The word Mandate here refers to the arrangement by which the fate of the people in Palestine was handed to European colonial powers a century ago. A rereading of the Mandate at this time becomes a necessary act. Towards that, I distinguish between a Mandate 1.0 and a Mandate 2.0; a Mandate 1.0 in the 1920s by which European powers sought a foothold in Palestine, and a Mandate 2.0 in the 2020s with fundamentally different aims to preserve yet supersede Mandate 1.0. Periodisation of historical continuity is contentious, but the differentiation is to reinstate the Mandate in the present, as a subject of agency. For the conundrum of the Mandate always lay in how it could be fulfilled, the answer to which lay in a process of revisions towards fulfilment. What we see today in Gaza can be understood within that process; thus this is a rereading structured on a process of revisions. It offers a revisiting of the practices the Mandate instituted through the revisions, in particular to draw out its use of the law. Moreover, in the same process, through the Mandate we come to know the formulation of international law and universal rights by imperial interests that morphed into a ‘rules-based order’; and through the Mandate we understand why that same order now comes to fail the powers that produced it.


1.0
In January 1919 at the end of World War I, the Paris Peace conference was convened as a process of repair after so-called Hundred Years Peace in Europe had broken irreparably in 1914. The conference ended with the inauguration of the League of Nations for a new world order of sovereign nations, not empires, that would ‘preserve peace and prevent war’. 

For the great majority of the world, some 70% of its population then as the colonised who had been co-opted into Europe’s Great War, Paris offered a window with the so-called ‘Wilsonian Moment’ – named after the US President Woodrow Wilson’s call for self-determination and a point 5 of his Fourteen Points speech of January 1918: ‘A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims‘. Yet self-determination in that way was never an object at the Paris conference whose design would lay in the lines of a blueprint circulated by General Jan Smuts of South Africa, ‘the British Empire was the nearest approach to the League of Nations‘. Smut’s blueprint called the ‘League of Nations A Practical Suggestion‘ can be read today as being the perfectly transparent in its intent; referring to the colonies and territories captured by the Allies, it states, “there shall be no annexation of any of these territories to any of the victorious Powers”, and yet of their future it asserts, “The only successful administration of undeveloped or subject peoples has been carried on by States with long experience for the purpose….”
Through such wording on rights, the League created the concept of the ‘mandate’ meaning temporary guardianship under trusteeship of colonial powers for terms to be determined by a level of ‘civilisation’. Further, the mandates were placed in the hands not of the League’s Assembly of ‘sovereign nations’ but the making of another body, the Council of the League of Nations, that was first a Council of ten, then of four.

Absent in Paris was the Pan-African Congress, unable to send delegates to the Peace Conference; nor were its members permitted to serve on commissions. But historians can now write of W.E.B. Du Bois coming to Paris on behalf of the American NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to ask that ‘a man of African descent be added to the commission’. Also absent in Paris and uninvited was anyone from Russia after the 1917 October Revolution; Alexander Kolchak of the White Russian movement was the still recognised state head for the Allies.

The League lasted two decades until another collapse into war, World War II. Then came another process of repair with another international body, the United Nations. The UN reproduced the structure of the League, its (General) Assembly, its (Security) Council of supreme powers, its proposed court of arbitration. In a time of self-redemption after the Nazi genocides, the magnitude of refugees in the fragmentation in Europe, the UN produced a historic document, a universal bill of human rights; “universal”, meaning that it was something the colonised could also lay claim to, in the postwar process to come. As such, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 10 December 1948 with its 30 Articles was a monumental work by the UN’s drafting committee led by Eleanor Roosevelt. It was  almost faultless yet it was a stand-alone and as such without either the instruments to effect it or render it universal. This was how human rights came to be a dependent and placed in the care of a ‘national sovereign’  that took its place and turn in a new international order. 

In conventional thinking, the League was eclipsed by the UN and lost its significance, but it is the League that remains  instrumental in the workings of human rights today. For it was the League that wrote the code for a world order based on sovereign nations whereby rights became a function of national sovereignty; it was the League that provided the structure for the UN with its family of nations in the General Assembly able to vote only on non-binding resolutions; and, it was the League that created an executive Security Council of permanent members with veto powers who could direct or undermine the UN’s capacity in their interpellation of sovereign nations. This became the structure for a ‘rules-based order’ by which an imperial past would extend its future into the age of decolonisation. An age that would have to bear its liberation movements, its civil rights movements, coup d’etats, regime changes, colour revolutions and so on; a never-ending sequence in a world order that would reserve human rights as the wages of empire.


1.1
There is now a significant body of work on the Mandate as a contemporary British historiography that emerges from colonial archives, which this rereading specifically draws upon. At the same time, it is important to note how this historiography of the Mandate comes in the twenty-first century to point to the plight in the historian’s discipline – the time lapse of the minimum 20 yearwait for state releases and the material that remains inaccessible as the ghost archives at Hanslope Park near Milton Keynes. Notwithstanding these, there is  the unknown, the disappeared, the destruction of colonial records by the secret services.

The awarding of Palestine Mandate to Britain in April 1920 by the Supreme Council of Allied Powers at San Remo was always the formality but it involved much contest between competing Imperial interests. The secret Sykes Picot agreement of May 1916 had been released by Russian revolutionaries after they raided Tsarist files. It was published in Izvestiya 22 November 1917 and republished in Britain by the Manchester Guardian 26 November 1917. The leak exposed the planned carve-up of the Middle East using straight lines as with Africa in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile just prior, the British had released the Balfour Declaration 2 November 1917, published in the Times a week later. The conjunction of dates matters in the struggle between European powers over the territories of the former Ottoman empire since it explains why it took almost two years to draft the mandate and a further year before it officially came into force in September 1923.

The insertion of the Balfour Declaration into the Mandate for Palestine was its defining revision. James Renton’s Failed Foundationsessay for Rory Miller’s compilation on the Mandate (2013) reads the Balfour Declaration as ‘a piece of wartime propaganda‘ designed ‘to win the allegiance of world Jewry to the Allied cause‘. Balfour’s central concept of a ‘national home’ (for Jews) had no legal precedent but derived from a founding document of political Zionism. Yet the term was transmuted into a legal object using the Mandate in August 1922. The Mandate also re-categorised peoples whereby the Jews became a ‘national community’, irrespective of who or where they were; simultaneously, the Arabs in Palestine, the then 95% of its population, became the ‘non-Jewish communities’ of Palestine, in effect without political rights. The international lawyer Ralph Wilde’s writing (2022) provides substantial discussion on why this contravened the very covenant the Mandate was subject to; and to explain why it remains unchallenged.

But if the Balfour Declaration was ‘the golden key which unlocks the doors of Palestine‘ in the words of the Mandate’s ever-present watchman, Chaim Weizmann as president of the Zionist Organisation, Britain sought its own aims in a future Middle East through the Zionist mission. Bernard Regan’s The Balfour Declaration (2017) explores the role Mandate Palestine was to play for Britain through a radical change of its orientation from Empire to a new imperialism. A new imperialism pointedly after the Paris conference that would transform Britain, in Regan’s words, “from a predominantly colonialist orientation to a focus on the finance capital driven concern to ensure control over raw materials and the hegemony of markets”.

1.2
Given that the population of Palestine were not even the colonial subjects as in its other colonies, Britain offered no representative assembly in Palestine – that would mean an Arab assembly in conflict with its goals. The Mandate turned Palestine into a deviation from ‘standard’ colonial practice; a deviation which required its operational revision. This at the onset was through Mandate law whose primary purpose was to keep the population in hold; the way to this was through criminal law, in effect criminalising the population en masse with pervasive means of collective punishment. The use of law to this end is schematised by Alex Winder in the Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question. Listing a sample is instructive, but even more so to note the impositions before the start of Mandate’s rule in 1923:

1920
The Prevention of Crime Ordinance: to require the payment of a bond by villages to ensure their good behaviour, and to allow the mandate to pre-emptively arrest anyone “likely to commit a breach of the peace or to disturb the public tranquillity”.

1921
The Palestine Police Ordinance: to establish a paramilitary police force having declared Mandate Palestine to be in “a disturbed or dangerous state” in anticipation of the population becoming restive.

1922
The Firearms Ordinance: updated multiple times, for a policy to disarm the Palestinian Arab population and thereon selectively arm the small but growing Yishuv (Jewish) minority.

1924
The Prevention of Crime (Tribal and Village Areas) Ordinance: to recruit tribal leaders into the Mandate’s legal system tasking them with powers of investigation and arrest, alongside the threat of detention, fines and the confiscation of livestock if they fail to cooperate.

1926
The Collective Punishments Ordinance: to provide the legal framework for collective fines, to make villagers pay for the costs of their own policing and for costs of holding detained villagers.

Law was ‘the bedrock of Britain’s pacification of Palestine, writes Matthew Hughes in his study of Mandate Palestine as an emergency state (2019), summarising its work in one sweeping paragraph in a section named on its use in present day Israel: “…. ‘lawfare’ pacified the country through quotidian application of a crafted, all-encompassing legal system that restrained, detained, and impoverished Palestinians, hanged and killed them, and demolished their homes… If they had a nice house, the authorities marked it for destruction if a stranger in the neighbourhood broke the law…. Whole village populations walked miles and back every day to report their presence at a police station.”

Mandate law was instituted as the means to maintain a population in a state of limbo; this would lead to the other dimension of the Mandate which would come in the ’30s.

1.3
John Newsinger (2006) draws through sources to tell us how “1935 was the “turning point in the struggle of the Palestinian Arabs” with the immigration over 66,000 and the Zionists purchasing “almost 73,000 dunams” of land”. The realities of disenfranchisement – changing demography, loss of land and policies of Jewish-only labour led inevitably to organised resistance beginning with the general strike called by the newly formed Arab National Committee in Nablus April 1936. The strike was followed by the so-called Arab Revolt, or the Great Revolt – the Quassamist al-Thawra al-Kubra. 

With the full resources of the Empire at its disposal, the Mandate would use the uprising to effect irreversible changes on the ground. The British knew all along that to fulfil the Mandate mere use of law to pacify would not suffice; the debate then between the Colonial Office and the War Office was on how the law under Mandate rule could be ‘freed’ to greater effect. It required an exercise of re-naming. Thus, martial law would become “statutory martial law” whilst state of emergency was replaced by “use of emergency powers” or “emergency regulations” and then by “Emergency Powers (Defence) Orders”. By such convolutions of language, a strategy of exploiting civil resistance would produce the necessary facts on the ground. This became the blueprint; the same legal terms remain in use in the now named ‘Occupied Territories’.

With ’emergency regulations’ announced by airdropped leaflets, the entire old city of Jaffa was rigged up with gelignite charges and flattened on 16 June 1936. For the High Commissioner for Palestine, Arthur Wauchope, Jaffa with its narrow alleyways “formed a hostile stronghold into which government forces dare not penetrate”. The debate in Westminster on the proportionality of displacing 6,000 Palestinians can be read in the Commons record of 1st July 1936 Vol 314 where one MP asks, “Am I to take it that the Minister is preparing to make the way of the Commission easy by wiping out the Arab population of Palestine.”

David Cronin’s Balfour’s Shadow (2017) writes that in September 1936, Arthur Wauchope noted the “unweakened determination of the Arabs of Palestine” who resist despite thousands of deaths and despite their destitution; for Wauchope this signalled, “what we must expect if we start on ruthless measures when necessarily the innocent cannot be separated from the guilty.” Cronin details the Mandate’s turn to indiscriminate use of mass detention in concentration camps (the term as used in Colonial Office documents), and of segregating males in villages into ‘cages’; good cages and bad cages. Mass displacement became normalised with the regular use of 20 lb aerial bombs on Palestinian villages. In his time with the RAF in Palestine, Arthur Harris of Second World War fame, advocated “one 250 lb or 500 lb bomb in each village that speaks out of turn” – a premonition of what comes in future with the Dahiya doctrine using US supplied 2000 lb bombs.

Matthew Hughes argues that the Mandate did not engage in the ‘boundless violence’ associated with other chapters of colonial history nor engage in a project of ethnic cleansing but produced the conditions for it. The differences between enablement and involvement, or complicity and collaboration in a project of population replacement, then as now could be endlessly deferred as juridical argument but what mattered then to the British was being seen to uphold the law. Which is why the same laws that enabled the law to be free were rigorously applied to conceal. As Cronin reports on the BBC’s coverage of Palestine in the ’30s,

“the British public were kept in the dark about the revolt. Rather than holding the powerful to account, the BBC facilitated censorship of its content. At an early stage in the revolt it informed the government of a planned radio programme that would feature interviews with a ‘man in the street’ from Palestine. At first the BBC offered to allow the Colonial Office vet the programme’s script. Yet when one mandarin contended that the broadcast would definitely prove controversial, the corporation agreed to scrap the idea.”

1.4
We can read the Mandate’s next revision in the joint statement by the Colonial Office and Foreign Office dated 15 May 1948 as an act of performative abandonment. Because once the methods of the Mandate were grounded, there would always be a passing of the baton. For the Arab peoples of Palestine, it would mean a continuation but for the British it was a new game as the French and Americans undermined them by arming the Jewish militias each for their own reason. The French to recover their influence in the aftermath of a forgotten entente cordiale, the Americans to usurp the place of the British in the Middle East.

But having planted one last settler project in pursuit of its own interests, the British would leave when, as James Renton put it, “… the conflict spiralled out of control, and it had no choice; in other words, when it was too late”. Irrespective of the UN, the Zionist militias would enact the nakba and declare their state but the above encapsulates all that comes after ’48. The process explains why the Mandate predicated on producing a ‘national home’, a concept non-existent in international law led to a form of state elusive to international law. That through the Mandate, as Matthew Hughes suggests, Palestine became a ‘zona franca’ where permutations of lawcraft and techniques of population control drawn from centuries of colonial practice would find a locus; a zona franca of unending revisions of itself.

2.0
To extrapolate in time, this rereading of the Mandate could end here – for everything taking place in Gaza today lies in all of the above. Yet the present is not another revision. Rather it is a revision to force an end to the revisions. Which is what we are witness to now, almost as a spectacle using the resources of the very same imperial powers that created the Mandate. A spectacle of imperial creative destruction that is no longer to be governed by the rules-based order created by imperial powers themselves but rooted in a language of survivalism which is in fact imperialism’s own survivalism. Thus, in the statement, Israel has the right to defend itself is Imperialism’s right to defend itself, the means to renew itself in a new century. It is how they become conjoined through the state created by the mandatory process, that remains a mandatory functionary or a mandatory protectorate. This is Mandate 2.0.

Mandate 2.0 is to supersede Mandate 1.0, to wipe the history of its revisions and thus become the fulfilment of the Mandate. What enables it is the licence to act outside the bounds of law. What drives it is simply that the people of Palestine whether still classified as its ‘non-Jewish communities’ have still to give up their rights. Instead, they endure and remain, and moreover unlike the settler genocides of past colonial history without recourse to any court of law, the Palestinians today through South Africa’s ANC bring the charge of genocide to the courts of international law. This is not how it was meant to be. International law has always served as the enabler of European imperial power, to provide a framework of legitimation for its ‘mowing of the lawn’ as it sees fit for which Palestine serves as the paradigmatic site. And when challenged using the same tools of law meant to serve imperial interests, court judgments are reduced to irrelevance to maintain what the UN Secretary General, helplessly quoting obligatory legal articles, describes as an ‘endless death loop’. At the same time, the courts that dare to intervene are subjected to sanction.

This is how the bodies of international law are led to a dead-end. A dead-end in a project of denial and silencing which ironically manifests a surge of lawmaking in the very centres of Empire. US laws, British laws, German laws, French laws, EU laws, laws to ban protest, laws to criminalise solidarity, laws to reinforce instruments like the IHRA, laws to deport, laws to prevent entry, laws to prohibit terms like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ and ‘boycott’ in civil institutions, laws to require allegiance to the state created by the Mandate in revised citizenship law; and laws after laws to follow inevitably. By the weight of laws, the liberal state begins to fold, its architecture of rights eroding by the day. At least in these terms, this is the transformation we see. A mere beginning of what will be a shared Mandate 2.0 that conjoins empire and periphery and renders naked the way our universal rights have been configured. It forces us to revisit the making of the language of rights and order that we have come to use.

The Mandate if we cycle back through its revisions returns us to its working site; the League of Nations Covenant, with its ‘trust of civilisation‘ based on ‘the well-being and development of such peoples‘ and its commitment to ‘non-annexation‘. Such words were crafted in 1919 after Europe’s collapse so that the declared outcomes in the cycle of European settler-colonialism could be different from the conference that preceded it; the Berlin Conference which concluded with General Act of 1885 and its obligations, ‘to watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being’. 

To read these documents afresh in the light of Gaza is essential now to know how a language of rights was not merely drafted as the rights of Others for imperial purpose but to use them as legal objects to claim the ground and then to free the law. By that process, a body of universal rights would emerge and come to serve. Rights to be grafted onto declarations and constitutions, enshrined into international law in flag waving ceremonies to serve as nothing more than an useful ‘fictitious commodity’. 

If anything, Gaza has irreversibly exposed this for us; it is why, through Gaza, we are seeing the seedlings of new projects for preserving rights and for rewriting rights for an order that enables them to grow. They begin with Palestine and in the face of Mandate 2.0.

Siraj Izhar is an activist-artist. His writings are at amplife.org

Bibliography: 
(Cited works drawing from National Archives, parliamentary and colonial records) 

• James Renton, Failed Foundations: The Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate in Britain, in Palestine and Empire: The Mandate Years, ed. Rory Miller, Routledge London 2013
• Bernard Regan, The Balfour Declaration:Empire, the Mandate and Resistance in Palestine, Verso London 2017
• Matthew Hughes, Britain’s pacification of Palestine, Cambridge University Press, 2019
• John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried, A People’s History of the British Empire, Bookmarks Publications 2006
• David Cronin, Balfour’s Shadow, A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel, Pluto Press London 2017
• Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets, ‎HarperPress London, 2012