MontyB
All-Blacks Supporter
I'm very happy with this mature view. The mandate was to create a Jewish national Home in what is now Israel, PA and Jordan (they called it reconstituting). It was the British who had to accomplish that. In the beginning they really tried their utmost best to achieve that. Letters and reports to the government prove that.
The following is my reasoning with the information I have. When the mandate started the British could not immediately give all the land to a few Jews. The mandate gave unlimited immigration to the Jews but it was not allowed to harm the people already living there. That's why the British tried to find a balance between immigration and the economy to support the increase of people.
No.
Your previous text clearly indicates Jordan was not included in any deal, the borders of Palestine were fixed at the point that Palestine met Trans-Jordan.
The fact still remains that "Israel" was in my opinion never the intention of the mandate, Israel is the manifestation of European colonisation at the expense of the indigenous/native population and as such could never have been accepted as part of any mandate.
Palestine in my opinion was meant to be a single state under the control of the local population as it was post WW1 not 1948 structured along the lines of a modern western state ie secular and had this come about I doubt it would have been called Israel.
That went fairly well in the beginning. Some land in possession of the mandate (transfer from the Ottoman empire, completely legal in international law) was destined for acquirement by the Jews. The Arab leadership that fought alongside the British and the Jews against the Turks were happy with the arrival of the Jews but didn't want a Jewish state out of religious grounds. (replace Jews with Christians and it would have been the same).That was of course a major problem for the British because they needed the Arabs for the oil and the use of the Suez canal. Things got worse with the first (religious) attacks on the Jews. And it got worse and worse. Palestinians selling their land to Jews were killed by their fellow countrymen. The attacks on Jews increased and they started to defend themselves. In the beginning the British did whatever they could to protect the Jews but it became a nightmare. They also came under attack of the fanatical Palestinians and didn't want to be in the middle of that "war" and became reluctant to intervene. In the meantime they reduced the immigration, even sending away (deporting) ships full of refugees to the other side of the world to please the Arabs. This angered the Jews. Some of them were fed up with the defense and the failure to give them the promised Jewish state and started to go on the offensive. So we had everyone fighting against everyone. The British ended the mandate and left. The Jews declared independence on the land that was to be theirs according to the partition plan and the Arabs attacked with the intention to destroy it (infringement of international law). The attacks had nothing to do with the immigrants but with their religion, as said before. It also was to no help for the Palestinians for which the Arabs didn't care, propably because they didn't fight along them against the Ottoman Turks.
I also like to point you to the notion of "stealing the land". This had nothing to do with the ownership but all with the religious belief that non muslims are not to rule over muslim ground and that it is the duty of every muslim to do something about that (Jihad).
All pretty much irrelevant, people have the right to defend the land they have lived on for centuries.
Very simple. Universal laws. Constitutional equality. The British started to go into that direction adding the principles of the Anglo-Saxon system (which
is based on judicial precedents or case law) to the Ottoman laws. Israeli law is also based on that. Specific laws were enacted for some of the recognized religious communities including the Moslems, the Druze, the Jews, and the Christian communities (generally restricted to matters of marriage and divorce). This is religious freedom opposite to laws based on the Koran, which does not give religious freedom but religious tolerance at best.
You are barking up the wrong tree as you cant even convince Israelis that they aren't just paying lip service to equality as recent polls have pointed out 60% of them believe there system is one of institutionalised racism and a further 8% describe it as an apartheid state.
If you cant convince them you sure as hell wont convince me.
I remain convinced that the Israel of today is not the Palestine envisaged in the mandates.