1. Palestine: Should Britain take over the Government of Israel again?
Does UK have rights as the last conquering power of Palestine/ Israel?
Why shouldn’t Britain re-assert its government over all of Palestine and Jordan? After all, the British army conquered this territory in 1917. It is theirs by conquest. The Ottoman Turkish empire, which had ruled the area since 1516, was defeated. It yielded sovereign control to the British Empire troops. The British forces chased the Turks out of the whole of the eastern Mediterranean.
The Turks have no rights to the land, to taxes, or to anything else. They lost it all. But the British could take over all these matters and organize the country as they wished.
Some people may object to this proposal. They would say military conquest does not provide legitimacy. Then what does?
Property, residence rights of citizens and heritage rights under the just rule of Law, they reply.
So we have two methods of determining who should be able to form a government in Palestine or Israel:
conquest by war, or
property rights of land ownership and heritage claims of the citizens.
Which citizens? Not the Turks. What about legal residents that the Turks had previously expelled?
Allenby ‘the prophet’
What was the British attitude at the time? What claim did they make? What do the UK’s official documents of conquest say? What did the inhabitants say when the British conquered Jerusalem? Here are some other official maps and extracts from military reports.
Huge crowds greeted the British at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem. General Allenby, commander of the British invading army, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, showed respect for the holiness of the land. He entered Jerusalem on foot, unmounted and without his war horse. The official account records that no British flags were shown throughout the simple ceremony of the change of sovereignty.
Local eye-witnesses said the crowds that came to greet him were bigger than anyone had seen before. Bigger than that which famously greeted Kaiser Wilhelm in 1898; bigger than the huge celebration on the revival of a Constitution by the Young Turks a decade later.
Many wept openly with joy. Others embraced. Priests rejoiced. The Arab civilians were enthusiastic. They saw it as the fulfilment of an Arab prophecy: that
When the Nile flowed into Palestine, the prophet (al Nebi) from the west would drive the Turk from Jerusalem.
And sure enough, who poured into Palestine but the Egyptian Expeditionary Force with General Allenby as head of the army!
The Jews were also happy. Allenby entered Jerusalem on the winter Festival of Chanukah. It celebrated the victorious entry into Jerusalem, way back in 165 BCE, of Judas Maccabeus. He rededicated the Temple after defeating the superior army of the Seleucid Empire in 165 BCE. In 1917 the arrival of the British forces prevented the Turks carrying out their order for ‘the wholesale deportation of Hebrew colonists and residents’ including valuable agriculturists.
The Ottoman Sultan thought he could grant and revoke land rights at will. That was both unjust and the recipe for economic decline.
The British published in Hebrew, Arabic, French, English, Greek, Russian and Italian notices that the hallowed sites were to be preserved free for worshippers and open to all. Under the Turks any assembly of more than three people had been forcibly stopped by the police.
Ownership and international Law
When an army conquers a land, the conquerors do not always change all the previous laws of the land. That would cause uncontrollable chaos. They may take administrative buildings and some homes of the enemy rich but the majority of the population usually keeps their property. The laws of property may remain as before. Authentic national history as well as adherence to authentic religious beliefs are not forgotten despite persecution. The holy sites and archaeological heritage over centuries cannot be made to disappear.
And if the conquerors are chased out, the property they commandeered is returned to the original owners. Those who owned property but had previously been expelled could reclaim their homes and industries. This is exactly what happened after World War 2. People returned and reclaimed their property from which they had been expelled by an enemy invader.
It also happened in North Cyprus where Greek householders fled before an invading Turkish army in 1974. The houses were then occupied by others. When a Turkish Cypriot tried to sell ‘their house’ to a British citizen they were stopped. The original owner appealed both to the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg and the High Court in London. Both courts gave the same judgement. It was illegal to sell the ‘occupied house’. The house belongs to the original owner and an ‘occupier’ cannot legally sell it.
After the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1, Germany took the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine as war booty. What was their status and that of its inhabitants? Lorrainer Robert Schuman, the initiator of the European Community peace system, wrote his Doctorate of Law originally with a title Transfer and Seizure of a part of a Heritage. As this analysis of German civil law code was to be submitted at the German-occupied university of Strassburg, he was advised to camouflage the title somewhat. The question remains an important one in law. The United Nations has tried to obfuscate some of the legal principles when it comes to Palestine.
What do you mean ‘Occupied’?
In English the term ‘occupied’ can have two senses. It can mean militarily occupied, or it can be legally occupied. In the latter sense I am the occupier of my house, whether rented or owned.
If a property is ‘illegally occupied’ the first question should be: by which law is it illegal? What contract is defective?
The British occupied what was then called Palestine in 1917. Was it a legal occupation? It was a military occupation replacing that of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. To whom should the British return the land, if they believed in the rule of law?
The Ottoman Turks had conquered the land from Mamluks of Egypt. Should the land be then given back to Egypt? That hardly deserves a thought. The Mamluks had long disappeared. The Mamluks took it from the Crusaders of Europe. They, in turn, conquered it from the Fatimid Ismaili Shi’ite Caliphate. Should the land be given to the Shi’ites? But was it theirs? The Fatimids took it from the Abbasids who took it from the Umayyads. They fought the Roman Empire, which then had its capital at Constantinople.
As for the earlier Romans, who did they fight against? Well they invaded the land militarily in 63 BCE under Pompey. He sacked the Temple treasuries of gold and silver. The Romans took sovereign rights from the people who had been living there and who claimed it as home for more than a thousand years — the Jews and Israelites. They had it as homeland centuries before Rome existed as a power.
For the next millennium and more, a stalwart group of Jews continually lived in Palestine, always persecuted, sometimes burned to death and brutalized into poverty. They experienced all this later to-ing and fro-ing among the factious Muslim armies and the Crusaders. The Jews who were expelled also claimed incessantly over the centuries their right to return to take up ancestral homes. Their land was never abandoned in their eyes and in their constant affirmations: ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ The soil of Israel represented their identity.
So who should the British have given Palestine back to? Or should the British have kept it like everyone else tried to do? No, they tried to follow the rule of law.
What decision did the British and other States make to return the powers of government to the land’s legitimate owners?
Judea and Samaria by name
The maps above that General Allenby used show that the British (and many other countries) called the country by identifiers like Judea, Galilee, and Ephraim. The British Government recognized that these and other names were engraved on the land. They authenticated ownership as much as names on a passport or titles on a property deed of Palestine.
But who were the Palestinians? Surely the governments of the EU and the United Nations wouldn’t use disinformation, would they?