Palestine
al Justice, the court of the League of Nations. A private Greek concessionaire had entered into a contract prior to World War I with the Turkish Gov- ernment for work in Palestine. In the 1920s, after Turkey had lost its Arab territories, Greece sued for non-performance. The Permanent Court of In- ternational Justice needed to decide Palestine’s status in order to ascertain its responsibility under the contract. The Court ruled that Palestine was a state, as a successor to the Ottoman Empire in the territory of Palestine.
An arbitration case arose at that same period to determine which entities were responsible for the outstanding debts of the Ottoman Empire. The ar- bitrator, the Swiss jurist Eugène Borel, ruled that the territories under French and British mandate, including Palestine, were states.
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In 1937, Pierre Orts, Chair of the Permanent Man- dates Commission, which oversaw the admin- istration of the mandate states, had occasion to discuss Palestine’s status during a session of the Commission. Orts said that “Palestine was a State, though provisionally under guardianship.”
By the 1930s, Palestine’s statehood was accepted by the consensus of the international community, in recognition of what had been established by the League and by Britain. That consensus includ- ed the United States, even though it never joined the League. In 1932, Britain in fact had occasion to inquire of the United States what its view was on the status of Palestine. Britain had enacted a new set of tariffs but did not want to levy tariffs on goods arriving to Britain from Palestine. How- ever, Britain had most-favored-nation treaties with several states around the world. These trea- ties forbade Britain from charging these states a higher tariff on their exports to Britain than Britain charged on like goods entering Britain from any other state. The British Government was con- cerned that if it allowed goods from Palestine to enter Britain duty-free, these other states might invoke their treaties and demand duty-free treat-
ment to their own goods coming into Britain.
So the British Government approached several such states to ask how they might react. Britain had most-favored-nation treaties in particular with Italy and with the United States. The US Secre- tary of State replied that, if the tariffs were not applied to goods entering Britain from Palestine, the United States would indeed invoke the most- favored-nation treaty to demand duty-free entry of US goods into Britain. The US Secretary of State informed Britain that Palestine was a state, and therefore that the United States would be so entitled. Britain made a similar inquiry of Italy and got the same unwelcome answer.
Not content to let the matter rest because of the potential negative impact on the Palestine econ- omy, the British Government asked its own law- yers whether Britain might be able to sue in the Permanent Court of International Justice to get a ruling that duty-free treatment of Palestine goods would not allow states like the United States and Italy to claim the same. The United Kingdom At- torney General advised that the Court would likely decide against Britain, because it would rule that Palestine is a state. At that point, Britain let the matter drop.
Palestine after British Administration
In 1947, Britain withdrew from Palestine, leaving it without a government. The drafters of the UN Charter wrote a provision (Charter Article 80) to preserve the rights enjoyed by states and peoples under League of Nations mandates. That included the right to independence of the people of Pales- tine and of the Palestine state. Thus, the United Nations assumed the obligation to complete what the League had not.
Some of Palestine’s territory (it not being clear precisely which) split off in 1948 to form a state of Israel. Some territory (the Gaza Strip) was ad- ministered by Egypt, and some (the West Bank of the Jordan River) by Jordan. Egypt administered Gaza on the basis of Gaza being a part of Pales-
ILSA Quarterly » volume 20 » issue 2 » December 2011
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