The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reminds us that President Biden harassed Netanyahu about stopping the war in Gaza, strongly advised him against launching a military attack against Hamas, and even after the IDF’s obvious military success, sought to intimidate him from advancing to the city of Rafah, where Yahya Sinwar was believed to be hiding. The paper concluded that “if Israel had taken Mr. Biden’s advice, Sinwar, Nasrallah, and the rest of the Hamas-Hezbollah leadership would still be alive.” Arutz Sheva writer Gary Willig wrote of the next war that would have ensued.
Now French President Emmanuel Macron allegedly asserted, that “Netanyahu must not forget that his country was created by a decision of the UN. Therefore, he should not liberate himself from the decisions of the UN,” Apparently, he was referring to UN Resolution 181 adopted on November 29, 1947.
Perhaps if Macron understood how Israel came into being, he would not be so callous in demanding Israel adhere to UN resolutions, when they are consistently prejudicial to the security of the Jewish state. As Abba Eban, Israel’s first permanent representative to the UN, once pointed out, the UN is “the world center for antisemitism.”
Did the UN Create the State of Israel?
The Balfour Declaration
The Balfour Declaration, sent by British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour in a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild on November 2,1917 read: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object….”
In a speech in Parliament on November 17, 1919, Lord Balfour, who held no ill will toward the Arabs, believed that the Jewish claim to Palestine was more compelling: “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
In April 1931, David Lloyd George, who had been Prime Minister of England when the Imperial Cabinet formulated the idea of a national home, explained the justification for the Balfour Declaration: “The Jews surely have a special claim on Canaan. They are the only people who have made a success of it during the past 3,000 years. They are the only people who have made its name immortal, and as a race, they have no other home. This was their first; this has been their only home…. Since their long exile… this is the time and opportunity for enabling them once more to recreate their lives as a separate people in their old home and to make their contribution to humanity as a separate people, having a habitation in the land which inspired their forefathers.”
The San Remo Conference
At the San Remo Conference in San Remo, Italy in April 1920, the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan met to define the precise boundaries of the lands they had conquered at the end of WWI. As part of a peace agreement, Turkey yielded jurisdiction over the land which it had ruled from 1517 to 1917, including the Holy Land. Israel and two dozen other countries were created from the states of the former Ottoman Caliphate.
Former Israeli ambassador Dore Gold observed that in the last century, Israel is the only state established whose legitimacy was officially acknowledged by the League of Nations and the UN.
The League of Nations Mandate did not grant the Jewish people the rights to establish a national home in Palestine, it simply recognized the pre-existing right that had never been surrendered or forgotten. The Jewish people had been sovereign in their own land for a thousand years before many were forced into exile. The establishment of the State of Israel did not represent a creation ex nihilo. Israel was admitted to the United Nations as a full member on May 11, 1949.
These rights were upheld by the UN under Article 80 of the UN Charter after the UN replaced the League of Nations. International law expert Nathan Feinberg, added, On July 24, 1922, the Council of the League of Nations recognized the existence of the Jewish people, its historical link to the land of Israel and its right to reestablish its ancestral home there.
When the Muslims invaded Palestine in 634, ending four centuries of conflict between Persia and Rome, Israeli diplomat Yaakov Herzog noted, they found direct descendants of Jews who had lived in the country since the time of Joshua bin Nun, the man who led the Israelites into the Land of Canaan. This means that for 2,000 years, Jews and Christians constituted the majority of the indigenous population of Palestine, while the Bedouins were the ruling class under the Damascene caliphate.
Israel’s formal acceptance as the 59th UN Member State on May 11, 1949 was consistent with the UN’s original core beliefs. The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in Paris on December 10, 1948 by the UN General Assembly, was issued in response to the “disregard and contempt for human rights” that resulted in the “barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind” called the Holocaust—the attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe by the Nazis.
Does this suggest that Israel was “created” by the UN asks historian Martin Kramer. No he says, because “ if it were within the power of the UN to create states, an Arab state would have arisen in 1948 alongside Israel….”
