And I add, the whole of Judea and Samaria as well as Gaza.
Read also: 20 Years of Research Reveals: Jerusalem Belongs to Jews
Furthermore, he claimed that Roman, Byzantine, and other successors lacked a “continuous and undisturbed presence” in Israel that would relinquish the Jewish claim to the land. In fact, the Ottoman Turks, who owned the Land of Israel prior to WWI and the British Mandate, renounced their claim to all of the land of Israel in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. When the Balfour Declaration was drafted there was no Palestinian nation. In 1919, Palestine was a sparsely populated land where Lord Balfour claimed that only 700,000 Arabs lived, of whom a large number migrated within recent history.
In contrast, there were far more Jews in the world in need of a homeland in 1919 than there were Arab residents in Israel and there existed a significant Jewish minority that continued to live in Israel. As the Blackstone Memorial, signed by Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court Melville Fuller proclaimed in 1891, Israel, which included Jerusalem, is the “inalienable possession” of the Jewish people “from where they were expelled by force.”
Thus, the Balfour Declaration was drafted with the goal of establishing a Jewish national home in the Land of Israel. The “civil and religious” rights of the Arabs were to be respected, yet politically, the country was supposed to belong to the Jews. The Balfour Declaration was ingrained into international law at the San Remo Conference. Through San Remo, “The Jewish people have been given the right to establish a home, based on the recognition of their historical connection and the grounds for reconstituting this national home,” Jacques Gauthier, an expert on international law, explained.
H/T: Doug Tanzer via Shuli Wolfe
NOTE: Once again, Eugene Kontorovich:
