The 1922 League of Nations Mandate's Article 6 still legally binds the United Nations today

In the world of international diplomacy and the campaign to delegitimize Jewish sovereignty in its ancestral heartland, a foundational truth is often ignored. It is a truth not found in failed political agreements, but in international law.

That truth is the legal power of the Mandate for Palestine, specifically Article 6, and its clear instruction to “facilitate Jewish immigration “ and “close settlement by Jews on the land.”

Critics often suggest: “The League of Nations is dead. The British Mandate is a relic of a bygone colonial era.” This is a misunderstanding of international law. The legal rights established in 1922 did not end in 1948; they were specifically codified in Article 80 of the UN Charter and are legally binding on every member state of the organization that often seeks to undermine them.

The chain of legality is simple and unassailable.

The League of Nations Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration, created an internationally recognized legal right for the Jewish people to reconstitute their national home in the territory then known as Palestine. Article 6 was the operational heart of this right, explicitly mandating Jewish settlement on the land, including state lands and waste lands.

When the League of Nations was dissolved, its assets and its legal obligations were transferred to its successor: the United Nations. The architects of the new world order were meticulous. They included in the UN Charter a specific clause—Article 80—often called the “Palestine Article.”

This was no accident. Article 80 states that nothing in the UN Charter shall be “construed to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments.” This was a legal clause that protected on the rights granted under the Mandates. It fixed them in place until a final political settlement might be concluded.

No such settlement may supersede these rights. Therefore, the UN is not merely a bystander; it is the legal custodian of the Mandate’s provisions. For the UN to actively oppose Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria is for it to violate its charter. This link in chain from the League to the UN is not broken; it is legally binding and stands today as part of international law.

The Settled Borders of Jewish Palestine

Furthermore, we must address another fiction promoted by most UN member states who speak of “occupied Palestinian territories” as if this were a recognized legal fact. It is not.

The territory of Jewish Palestine was explicitly defined in 1923. The subsequent creation of the Emirate of Transjordan on 78% of this land was a painful partition, but it did not extinguish the Jewish right to the remaining 22% west of the Jordan River.

The dispute over these borders has, for all practical purposes, been settled. The peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) did not establish a Palestinian state; they normalized borders between sovereign nations, accepting the territory of Israel. Crucially, these treaties ended the state of war and settled the central territorial disputes of those nations.

Now, the momentum of history continues. Talks are underway, to formalize relations with Lebanon. Discussions, direct and indirect, continue with Syria. The Arab world is moving forward, recognizing that the path to peace lies in accepting the reality of a Jewish state within its historic homeland, not in futile attempts to destroy it.

The ongoing conflict is not with the states of the region, who are increasingly making their peace, but with a political movement that refuses to accept the legal and historical reality of Jewish sovereignty.

Much of the international community, and the United Nations in particular, stands in violation of its own legal obligations when it condemns the settlement activity that its foundational documents were designed to protect. Article 6 of the Mandate, preserved by Article 80 of the UN Charter, and It is the law. It is time the world recognized it, and it is time Israel exercises its legal and historic rights.