100 years ago: League of Nations Council confirms British Mandate for Palestine

And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath driven thee,
And shalt return unto the LORD thy God, and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy soul;
That then the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath scattered thee.
If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the LORD thy God gather thee, and from thence will he fetch thee:
And the LORD thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers. Deuteronomy 30:1-5

This is a slightly different version of my post 90 years ago: League of Nations supports Zionism (July 21, 2012).

On July 24, 1922, the League of Nations Council confirmed the text of the draft of the British Mandate of Palestine; Britain formally assumed control of Palestine on September 29, 1923. As reported by the Israel Bible, July 24, 2022 (links in original):

...On April 24,1920, 51 nations, so recently divided by World War I, sent representatives to the League of Nations in Sanremo, Italy. At the San Remo Conference, they agreed to divide up the Ottoman territories, putting Israel in the hands of the British. The decision incorporated the Balfour Declaration, written during the war in 1917, which established the basis for a Jewish state in Israel. The text of this agreement was confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations on July 24, 1922.

How did this all come to be?

In 1917, while the outcome of World War One was very much in the balance, the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour sat down to write a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The letter was the first public expression of support for Zionism by a major political power, and was the result of rising sympathy among British evangelical Christians towards the “restoration of the Jews” to Palestine that had begun 80 years earlier.

In some ways the Balfour Declaration was the beginning of the process. It certainly was the seed from which the State of Israel grew, but it nearly became a meaningless piece of paper. When Lord Balfour put pen to paper, the British armies were stuck in Egypt and the British government had no political ability to carry out this vision.

On October 31, 1917, the remarkable charge of the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade captured Beersheba from the German and Ottoman forces. This opened the way for the British forces to advance and capture Jerusalem six weeks later, making the Balfour Declaration relevant, and having practical implications for the Jewish people.

After the war, in 1920, the Paris Peace Conference founded the League of Nations, the first worldwide intergovernmental organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. That same year, the seven-day San Remo Conference was held. The full text of the Balfour Declaration became an integral part of the San Remo resolution and the British Mandate for Palestine, turning the letter of intent into a legally-binding foundational document under international law.

51 nations signed the resolution. No objections were raised from the Arab world. In fact, a signed agreement between Emir Faisal, the third son of Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, King of the short-lived Kingdom of Hejaz, and Chaim Weizmann, a Zionist leader, was one of two documents used by the Zionist delegation at the Paris Peace Conference to argue that the Zionist plans for Palestine had prior approval of Arabs.

Faisal, who acquiesced to a Jewish state in order to gain support for his claim on Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt, was the sole recognized representative of the entire Arab people in 1918. No other Arab states existed at the time. Ironically, the same San Remo Conference that paved the way for Israel also paved the way for the Arab nations that sprung into existence in the region, allocating 99% of the land to form new Arab states.

It took another 27 years and a new organization named the United Nations to formally establish the Jewish state, but the foundations were laid and confirmed by the League of Nations in San Remo in 1922.

See also my posts:

100 years ago: The Balfour Declaration paves the way for fulfillment of biblical prophecy (November 2, 2017)

100 years ago: British forces capture Jerusalem (December 11, 2017)

100 years ago: The Faisal-Weizmann Agreement (January 3, 2019)