Odd Legal Reasoning

I was alerted to this information:

From one of the NGO Amicus briefs filed to the ICC, a bizarre argument:

Prior to the Palestine Mandate, Great Britain administered Palestine as a belligerent occupant.11 Although the San Remo Convention adopted on 24 April 1920 assigned the Mandate for Palestine under the League of Nations to Great Britain, this did not come into force until 29 September 1923.12 Between 24 April 1920 and 29 September 1923, ‘Great Britain had no other title to the exercise of public power in Palestine than  that afforded by its military occupation.’ 

My response:

Does this mean that Jordan, formerly Transjordan, created out of nothing during those same years (Cairo Conference March 1921; Churchill in Jerusalem and his famous walk at the end of that month; the League of Nations July 1922 decision to prohibit Jews settling in Transjordan) has no right to exist?

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And other response:

There are three entirely different arguments here.

The first part is the not-crazy argument that the date of the Mandate coming into force is not the date the Mandate was approved by the allied states, nor the date it was actually implemented on the ground (both in 1920), nor the date it was approved by the League of Nations (1922), but only the date of the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) , in which Turkey surrendered sovereignty over the territory.

The second part is the same idiotic argument that Palestinian Arabs have been making for decades that upon Palestine becoming a Mandate, it became an independent state, and that state has an ethnic identity of Arab such that Israel cannot claim the rights of that state.

And the third part is where the two arguments are combined in a logically inconsistent non sequitur and the NGO argues that since the Mandate only came into force in 1923 when Turkey yielded sovereignty, and since the Mandate already came into force in 1919, when the League of Nations Covenant was adopted (by virtue of the ratification of  Treaty of Versailles), Palestine has been a state since 1919 because there was a Mandate of Palestine.

The last two arguments can be found in more eloquently stated form (albeit no less illogical) in Henry Cattan’s books from fifty+ years ago.

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