Friday, April 24, 2020
From Ian:
Prof. Efraim Karsh: How the Jewish National Home Entered International Law
Prof. Efraim Karsh: How the Jewish National Home Entered International Law
The San Remo conference in April 1920 appointed Britain as mandatory for Palestine with the specific task of "putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2, 1917, by the British Government [the Balfour Declaration], and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." This mandate was then ratified on July 24, 1922, by the Council of the League of Nations - the UN's predecessor.Melanie Phillips: Israel overcomes virus of political, moral collapse
The importance of the Palestine mandate cannot be overstated. Though falling short of the proposed Zionist formula that "Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people," it signified an unqualified recognition, by the official representative of the will of the international community, of the Jews as a national group - rather than a purely religious community - and acknowledgment of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" as "the grounds for reconstituting their national home in the country."
It is a historical tragedy that 100 years after this momentous event, the Palestinian leadership and its international champions remain entrenched in the rejection not only of the millenarian Jewish attachment to Palestine but of the very existence of a Jewish People (and by implication its right to statehood).
Rather than keep trying to turn the clock backward at the certain cost of prolonging their people's statelessness and suffering, it is time for this leadership to shed its century-long recalcitrance and opt for peace and reconciliation with their Israeli neighbors.
One hundred years ago this Sunday, the four principal allied powers involved in World War I signed a resolution at San Remo. Next week, Israel celebrates Yom Ha'atzmaut, the 72nd anniversary of the state's declaration of independence.Caroline Glick: American Jewry's organizational crackup
Typically, the world thinks that the key step towards the establishment of the State of Israel was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the statement in which the British government committed itself to work for the establishment of a Jewish home in what was then called Palestine.
Relatively little attention has been paid to the more important milestone in that story: the San Remo resolution signed on April 26, 1920.
For it was at San Remo that Britain, France, Italy, and Japan turned the Balfour Declaration into an internationally binding treaty to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, with Britain being given the mandate to facilitate Jewish immigration there.
A few months after the San Remo conference, for reasons of realpolitik, Britain hived off some three-quarters of Palestine to create Transjordan.
The scope of what was left for the Jewish national home, however, is something that Israel's enemies don't want to acknowledge – and is the reason that San Remo is conspicuously ignored. For in that resolution lie the roots of Jewish legitimacy, not just in Israel but also in the disputed territories.
That's because the Palestine within which the Jews were legally entitled to settle as their designated national home included not just the Israel that emerged in 1948, but also Judea and Samaria. That legal right given to the Jews to settle the entire land of Mandatory Palestine has never been abrogated.
During the war of extermination mounted against Israel at its rebirth in 1948, some of that designated territory was captured by the Jordanians.
As the international lawyer Eugene Kontorovitch has noted, when Israel eventually recovered this land as a result of the Six-Day War in 1967, much of the international community pretended that its own earlier guarantees didn't exist.
Far from acknowledging the legal, moral and historical right of the Jewish people to live in Judea and Samaria, the international community has consistently claimed that the areas Jordan ethnically cleansed of Jews in 1948 must indefinitely remain Jew-free zones.
Last week an event occurred that will be remembered as a key moment in the disintegration of organized American Jewish support for Israel and American Jewish organizational life itself.
Last Friday, the leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations announced that the Conference's nominating committee had selected Dianne Lob, the former president of HIAS to run unopposed for the position of chairman of the Conference's Executive Board. Her election is scheduled to take place on April 28.
The Conference of Presidents – an umbrella group that comprises 53 Jewish American organizations – is widely viewed as the most important Jewish organization in the United States.
Why is Lob's selection important? On the face of things, it was unremarkable. People who have known Lob for decades describe her as a garden variety New York Jewish liberal whose views on Israel are in keeping with the views of the vast majority of American Jews.
Members of the Conference of President, for their part, claim not to know her at all. During her term as chairman of HIAS, from 2016-2019, she didn't participate in major Conference events like its trips to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Lob's selection is an earthquake in American Jewish organizational life is not because of anything she has said or done, but because of her organizational affiliation with HIAS.
HIAS was established at the end of the 19th century under the name Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to assist the hundreds of thousands of penniless Eastern European Jews who were immigrating at the time to the US. The last major group of Jewish immigrants HIAS was involved in resettling in the US were the Jews who left the Soviet Union between the 1970s and 1990s.
In 2014, HIAS officially set its Jewish roots aside. It abandoned its full name in favor of its acronym. HIAS CEO and President Mark Hetfield claimed that the world "Hebrew" is exclusionary.
