Occupied Palestinian Territory is Reoccupied Jewish Territory

The UN General Assembly should take no comfort from the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in “Legal Consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem” (“Territory”) which has failed to recognise the rights vested in the Jewish people to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in this Territory under articles 6 and 25 of the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine - preserved by article 80 of the United Nations Charter.

The ICJ has ridden roughshod over these vested Jewish rights in Paragraph 51 of the Advisory Opinion:

“Having been part of the Ottoman Empire, at the end of the First World War, Palestine was placed under a class “A” Mandate that was entrusted to Great Britain by the League of Nations, pursuant to Article 22, paragraph 4, of the League Covenant....

... The territorial boundaries of Mandatory Palestine were laid down by various instruments, in particular on the eastern border, by a British memorandum of September 16, 1922 and the Anglo-Transjordanian Treaty of February 20, 1928.”

Firstly: No mention by the ICJ that the primary purpose of the Mandate as expressed in its preamble and its articles was to promote the reconstitution of the Jewish National Home in what the ICJ is now misleadingly calling “Occupied Palestinian Territory”

Secondly: the Mandate for Palestine was not a class “A” Mandate as the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission Report explained:

“The Mandate is of a different type from the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon and the draft Mandate for Iraq. These latter, which were called for convenience “A” Mandates, accorded with the fourth paragraph of Article 22. Thus the Syrian Mandate provided that the government should be based on an organic law which should take into account the rights, interests and wishes of all the inhabitants, and that measures should be enacted “to facilitate the progressive development of Syria and the Lebanon as independent States “. The corresponding sentences of the draft Mandate for Iraq were the same. In compliance with them National Legislatures were established in due course on an elective basis. Article I of the Palestine Mandate, on the other hand, vests ” full powers of legislation and of administration”, within the limits of the Mandate, in the Mandatory.”

Thirdly: Not one reference by the ICJ to article 6 of the Mandate which stated:

“The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in cooperation with the Jewish Agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes”

Fourthly: The territorial boundaries of Palestine remained unchanged until 1946 when Transjordan (78% of the territory of Palestine located east of the Jordan River) was granted independence by Great Britain.

The ICJ has displayed a blatant anti-Jewish bias in its consideration of the Mandate.

The ICJ failed to consider:

• Article 80 of the 1945 United Nations Charter that continues to preserve the vested rights of the Jewish people in the Territory created under the Mandate until today.
• That the Jews were driven out of the Territory in 1948 by six invading Arab armies and not allowed to return there until the end of the Six Day War in 1967 to again reoccupy the Territory that had been allocated to them under the Mandate.

The ICJ-designated “Occupied Palestinian Territory including East Jerusalem” is actually “Reoccupied Jewish Territory including East Jerusalem”

The Advisory Opinion is irrelevant, completely ignores Jewish rights and is rotten at its core.

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Author’s note: The cartoon — commissioned exclusively for this article — is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones”- one of Israel’s foremost political and social commentators — whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades.