Now, it is clear from this statement, that both those who hope and
those who fear that what, I believe, has been called the Balfour
Declaration is going to suffer substantial modifications, are in
error. The fears are not justified; the hopes are not
justified....The general lines of policy stand and must stand. "

The third clause of the preamble is especially significant:

"[R]ecognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of
the Jewish people with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting
their national home in that country..."

Here the drafters highlight, as the grounds or source of the Jewish
people's rights in Palestine, "the historical connection of the
Jewish people with Palestine." The Mandate contains no granting
clause by which the Allies or the League say they are giving the Jews
a right to a state or homeland in Palestine. Instead the Mandate
recognizes pre-existing Jewish rights, rights that flow from Jewish
history. The drafters pointedly used the word "reconstituting" to
describe the building of the Jewish national home in Palestine. As we
have seen, the British government stressed that the Allies obtained
certain rights based on conquest, but it did not assert that the
Jewish people's rights in Palestine derived from those of the Allies.

Traditional international law would have supported the Allies' right,
as victors, to dispose of Palestine as they saw fit. It is
noteworthy, however, that Britain and the League took pains to ensure
that their "legislative" decision in favor of the Jewish national
home was associated harmoniously with the Jews' claims of historical
ties to the Land of Israel. They wanted to make clear that the new
positive law on Palestine had a definite moral and historical
foundation. In this era of Wilsonian idealism, there were those who
believed that Zionism legitimated the British administration of
Palestine more than the other way around. As Elizabeth Monroe, a
British historian with little sympathy for Zionism, put it: "the
British climbed on the the shoulders of the Zionists in order to get
a British Palestine." Moreover, British officials believed that the
practical success of the Jewish national home policy hinged on the
Jews' confidence that their rights in Palestine were not a gift from
anyone. The British government's 1922 White Paper on Palestine made
this point:

"[I]n order that [Palestine's Jewish] community should have the best
prospect of free development and provide a full opportunity for the
Jewish people to display its capacities, it is essential that it
should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on
sufferance. That is the reason why it is necessary that the existence
of a Jewish National Home in Palestine should be internationally
guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognised to rest upon
ancient historic connection."

The first articles of the Mandate state that Britain is to use its
full administrative powers in Palestine to "plac[e] the country under
such...conditions as will secure the establishment of a Jewish
national home," to encourage "local autonomy" and to recognize the
Zionist Organization as the Jewish agency to serve as interlocutor
with the Mandatory Administration on matters "as may affect the
establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the
Jewish population in Palestine." There is no provision for the
creation of an Arab agency for Palestine, which reflects the original
conception that the Arabs would set up their state or states
elsewhere, making Arab administrative bodies in Palestine unnecessary.

Article 6 says:

"The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and
position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced,
shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and
shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency, close
settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands
not required for public purposes."

Facilitating Jewish immigration and encouraging "close settlement by
Jews on the land" are set forth as the administration's express
duties, thereby recognizing the corresponding rights of the Jews in
their national home. "Under suitable conditions," the phrase
qualifying the former duty, was originally understood as a reference
to the land's so-called economic absorptive capacity.

The Mandate does not use the words "Arab" or "Arabs," though Article
22, as a means of protecting the civic rights of all the communities,
does state that English, Arabic, and Hebrew shall be official
languages in the territory.

Which brings us to Article 25--the focus of a great controversy. But
before parsing it, we must return to our chronology.

Churchill's Intervention

In the months following the April 1920 San Remo Conference, at which
the Middle Eastern mandates were drafted, Britain faced difficult
problems in the region. First among these was: How to cut the cost
of its postwar military deployments there? Second was: How to protect
its various, delicate diplomatic and legal arrangements with
France--strained as a result of Anglo-French differences in Europe as
well as the Middle East--from further damage at the hands of
Britain's Arab clients, the Hashemite family, who were asserting
claims to French mandate territory in Syria.

The Hashemites, descendants of the Prophet Mohammed and the guardians
of the Moslem Holy Cities, Mecca and Medina, had declared their
region of western Arabia, known as the Hedjaz, an independent kingdom
in 1916. Britain granted recognition. The king's sons, Feisal and
Abdullah, led the small Arab force that fought the Turks in World War
I alongside the brilliant, if bizarre, British Colonel T.E. Lawrence
("of Arabia"). On the basis of some exquisitely indefinite British
wartime promises, the Hashemites believed themselves entitled to a
new kingdom comprising most of the Middle East. To win his own state,
the Hashemite Emir Feisal was willing to welcome the creation of a
Jewish state in Palestine.

In January 1919, Feisal, acting on behalf of the Arab Kingdom of the
Hedjaz, entered into a formal written agreement with Chaim Weizmann,
leader of the Zionist Organization. The Arab side pledged to support
all necessary measures for implementing the Balfour Declaration and
"to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a
large scale, and as quickly as possible to settle Jewish immigrants
upon the land through closer settlement and intensive cultivation of
the soil." In return, the Jewish side pledged to support "the closest
possible collaboration in the development of the Arab State," in
harmony with the aspirations of the Arab national movement, and to
provide Zionist "experts" to help the Arab state develop its economy.
Feisal conditioned the agreement on the prompt establishment of an
independent Arab state reaching from Turkey to the Indian Ocean.

Alas, this early land-for-peace deal with the Arab leader came to
naught. The notables from around the Arab world who gathered in
Damascus after the war were willing to accept Feisal's leadership,
but not an accommodation with the Zionists. Furthermore, in the
summer of 1920, French forces expelled Feisal from Syria, thus
aborting the Kingdom of Syria and negating Feisal's agreement with
the Zionists. The French held Britain responsible for keeping its
Arab friends out of French hair in the future. The opportunity to
rule a vast Arab kingdom from Damascus had induced Feisal to pledge
peace with a Jewish Palestinian state. But the pledge proved anathema
to his constituents, the moment passed, and the offer, once off the
table, disappeared beyond retrieval.

It became the job of Winston Churchill, recently appointed colonial
secretary, to find a way out of Britain's Middle Eastern dilemmas.
Early in 1921, Churchill developed a plan. The key was to transfer to
Arab powers the responsibility for maintaining order in the vast,
undeveloped and generally inhospitable territories of Mesopotamia and
Eastern Palestine. He aimed to satisfy the Hashemites by having
Feisal elected king in Mesopotamia and allowing Feisal's brother, the
less well-regarded Abdullah, to try his hand as ruling Emir of
Eastern Palestine. Thus came into being both the Hashemite Kingdom of
Iraq, which lasted until the revolution of 1958, and the Hashemite
Emirate of Trans-Jordan, which in 1946 gained independence as the
Kingdom of Trans-Jordan.

Churchill's inclination to put Eastern Palestine under Arab
administration--to lop off around 80 percent of the territory
originally available for the Jewish national home--caused
consternation among the Jews. It moved Chaim Weizmann to write
Churchill that a Jewish national home confined to Western Palestine
was altogether inadequate:

"The economic progress of Cis-Jordania [that is, Western Palestine]
itself is dependent upon the development of these Trans-Jordanian
plains, for they form the natural granary of all Palestine and
without them Palestine can never become a self-sustaining economic
unit and a real National Home.... It is fully realized that His
Majesty's Government must consider their pledges to the Arab people
and the means of satisfying their legitimate aspirations. But the
taking from Palestine of a few thousand square miles, scarcely
inhabited and long derelict would be scant satisfaction to Arab
Nationalism while it would go far to frustrate the entire policy of
His Majesty's Government regarding the Jewish National Home."

Meanwhile, representatives of the leading Arab families of Palestine
sent Churchill a memorandum of their own. Though they rejected the
notion that the Arabs of Palestine are a nationality different from
that of the Arab people in general, they organized themselves
politically to fit within the "imperialist" boundaries they hoped to
erase. Hence, it was in the name of the Palestinian Arab Congress
that they wrote to Churchill declaring the Balfour Declaration
invalid, stating that "Palestine belongs legally to the Arabs" and
contending not only that the Jews have no rights in the land, but
that they have no rights at all as a national group: "[T]hey have no
separate political or lingual existence." The Arab leaders creatively
used the phenomenon of antisemitism as an argument against Zionism: