Palestine: The Unfinished Responsibility of Administering Powers

International Relations

By Vijay Makhan

A century after Balfour, the Palestinian tragedy remains a stark reminder that external powers cannot shape the destinies of peoples and then disclaim responsibility for the consequences. Historical candour must now be matched by the courage to act.

British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour

In my article ‘Meanwhile in Palestine…’, I suggested that a conflict of such consequence must not be allowed to disappear from our field of vision simply because the world is assailed by so many other crises. There is a further and more uncomfortable question that we should now confront. How did the international community arrive at a point where the future of an entire people could be made the object of decisions taken elsewhere — and then left unresolved when the administering power withdrew?

The answer is not to be found in one document alone, nor is the burden of history to be placed upon one actor. The Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 remains an unavoidable point of departure. After much internal debate, in a 67-worded paragraph, Britain expressed support for the establishment in Palestine of “a national home for the Jewish people”, underscoring that nothing should prejudice “the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities”. No political means was established by which the collective future of either people (Arabs or Jews) could be assured.

The Jewish people, long exposed to persecution and exclusion in Europe, understandably sought security and a national home. The World Zionist Movement pursued international support with great energy, approaching the principal European powers, among them Britain, France and Italy. Yet no European power offered territory under its own possession for this purpose. King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy was asked whether territory in North Africa — present-day Libya — might be made available. Declined. The King’s response was simply that it was the home of others.

That reply should equally have informed and guided policy in Palestine. It was not an empty space upon which the European powers could devise an answer to a European tragedy. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, Arabs represented some 90 per cent of its population and Jews about 10 per cent. It had an overwhelming Arab population with its own political aspirations, its own social fabric and its own deep attachment to the land.

The end of the First World War placed this matter within the League of Nations’ mandatory system. Territories detached from the Ottoman Empire were entrusted to administering powers, ostensibly for the purpose of guiding their peoples towards self-government. France assumed responsibility for Syria and Lebanon; Britain for Iraq and Palestine. In Palestine, however, the British Mandate incorporated the Balfour policy. The Mandatory was expected simultaneously to facilitate a Jewish national home and safeguard the rights of the existing population. This contradiction was built into the arrangement itself.

It is against this background that a remarkable study by John Quigley, Professor of Law at Ohio State University, deserves renewed attention. In his 2011 article, Britain’s Secret Reassessment of the Balfour Declaration: The Perfidy of Albion, Professor Quigley draws on Cabinet records to show that, in 1923, a secret British Cabinet committee confronted the contradiction at the heart of the policy. It found it difficult to reject the argument that the Mandate was trying to “reconcile the irreconcilable” — the creation of Jewish privileges alongside the maintenance of Arab rights.

This was no retrospective judgement by later generations. It was an internal recognition, by those responsible for administering the Mandate, that peaceful reconciliation on the proposed terms was unlikely. Yet the committee concluded that it was no longer pertinent to revisit the wisdom of the 1917 Declaration. Britain was preoccupied with its own credibility, its imperial interests, the views of allies and the consequences of retreating from commitments already undertaken. It continued on its course.

What gives this episode its enduring significance is not merely that British policy was controversial. It is that the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations was not given the benefit of this consequential internal assessment. A system of international supervision cannot fulfil its purpose if the supervising body is told that two objectives are being reconciled while the administering power privately entertains serious doubt that they can be.

A lesson for our own time: Administering powers do not escape responsibility merely because an arrangement was inherited from war, or because its consequences ultimately outgrew their original calculations. The State was left in an aggravated and unresolved condition. The passage of time could not be a substitute for political responsibility.

Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine in 1948, followed by war, displacement and a conflict that remains unresolved, did not close the account. It made the search for a just political settlement all the more imperative. This is not a call for endless recrimination. History cannot be revisited in order to be undone. But it can be confronted honestly, so that it does not continue to be evaded.

Nor should this be read as a denial of the legitimate security concerns and national aspirations of Israelis. It is, rather, an appeal for historical honesty and political courage. The powers most closely associated with the Mandate era — above all Britain, but also those that helped shape the post-war order — retain a particular responsibility to help recreate the conditions for a settlement based on law, equality and security for both peoples.

That responsibility must be translated into practical action; it requires an unambiguous defence of international humanitarian law and the protection of civilians. It requires resistance to actions which foreclose a viable Palestinian political future. It requires support for reconstruction, for accountable Palestinian governance and for credible security arrangements for Israel. Above all, it requires an end to the pretence that diplomacy can manage a conflict indefinitely while denying it a political horizon. Recognition should be part of a serious process — not a gesture disconnected from implementation.

The inhabitants of a territory are not objects of international policy, a fact ignored under the Mandate. Their consent, their dignity and their political rights cannot permanently be subordinated to the calculations of outside powers. We, in Mauritius, understand fully what that means, though the circumstances are not comparable.

The institutions built after one disastrous period of fragmentation are being weakened just as the conditions that made them necessary are reappearing. Palestine is not merely a regional tragedy. It is a test of whether international responsibility retains any meaning when the unfinished business of history becomes unbearable.

Palestine will not be settled by declarations without consequences, by expressions of concern repeated year after year, or by a diplomacy which treats the conflict as manageable rather than intolerable. It will be settled only when international law is permitted to govern policy; when Israeli security and Palestinian self-determination are treated not as competing slogans but as inseparable conditions of a durable peace; and when those with influence are prepared to use it.

The administering powers of yesterday cannot undo the past. But neither can they absolve themselves by invoking its complexity, nor remain neutral spectators of its consequences. The task is no longer to manage the conflict. It is to resolve it. History will judge them not by the solemnity of their declarations, but by whether they found the courage to act when that responsibility could no longer be avoided.

23 September 2026

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 25 September 2026