... The 1919-1920 Paris Peace Conference was concerned with the task of accommodating the political interests of the victorious Allied and associated powers with the claims to self-determination of well-known peoples which had long histories of national self-affirmation and bitter suffering under foreign oppression. Thus, considered were difficult and entangled issues touching the self-determination of such famous peoples as the Chinese, the Poles, the Germans, the Finns, the Letts, the Latvians, the Estonians, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Serbs, the Slovenes, the Croats, the Italians, the Hungarians, the Romanians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Turks, the Kurds, the Armenians, the Arabs and the Jews. In this larger context, just one decision among many was creation of an entirely new country called "Palestine" as "a national home for the Jewish people."
THE international decision to establish "a national home for the Jewish people" was the sole rationale for the 1922 creation of Jewish national home in Palestine which, under the aegis of the League of Nations, was administered by the British until May 1948, when Israel declared independence. Decision-makers at the 1919-1920 Paris Peace Conference knew that Palestine would initially lack a Jewish majority population. However, the international decision to create Palestine "as a national home for the Jewish people" was made not so much on the basis of local demographics, but in recognition of the Jewish people's aboriginal title and continuing links to the land around the Jordan River, as well as with regard to broader considerations of demography, history, politics and social justice that were both global and Middle Eastern. Thus, there was a conscious choice to refer - not just to the 85,000 Jews then living locally - but also to the past, present and future of 14 million Jews worldwide, including the 1 million Jews then living in the Near and Middle East.
Failure to create a Jewish national home in Palestine would have meant denying the Jewish people a share in the partition of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire, where Jews had lived for centuries, including some west of the Jordan River. Failure to create a Jewish national home in Palestine would also have meant that the Arab people would have received almost the whole of the Ottoman inheritance. That result would have been unacceptable to David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and their peers, because they clearly understood that the claim to self-determination of the Jewish people was no less compelling than that of the Arab people.
The Paris decision-makers strongly believed that they had also done justice to the claims of the Arab people, whom they had freed from 400 years of Turkish rule and helped on the road to independence via the creation or recognition of several new Arab states on territory that had formerly been subject to the Ottoman sultan. Moreover, the decision to create Jewish national home in Palestine did not result in the displacement of any Arabs. To the contrary, from 1922 until 1948, the Arab population of Palestine almost tripled, while the Jewish population multiplied eight times. The later problem of Arab refugees (about 736,000) from Palestine and Jewish refugees (about 850,000) from Arab countries only emerged from May 1948, when local Arabs allied with several neighboring Arab states to launch a war to exterminate the Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. ...
... Such analysis does not deny the current existence of a distinct Palestinian Arab people; nor does it claim that such a Palestinian Arab people is without rights. Rather, the conclusion is that there are rights on all sides, and that there should be a peaceful process that respectfully reconciles the rights of the Palestinian Arab people with the prior rights of the Jewish people.
Interesting!
One of the better articles on the subject.
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