Whose Land is Palestine?

Jews are "In Palestine as of Right and Not on Sufferance"

Winston Churchill
British Secretary of State for the Colonies
June 1922

April 21, 2011 | Eli E. Hertz

International law expert Professor Eugene V. Rostow, a key draftee of the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242, examining the claim for Arab Palestinian self-determination on the basis of law, concluded: [1]

"The Mandate [for Palestine] [2] implicitly denies Arab claims to national political rights in the area in favor of the Jews; the mandated territory was in effect reserved to the Jewish people for their self-determination and political development, in acknowledgment of the historic connection of the Jewish people to the land. Lord Curzon, who was then the British Foreign Minister, made this reading of the mandate explicit. There remains simply the theory that the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have an inherent 'natural law' claim to the area. Neither customary international law nor the United Nations Charter acknowledges that every group of people claiming to be a nation has the right to a state of its own." [italics by author] Political rights to self-determination as a polity for Arabs, were guaranteed by the League of Nations in four other mandates - in Lebanon and Syria [The French Mandate], Iraq and later Trans-Jordan [The British Mandate].

[1] See Eugene V. Rostow, The Future of Palestine, Institute for National Strategic Studies, November 1993. Professor Rostow was Sterling Professor of Law and Public Affairs Emeritus at Yale University and served as the Dean of Yale Law School (1955-66); Distinguished Research Professor of Law and Diplomacy, National Defense University; Adjunct Fellow, American Enterprise Institute. In 1967, as U.S. Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, he became a key draftee of UN Security Council Resolution 242. See also his article: "Are Israel's Settlements Legal?" The New Republic, October 21, 1991.

[2] "Mandate for Palestine" at: http://mythsandfacts.com/