The Balfour Declaration and International Law

An American general who formerly headed the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization in Palestine stated recently: The American mind is being manipulated as far as Palestine is concerned. He was referring to Zionist manipulations. My own experiences with the Zionist Organization of America, which refused to answer any of my requests for varied information, confirm the general\u27s charge. My own acquaintance with the Palestine problem has revealed that the equities involved in the area have been buried under a mass of distortion, misinformation and insidious propaganda which have misrepresented the actual facts and veiled the historical and legal truth to the extent that the Palestinian victims are made to appear as being the wrongdoers and the Zionist wrongdoers as the victims. The present problem in Palestine is the derivative of an extraordinary accumulation of injustices, illegalities and violations by Zionism of many decencies: violations of international law, violations of League of Nations and United Nations provisions, violations of fundamental human rights. For more than three-quarters of a century there has been interminable conflict between the indigenous Palestinian Arab people and alien-imported Zionist ideology which maintains that Palestine belongs to the Jews. On the other hand, there is the international law perspective which rejects the Zionist ideological claim and its form of extralegal logic. It may be stated with historical assurance that the great powers and organized international Zionism have used power politics, including a large measure of military methods, to deal with the problems of Palestine. From this accurate premise it may be erroneously deduced that international law has been a failure in the Palestine question. It would be far more accurate to conclude that international law has not even been applied in the Zionist-Palestinian issue. A careful legal and historical analysis demonstrates beyond doubt that the Balfour Declaration is invalid under the criteria of modern international law; it should also be recalled that the instruments of Zionist discrimination and oppression of the Palestinian people in Palestine-Israel have not been established in a day or even as short a period of time as a half century, Zionist beginnings, at the latest, were at the First Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland in 1897. From there Zionism has proceeded extralegally one step at a time in a carefully planned program utilizing political, military and propaganda instruments, culminating in the illegal military fait accompli of 1948 when the Jewish State of Israel was installed by organized Zionism. The native Arab people were ruthlessly driven out as part of an Israeli master-plan to rid Palestine of its Arab people in order to build an exclusivist Jewish state, and the few Arabs who remained in Israel have been exploited and repressed by the Israeli Zionist establishment. Any objective student of the Middle East will reach these conclusions if he analyzes Zionist history and its consistent violations of international legal principles and norms. Moreover, without an understanding of these causative factors of the Palestine problem, it is important to recognize that the plight of the Palestinian people will continue to be ignorantly ignored. What must be axiomatically recognized is that the violent uprooting of the Palestinians from their native land by international Zionist Jewry and their suppliants can have no legal or moral justification. Not only is it a violation of international law and the principles of the United Nations Charter, it also constitutes an unparalleled violation of elementary principles of humanity and civilization. This, the writer has disclosed in his analysis of the Balfour Declaration in the context of international law