Part 008 - PAMPHLET 035 008

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THE ILLEGITIMACY OF ISRAEL possessed any legal capacity or competence to create a Stare in the territory of Palestine would be simply ridiculous. It follows, therefore, that the parties which purported to proclaim the State of Israel in 1948 possessed no power under the internal law of Palestine or under international law to proclaim a Jewish State in Palestine and their action must be considered null and void. If we now turn to the grounds upon which the Proclamation was based we find them as invalid as the parties that made it were incompetent. The first of those grounds was stated to be "the natural and historic right of the Jewish people." There is no need to repeat here what was said in Section 1 of Chapter I about this claim being spurious in law and false in fact. This ground entirely collapses under an historical and legal scrutiny. With the collapse of one of the two legs which supported its statehood, Israel cannot even limp along on the other leg, namely, the partition resolution. This second ground has no more legal basis than the first. We have seen, in Chapter III, the grounds which invalidate this resolution and it is clear that it gave the Jews neither a legal basis for establishing a State in Palestine, nor title to the territory which they occupied. The view that the State of Israel derived no valid root of title from the parti- tion resolution is further reinforced by the consideration that Israel was estab- lished not in conformity with, but in "flagrant violation" of, the UN resolution.⁹ Neither territorially, nor demographically, nor organically does the State of Israel correspond to the concept of the Jewish State that was envisaged by the UN. Thus, territorially, Israel is not the Jewish State which was envisaged by the UN resolution. We have already described in Section 4 of Chapter IV the areas which Israel seized in excess of the partition plan. Such seizure was no accident, but was deliberate, and the ground for it was prepared by the complete omission in the Proclamation of the State of Israel of any reference to boundaries. David Ben Gurion states that the question of boundaries was considered at the time of drafting the Proclamation. There were then two conflicting possibilities: to create a State without defining its frontiers, or to fix its frontiers as determined by the UN. Ben Gurion opposed the fixing of any frontiers for the Jewish State, thus preparing the ground for its expansion. By five votes to four it was decided that the question of frontiers should not be mentioned in the Declaration of Independence.¹⁰ Likewise, neither demographically nor organically could Israel be considered to be the Jewish State contemplated by the UN. The Jewish State as envisaged by the General Assembly resolution was Jewish only in name, for in fact it would have had an Arab majority. The proposed Jewish State would have had 9 See statement of Fuad Ammoun, Lebanese Delegate to the UN. Oscial Records of the 3rd Session of the General Assembly, 1948, First Committee, p. 23. 10 David Ben Gurion, Israël, Années de Lutte, pp. 49-50, Flammarion, Paris, 1964.