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My Speech at SOAS Book Launch

1. Good evening & thank you for coming. I would like to start by expressing my gratitude to Brian, Ilan, and Catriona for joining us, as well as Laleh for chairing. Dan Plesch at the CISD was very kind to provide funding, as was Poul for organising the launch, Jon at Pluto for bringing the books, and Khaled for the catering. There will be a reception with wine and Arabic food after the talk.

2. The Israel-Palestine conflict is often in the news but few of those who report on it or follow it or perhaps even teach it would agree on its history. Indeed if you were to assemble a group of scholars or ‘experts' and ask them to explain the origins of the conflict, you'd probably get a dozen answers. The international lawyers will have their own explanation, historians on the Middle East will have another explanation, scholars of Jewish history, and anti-semitism would have a different take as would anthropologists, political scientists, scholars of international relations and so on.... What I tried to do with From Coexistence to Conquest is tell a narrative that brings together some of these views. This is why we have an international lawyer, an expert on Jewish history and anti-semitism and two scholars on the Middle East with us today.

3. Some of you who have not studied law before might be put off reading a book that purports to be a legal analysis of the conflict. I was conscious of this in writing From Coexistence to Conquest and so I tried to avoid technical jargon as best as I could. I also wrote a glossary to explain some of the standard terminologies that we use as international lawyers which is in the back of the book. There are also eight digital scans of original coloured maps from the National Archives for those of you who like geography, as well as a chronology and biographies of the main characters for those who like history.

4. In my opinion international law is part and parcel of international politics. In this connection, in writing From Coexistence to Conquest I endeavoured to place the international legal issues in their broader historical, political, and social contexts rather than approaching the subject strictly from the black letter of the law. This approach gives us a better understanding of how and why the conflict began. Perhaps it is obvious, but we must not forget that the world we inhabit today is a very different place to the worlds inhabited by Lords Balfour, Curzon, and Montagu, a century ago, when anti-Semitism and racism were rampant, and when colonialism was at its zenith. We cannot take colonial documents at face value. They are a product of time, place, and circumstance and reflect the prejudices of their authors. To give you an example, in the 19th & early twentieth century the Turks were regularly described in international law textbooks by Lorimer, Westlake, and others as ‘barbarians', Jews were described by the British PM in Parliament in 1905 as ‘a people apart', and British journalists, academics, and members of the clergy, called foreign immigrants in Britain ‘the scum of the earth'. As I explain, there was a direct connection between British support for Zionism as a method to stem the flow of Jewish immigration into Britain and into America as well as assist it with its imperial ambitions in the race for hegemony over the Middle East. I won't go into more detail on this now, but I have devoted almost 2 chapters to it in my book.

5. The standard explanation in most Israeli and western textbooks on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict tends to ignore developments in European history and simply describes the conflict as a clash of nationalisms. But this explanation overlooks the fact that Zionism could never have succeeded without the assistance of British colonialism and the acquiescence of the other Great European Powers. Had Britain not conquered Palestine in 1917, promised the Jewish people a homeland there, and encouraged mass Jewish immigration out of Europe and into Palestine there would have been no Jewish state or conflict to speak of. The question that I sought to answer in my book was whether this process was lawful or whether the colonial powers had an unfettered discretion to do what they liked? Well, and this is key, in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference which drew WWI to a close, the principle of self-determination was recognised and applied to the A-class mandates established in the Middle East. This included Palestine. In the early twentieth century, self-determination was understood to be a numbers game, in other words it implied majority rule. So how could Britain promise a Jewish home in Palestine when its population was 93 per cent Arab? I think this conundrum is best reflected by the chief architect of the Zionist project, Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour.

In a memo to Lord Curzon who succeeded Balfour as FM, he wrote the following (at p. 123 of my book).

"The contradiction between the letter of the [League of Nations] Covenant [which created the LoN and set up mandates system] and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the "independent nation" of Palestine than in the "independent nation" of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, 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 my opinion [Balfour continued] that is right. What I have never been able to understand is how it can be harmonized with the [Anglo-French] declaration, the [League of Nations] Covenant, or the instructions to the [King-Crane] Commission of Enquiry".

This was because the LON Covenant, the Anglo-French Declaration, and the instructions to King and Crane all recognised that the Arabs of Palestine were entitled to self-determination. In short, Balfour realised that British support for Zionism clashed with the principle of self-determination so that it would have to be withheld from the Arabs until a Jewish national home had been established. As Balfour told a meeting of the English Zionist Federation in 1923 and again I quote (at p. 250 of my book):

"...the critics of this movement [that is, the critics of Zionism] shelter themselves behind the phrase-but it is more than a phrase-behind the principle of self-determination, and say that, if you apply that principle logically and honestly, it is to the majority of the existing population of Palestine that the future destinies of Palestine should be committed. My lords, ladies and gentlemen, there is a technical ingenuity in that plea, and on technical grounds I neither can nor desire to provide the answer; but, looking back upon the history of the world, I say that the case of Jewry in all countries is absolutely exceptional, falls outside all the ordinary rules and maxims, cannot be contained in a formula or explained in a sentence. The deep, underlying principle of self-determination really points to a Zionist policy, however little in its strict technical interpretation it may seem to favour it"

In other words what Balfour was saying was to hell with international law and self-determination.  Zionism, in his opinion, fell ‘outside all the ordinary rules and maxims'.  But of course Balfour was just one man albeit an influential one.  Lord Curzon his successor vehemently disagreed with Balfour's policy as did many British officials as I explain in the book. In the words of the Peel Commission that recommended partitioning Palestine in 1937, read out p. 254 of your book:

"To foster Jewish immigration in the hope that it might ultimately lead to the creation of a Jewish majority and the establishment of a Jewish State with the consent or at least the acquiescence of the Arabs was one thing. It was quite another to contemplate, however remotely, the forcible conversion of Palestine into a Jewish State against the will of the Arabs. For that would clearly violate the spirit and intention of the Mandate System. It would mean that national self-determination had been withheld when the Arabs were a majority in Palestine and only conceded when the Jews were a majority. It would mean that the Arabs had been denied the opportunity of standing by themselves: that they had, in fact, after an interval of conflict, been bartered about from Turkish sovereignty to Jewish sovereignty".

This last phrase was a pun on President Woodrow Wilson's statement in favour of self-determination at a speech he gave to both Houses of Congress in 1918 when he said that ‘peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game". 

As I explain it was the conflict over the question of self-determination and the future destiny of Palestine that led to the policy of partition, and a succession of partition plans were suggested that are all outlined in my book.  Now whilst the partition plans were opposed at the time by the Arab national movement the Plans - and I think this is important -- explicitly recognised the right of the Palestinians to have an independent Arab state of their own in Palestine.  As I argue, the policy of creating a Jewish state in Palestine which had never been envisaged in the Balfour Declaration or in the Mandate and which was forced against the will of the Palestinian Arabs was contrary to international law.  It conflicted with Article 22 of the LON Covenant; it violated both safeguard clauses in the Balfour Declaration; and amounted to an act of conquest or subjugation which had been widely disapproved of by 1948.  This does necessarily mean that the state of Israel is unlawful today due to the effect of recognition. I would be happy to explain this further in the question and answer session.

6. To conclude, I just want to highlight a few documents I discovered during my research that I had never come across before, or seen in any other history book. For instance, I discovered memoranda and maps that supported the Arab interpretation of the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, and I found the first reaction of the U.S. Government to the Balfour Declaration, which, believe it or not, was negative. I also uncovered the British Foreign Office legal advice on the 1948 conflict, which completely contradicts the Zionist narrative. "If the Arab armies invade the territory of Palestine but without coming into conflict with the Jews," they wrote, "they would not necessarily be doing anything illegal, or contrary to the United Nations Charter." And then there was Anthony Eden's top-secret memorandum to Winston Churchill lambasting the partition plan as being manifestly unfair to the Arabs and a document prepared by the Foreign Office to tackle what they referred to as "inaccurate Jewish political propaganda" on the refugee question. As that document noted, "many Arabs fled before the Arab invasion of 15th May owing to the brutality and the atrocities of IZL [the Irgun] and Haganah, e.g. at Deir Yassin. This policy of intimidation had since been pursued fairly consistently." It continued: "Jewish settlers have systematically moved into houses and land of Arab refugees."

While there are a plethora of books on Palestine, one thing I learned through the writing of this book, is that there is still a great deal of information on the history of Palestine that has not made the journey from the dusty archive to the vibrant realm of common knowledge. I would therefore encourage anyone who is interested in this topic, to undertake further research. 

Thank you for listening to me.

For further details on my book launch please click here.

“This is an elegant and forceful narrative by a young Palestinian scholar.”

— Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Former Secretary-General of the United Nations (1992-1997)

Read more advance praise for From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1891-1949