soc.history.war.world-war-ii

Rich Rostrom wrote:
> "Hal Hanig" wrote:
>
>> Michele, cherie, it was the League of Nations that created the British
>> mandated territory in Palestine, not the UN.
>
> Actually, the Mandate was granted by the Allied
> Supreme Council in 1920; it was not ratified by
> the League of Nations until June 1922.
>
>> It was comatose when most of these events took place...
>
> The League remained in existence until April 18, 1946.

Would you have been happier if I had described them as inert instead of
comatose?
>
>> the UN wasn't formed until 1947.
>
> The UN existed as the alliance of nations against the Axis
> from January 1, 1942, with the "Declaration by United Nations"
> of Allied war aims - basically a reiteration of the Atlantic
> Charter and a mutual pledge of no separate peace.
>
> The UN as an institution was founded on October 24, 1945,
> with the ratification of the Charter by the five Security
> Council permanent members.
>
>> Your comment
>> overlooked the fact that the Balfour Declaration opened up Palestine to
>> refugee Jews as a homeland and the British chose to ignore it.
>
> The Balfour Declaration was merely a statement of
> preference by the British government. It was not
> binding on the British government nor anyone else.

You changed my words but you said the same thing I did. They indicated
their preference and then proceeded to ignore it at the very time in history
when they were in a position to honor it. Is what you're saying that the
British Government was duplicitous when it issued the Declaration because it
never had any intention of fulfilling it? So, was it that they just lied to
the Jews and then when the war was ending, the Jews took them at their word
and embarrassed them by showing up in Palestine from the refugee camps of
Europe?

What kind of spin can you give it to remove culpability from the British
part in the matter? If they didn't "prefer" that the Jews have a homeland
in what was then called Palestine, they should have held their tongues
instead of misleading the Jews into thinking that Palestine was the place
where they could do that.

> The Mandate for Palestine issued by the League
> incorporated the Declaration, with the very important
> addition that
>
> nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil
> and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities
> in Palestine...
>
> which made the goals of the Declaration very
> problematic, as the "existing non-Jewish communities"
> objected vigorously to the "Jewish homeland" project.
>
> British actions under the Mandate were torn between
> these incompatible directives.
>> People say "There's a Stradivarius for sale for a |
>> million," and you say "Oh, really? What's wrong |
>> with it?" - Yitzhak Perlman

I still come back to the fact that the Balfour Declaration, voluntarily made
by the British Government, predated the mandate that government accepted
from the League of Nations. It should not have taken a great brain to
figure out that there was going to be a problem and it was going to be one
that they themselves had created and caused. That buck cannot be passed.
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