Israel Hayom..
24 April '20..
Link: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-jewish-peoples-charter-of-liberation/..
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A moment before the world was turned upside down by a tiny virus and our lives became one long day, I managed, at the start of February, to visit the little town of San Remo on the Italian Riviera. We in the Israeli Embassy had been planning to hold a big event there on Sunday, April 26, to be attended by world leaders, to mark the 100th anniversary of the famous conference. The mayor had even put the symphony orchestra of the famous San Remo Festival at our disposal.
The idea was to highlight, in the global discourse, the main insight of all those who take an interest in the decisions made at the conference: in contrast to the conventions I frequently hear voiced in the world, international law is absolutely on our side.
We also planned an exhibit that would be shown in the Italian Senate, the European Parliament, and the Israeli Knesset, and display documents and items from that period. We visited the archives at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I saw files that bulged with documents from back then that might not have been opened since.
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For a week, the Villa Devachan in San Remo hosted representatives of the powers that were victorious in World War I: British Prime Minister Lloyd George, French Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand, Italian Prime Minister Francesco Nitti, Japanese representative Keishiro Matsui, and the US Ambassador to Rome, Robert U. Johnson. They, along with their aides, ushered in the decisions that led to the birth of the Jewish state.
In the archives at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, my eyes caught a telegram to "His Excellency Nitti" sent directly to San Remo, titled "The Peace Conference," which stated "We hope that the Supreme Council will resolve the question of Palestine in accordance with the Balfour Declaration." It was signed by the Community of Achim Neamonim and the Rabbi Benjamin Cohen. There were other similar telegrams that teach us about the tense anticipation in the Jewish world and how importantly the conference was perceived, even at the time.
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From a Zionist historical perspective, the San Remo Conference was of much greater importance than the Balfour Declaration -- the difference between a non-binding declaration and anchoring it in law. Oddly, Zionist historiography has forgotten this major event. We haven't really studied it. It's time to correct that.
One hundred years have passed since that conference in San Remo, and once again the world is fighting a global war -- this time against an invisible enemy that is threatening to infect all humanity with a deadly disease. The pandemic disrupted our plans. The April event was cancelled, and we are planning a new event to mark the hundredth anniversary of the conference. If life gets back on track, we'll meet in San Remo on Nov. 2, another symbolic date, the day of the Balfour Declaration.
The world entered World War I with the old order, and after the war a new order for Europe and the Middle East was born. In the hundreds of years leading up to it, Palestina had become a far-off district of the Ottoman Empire. The American writer Mark Twain visited in 1867 and described it as a land that "sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse." Without noticing, he echoed the curses in the Bible: "I myself will lay waste the land, so that your enemies who live there will be appalled." (Leviticus 26:32)
Eleven years after that same journey by Twain, Jewish pioneers moved into a plague-ridden swampland to establish an independent community that would support itself by its own labor, for the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple. They called the place Petah Tikva, from the comforting prophecy by Hosea, who foresaw that one day the Valley of Achor, the "cursed valley," would once again give hope.
After Petah Tikva, more Jewish communities were founded during the First Aliyah, and then the Second Aliyah -- all under the rule of the Ottoman Empire -- until the first world war broke out.
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Every war is replete with military and political interests, and the Balfour Declaration played a role in Britain's desire to win over Jewish public opinion. But Palestina was not some territorial gift to a ruler, like Transjordan to Emir Abdullah I, who was from Hejaz (now part of Saudi Arabia). British Prime Minister Lloyd George, as well as Lord Balfour, were devout Christians, Zionist Christians, which meant they believed in the biblical prophecies about the Jews' return to Zion and wanted to help make them come true and create a renaissance of Jewish nationality in the Holy Land, and do justice for our people's suffering.
Until then, anyone who lost a war paid for it in the territory. The winner took their land. This time, the key powers who won the war tried to do something different: create a new order in Europe and the Middle East and give the land to the people who lived there, in the spirit of US President Woodrow Wilson, who sought to create "peace without victory."
At the Paris Peace Conference, which convened in January 1919, the powers discussed the territories that had fallen into their hands. Europe was recreated there. The powers that had won territories from the losers gave them to others. They signed all the documents. Among other things, the representatives heard from the Arab delegation headed by Emir Faisal, who represented the Hashemite family, and the delegation of the Zionist movement, led by Dr. Chaim Weizmann. The Zionist leader was 46 at the time. The Arabs wanted to establish one large country across the entire Middle East. Faisal and Weizmann had agreed to support each other's proposals.
What did the Jews want? At the time, there were fewer than 100,000 Jews living in Palestina, compared to 600,000 Arabs. The Zionist leaders didn't want a state right away. They needed to worry about Jews making aliyah, and they needed to prepare the land for that to happen. But they asked for a few basic things that were of unparalleled importance for the future: that the world powers recognize our historic right to the land that had been called Palestina since the days of the Emperor Hadrian in the second century CE. As if that weren't enough, they also asked for the right to reconstitute their national home there.
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The request to reconstitute the Land had been submitted to Lord Balfour as early as August 1917. He brought it to the British cabinet, and only there was the term "reconstitution" altered to the less-binding "establishment." Now, with the whole world watching, Weizmann had restored the original request.
Dr. Jacques Gauthier, who has researched the subject extensively and from whom I learned much of what is written here (he is working on a new book that sums up a 1,300-page study), notes correctly that "reconstitute" means building on what already existed. Anyone who signs off on that needs to look into the history of the Jews' ties to the Land, the place Jerusalem holds for the people and their faith, and that is what they agree to. The map Weizmann and his friends laid out before the representatives of the world powers was the twin of what they knew as the ancient biblical borders of the 12 tribes.
Did the world powers agree? The documents signed at the Paris Peace Conference -- about 40 of them -- mostly addressed Europe and its new design. They didn't manage to cover the Ottoman Empire; Europe was close and its own matters were urgent. So they agreed to meet again in San Remo on April 19.
In the meantime, when the Paris conference ended in January 1920, the League of Nations was founded by a conference decision. The 20th clause of its covenant states that in the territories won in the war, if the people there were unable to found a state that would meet the criteria of the modern world, a "sacred trust of civilization" would be established. Practically speaking, that meant the Mandate.
On April 19, representatives of the world powers met in the Villa Devachan in San Remo to finish the job. They accepted the Arabs' demands and the vast majority of the Ottoman Empire territory was given to them, which now includes the territory of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. They discussed Palestina at the end of the week, and on April 25 the leaders decided to accept the Jews' claims. A decision was made to integrate the Balfour Declaration into the charter, they recognized our right to Palestina, and agreed to the request to "reconstitute" what had once been ours. In effect, for the first time since the destruction of the first century CE, the nations of the world had recognized the Jewish people as a legitimate claimant to its ancient land.
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Chaim Weizmann was there as a successor to Theodor Herzl. In his book The Founding Fathers of Zionism, Benzion Netanyahu demonstrated how Herzl had worked mainly to secure nations' recognition of the Jewish people's right to their land. If not for his activity, the communities of the First and Second Aliyah would have remained colonies, not communities of a future state. So he worked with the Turkish sultan, the German Kaiser, and the British. Weizmann picked the fruit of his labor in the form of the Balfour Declaration. It was only a declaration, nothing binding. Now, at San Remo, the declaration was given the validity of international law.
In August 1920, the San Remo decisions were included in the Treaty of Sèvres, and later in the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, in which Turkey gave up its claims to territory in the Middle East. Gauthier said that when you put the 22nd article of the covenant of the League of Nations, the San Remo Resolution, the Mandate over Palestina and its approval in 1922, together, "you get the declaration of independence of the Jewish people."
Weizmann understood how momentous an occasion it was. He said, "The San Remo Resolution, that recognition to our rights to Palestina, which was included in the charter with Turkey [Treaty of Sèvres] and became part of international law -- is the biggest political event in the history of our movement [the Zionist movement] and possibly -- it would not be an exaggeration to say -- the entire history of the Jewish people, since the exile."
When it came to the Arabs of the Land, the resolution upheld their religious and civil rights, but definitely did not mention any national rights, which were awarded (only in this country) to Jews alone. Arab nationality is present in the other charters, as Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Syria-Lebanon.
A year later, in April 1921, because of political and diplomatic considerations pertaining to the Arabs of the region and the Hashemite family, Britain removed from the mandate that had been given it to establish a national home for the Jewish people all of Transjordan (three-quarters of the original mandate) and founded there the Emirates of Transjordan, which would later become the modern-day Kingdom of Jordan. Effectively, of all the territory of the Middle East (including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and more), 99% had been given to the Arabs, with about one percent remaining for the Jews.
In 1946 the United Nations was established in place of the League of Nations. The 80th article of the UN Charter states that the rights given earlier by the League of Nations must be upheld. What had been given would not be taken away.
The UN Partition Plan of Nov. 29, 1947, was exactly that: a non-binding proposal by the UN General Assembly that depended on the agreement of both sides. The Jews agreed; the Arabs launched a war of annihilation the next day. We were left with the rights the nations of the world had given the Jewish people in April 1920. All the other agreements that followed the Paris and San Remo conferences were honored, and almost no one challenged the allotment of territory to the Arab peoples. Only the agreement about the Jewish people's right to their ancient land was challenged.
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Darkness and light are intertwined. At certain moments of history, we had the support of other nations. Mostly, we fought for what others take for granted. The war against the Jewish people took on various guises. If throughout history we learned to recognize the anti-Semitism we knew, which was based on difference of faith, in the last century we have come to know a new anti-Semitism: opposition to the existence of Jewish nationality, among other things by delegitimizing the very legality of the state, or unfortunately, the claim that our presence in Judea and Samaria in Israel is "against international law." Well, San Remo.
World War I led to a meeting between Lord Balfour and Lloyd George, and apparently other politicians as well, who supported the Jews' return to Zion and the fulfillment of the biblical prophecies. Some doubt the motives of the Christian Zionists; claiming that everything they did was intended to hasten the arrival of their own Messiah ("When he comes, we'll talk," Menachem Begin once said). But even those who opposed the return to Zion -- and they were the majority -- believed in the Second Coming, and nevertheless opted to wait for him while opposing the return of the Jews to their land.
Either way, at the root of the war of some entities in the world against the state of Israel is their attitude toward the Jews' return to history and their own land. In the long-term historical perspective, that is just as significant an aspect as the political and military interests that formed the basis of all the understandings and agreements. The world needs to choose on which side of history it will stand on the return to Zion. The British denial during the Mandate of their historic mission to help the Jewish people reconstitute an independent state led to the publication of the White Papers and a halt to aliyah during World War II. The result was genocide and the closure of all gates of refuge. We must dust off the story of San Remo and teach it to the generations to come. From now on, say, it's not the Balfour Declaration, but the San Remo Conference in Italy that was the defining moment in the history of Zionism.
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One last observation: I went to check the Hebrew date of the conference. I discovered that it began on the first day of Iyar, and lasted a week. The discussion about the Land of Israel took place on the last two days, the 6th and 7th days of Iyar. Thus far, we knew that the State of Israel was established on the 5th of Iyar and Jerusalem was liberated on the 28th of Iyar. On the 18th of Iyar we celebrate Lag Ba'omer, which is also linked to the war for our people's freedom. To these three dates of celebration we can definitely add the 7th of Iyar, the Hebrew date of the San Remo decision, which 28 years later led to the revival of the state of Israel.
Dror Eydar is Israel's ambassador to Italy.
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