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Upon capturing Palestine in December 1917, Britain assumed the role of belligerent occupant, and therefore, it had no power to alter the legal order of the country, which it nonetheless did in 1920. In order to grant itself full power of governance over Palestine, Britain drew up the "Mandate for Palestine," a document in which it declared its aim of promoting a Jewish "national home" in Palestine. This article examines this and other documents from the 1920s to argue that Britain did not have the legal grounding to alter its status as belligerent occupant, and that the League of Nations never took a position on Jewish territorial rights or on the legality of Britain's governance of Palestine. It argues further that the United Nations misread this history in 1947 when it took the Mandate for Palestine as a commitment of its predecessor to Jewish territorial rights in Palestine, and thus, as a basis for recommending the partition of Palestine.
John Quigley (Tue,) studied this question.