On centenary, San Remo Conference hailed as ‘seminal moment’ in Zionist history

World leaders praise April 1920 summit as first anchor of Jewish state’s legitimacy in international law; Pompeo says it marked world’s embrace of Jews’ unbreakable ties to Israel

By RAPHAEL AHREN Today, 6:48 am  0

• 7shares

Delegates at the San Remo Conference in April 1920 (screenshot YouTube)

Presidents, prime ministers and other senior officials on Sunday celebrated the centenary of the San Remo Conference as a milestone of Zionist history that paved the way to the establishment of a Jewish state.

In late April 1920, the UK, France, Italy, Japan and later the US (as an observer) convened in the northwestern Italian town and decided to divide the Ottoman empire into three parts. One of them later became the British Mandate of Palestine.

Crucially, the so-called San Remo Declaration charged the British mandate with implementing the Balfour Declaration, which three years earlier had endorsed “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top storiesFREE SIGN UP

The San Remo Conference, held in the town’s Villa Devachan, is historically significant as the first anchor of Israel’s right to exist in international law, though in contemporary geopolitics it is, for various reasons, not recognized as relevant to today’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“There is probably no more understated event in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict than the San Remo Conference of April 1920,” Efraim Karsh, the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, wrote in a paper published Friday.

It was remarkable that within less than five years, the Balfour Declaration “had been endorsed by the official representative of the will of the international community: not in the ‘technical’ sense of supporting the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine but in the deeper sense of recognizing the Jews as a nation deserving self-determination in its ancestral homeland,” he wrote.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the San Remo centennial was an opportunity to celebrate a “seminal moment” in the history of Zionism.

“In San Remo, the victorious allied powers of World War I recognized the Jewish people’s right of self-determination,” he said in a recorded video message for a virtual conference organized by a Christian pro-Israel group.

“Now in ratifying that historic declaration, San Remo recognized a fundamental truth: The Jewish people are not foreign colonialists in the land of our forefathers. The Land of Israel is our ancestral homeland,” Netanyahu said.

PM Netanyahu at the PMO in Jerusalem, March 18, 2029 (Kobi Gideon/GPO)

Digressing from the 1920 conference, he went on to address US President Donald Trump’s peace plan, which envisions Israel annexing parts of the West Bank. “A couple of months from now, I’m confident that that pledge will be honored, that we will be able to celebrate another historic moment in the history of Zionism,” he said. “A century after San Remo, the promise of Zionism is being realized.”

The organizers of the online conference appeared to distance themselves from Netanyahu’s juxtaposition of San Remo and Trump’s so-called Deal of the Century.

Mike Pompeo said the ‘historic agreement marked the world’s embrace of the unbreakable connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel’

“The statement made by the prime minister was not part of any official agenda by the conference organizers,” Tomas Sandell, the director of the European Coalition for Israel, told The Times of Israel.

“The main objective of the 100th anniversary broadcast was to explain the historical connections between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, as the right of the Jewish people to reconstitute their national home in their ancient land was codified under international law in 1920,” Sandell added.

“In a day and age of historical revisionism and ambivalence, these historical and legal facts need to be retold and taken into consideration.”

The European Coalition for Israel, which is based in Brussels, originally planned to host a celebration for the centenary of San Remo, but due to the coronavirus pandemic decided to postpone the event. Instead, it produced a one-hour live broadcast, which included interviews with current and former Israeli officials commenting on the importance of the conference.

Many speakers stressed the historical significance of San Remo especially as Israel’s detractors deny the Jewish state has a right to exist. More needs to be done to bring the decisions made there to the attention of today’s diplomats, it was argued.

“It’s important for our future, it’s important for our present,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said in a prerecorded interview.

Alberto Biancheri, the current mayor of San Remo, said his city “is rightly understood as the birthplace of Israel.”

‘The groundwork for the incredible nation that is Israel’

The online conference also featured excerpts from statements about the San Remo conference current and former world leaders submitted for the occasion.

“One of the seeds of the olive tree which was to become the symbol of the modern State of Israel was planted in San Remo,” Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte wrote.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban dedicated his message to the “courageous people whose great sacrifice, work and struggle could create the modern and independent Jewish state.”

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the centenary of the San Remo conference “provides an opportunity to not just reflect on decades of cooperation between our peoples — but also to look forward to an even stronger friendship in the future.”

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab applauds at the Foreign Office in London during the weekly’ Clap for our Carers’ in London, April 23, 2020 (AP Photo/Frank Augstein/pool)

In his message, Raab stressed Britain’s role in establishing a homeland for the Jewish people. San Remo “marked a new chapter in the history of our collaboration – bilateral relations that continue to go from strength to strength in the twenty-first century,” he said.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the “historic agreement marked the world’s embrace of the unbreakable connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.”

US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman took to Twitter to mark the occasion:

David M. Friedman

✔@USAmbIsrael

Recalling today the 100th anniversary of the San Remo Resolution, whereby the world powers recognized the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and the right of the Jewish people to a national home on that land was given the force of International Law.Twitter Ads info and privacy

Former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper hailed the “extraordinary statecraft at San Remo that laid the groundwork for the incredible nation that is the modern State of Israel.”

The world leaders who gathered in San Remo unanimously recognized Jewish rights and aspirations, which “contrasts starkly with today’s moral confusion and historical revision,” he added.

“The San Remo centenary reminds us of the enlightenment of the world leaders of that time, and of the perseverance of the Jewish people then and since.”

Tony Blair, a former UK prime minister who has long been involved in Middle East peacemaking efforts, said San Remo “planted the seeds of a modern era for the Middle East… With a secure and thriving Israel taking center-stage in the world today, I believe it is more important than ever to uphold the legacy of San Remo and work arduously toward peace and coexistence between Israel and the Arab world.”

Other dignitaries who sent statements included President Reuven Rivlin, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Czech President Milos Zeman and former Finnish prime minister Juha Sipilä.

Comment:

The truth – not the fantasy – is that there was never an independent, sovereign Arab state called Palestine.
Israel is “the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago.”
Jerusalem was never the capital of any Arab polity in all of recorded history. Only one people has ever made Jerusalem its capital and only one people ever established their indigenous ancestral and biblical homeland between East of the River Jordan and West to the Mediterranean Sea: the Jews.
Israel was reconstituted in 1920 by the April 1920 San Remo Treaty which was confirmed by the August 1920 Treaty of Sevres Article 95 and the Treaty of Lausanne, also by the January 1919 Faisal Weitzmann Agreement. The Arabs received at the same time over 6 million sq. miles (13 million km.) of territory with a wealth of oil reserves and the Jewish State was to receive 46,300 sq. miles which is Palestine. In the years before Israel was formally reconstituted and declared sovereign in 1948, the world referred to its Jewish residents as Palestinians. Indeed, the Palestinian military units fighting with the British Army in World War Two were Jewish to the man and woman. Few, if any, Arabs or Muslims fought against the Axis powers during that war and indeed many Arabs served in SS units; often willing collaborators with the Germans in murdering Jewish communities in the Balkans and elsewhere.
Remember, the word Palestine was the name the Romans renamed Israel and also named Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina. The Mandate for Palestine over the territory was granted under international law and treaty by the League of Nations in 1920 to Great Britain as trustee with the express duty and obligation of re-establishing within it a Jewish homeland as agreed to in international treaties executed after WWI.
At that time, the Palestine Mandate covered all of what is Israel – including Judea and Samaria, or what is erroneously called the West Bank – and present day Jordan.
What so many in the media forget, if they ever knew, is that after the Ottoman Empire was dismantled by the victorious Allies, France and Britain, at the end of World War One, many new Arab states were created on over 6 million square miles with a wealth of oil reserves and Palestine was reserved exclusively for a Jewish homeland under international law and treaty. 

(Napoleon in 1799 in a letter to the Jewish community in Israel Promised to give the Jewish people its land, since it belong to the Jewish people. But Napoleon lost the battle in Acco and his promise was never came to fruition.).
But Britain violated international treaties, thus, it reneged on its duty and obligation to the Jews and tore away four fifths of the Mandate territory in 1922 – that is all the land east of the Jordan River – and arbitrarily gave it away as a new Arab State to the Hashemite Bedouin tribe. Immediately Jews expelled their assets confiscated and were forbidden to live in what became Trans-Jordan and eventually the Kingdom of Jordan in 1946: An early example of ethnic cleansing and Arab apartheid. All Jewish property East of the Jordan River was confiscated and any Jews expelled.
The borders of the Mandate for Palestine as eventually determined; Jordan East of the Jordan River as the new Arab state taking away over 77% of Jewish territory and Israel everything West of the Jordan River including Jerusalem.
Interestingly, Arabs and their leaders had rejected any notion of a separate Arab Palestinian identity. For them, Palestine was merely a part of Greater Syria and the Arabs were indistinct from their neighbors. Indeed, the Syrian dictator, Assad, still plots for the return of Jordan, Israel and the disputed territories.
As far as Palestine was concerned to those Arab absentee landlords of the early years of the 20th century, living in the fleshpots of Cairo, Damascus and Beirut, the land was worthless: desolate, barren and malarial infested.
Then the Jewish pioneers returning in the late 19th century began to purchase the wasted and barren land at exorbitant prices – much higher than fertile land in Iowa and Idaho – drained the swamps and redeem again the ancestral ancient beloved Jewish homeland.
Jewish development of the centuries old desolate and neglected land, restored in familial love through blood, sweat and tears, ironically these brought into the territory hundreds of thousands of illegal Arab aliens who found livelihoods that were unavailable in the stagnant and corrupt neighboring Arab societies.
The British authorities invariably turned a blind eye to the flood of Arab Illegals seeing in them a stick to beat the Jewish residents. Herein lays the false genesis of the present day Arab claim to all the land and their descendant’s stated threat to extirpate any and all Jewish life within its borders. The British as trustee for the Jewish people gave away without authority land to the Arabs in Israel.
So many well-meaning people in the West, as well as latent anti-Semites, have fallen hook, line and sinker for the fabrication, delusion and myth of an Arab homeland called Palestine. So many people now believe the false and deceptive claim by the well-funded Arab deceptive propaganda machine that the Jews came and stole it, which is blatantly false.
But though it sounds affecting and no doubt to the liberal mind particularly emotional with all the tugging of the heart strings that it implies, it is still an absolute lie just like the weed that can never be fully uprooted.
For so many people who are either ignorant or hard hearted towards the Jewish state, they are unaware that the Jews were the aboriginal and remaining indigenous inhabitants for two millennia before the Muslim religion was created and Muslim armies swarmed out of Arabia with a Koran in one hand and a sword in the other to occupy vast territories in the name of Allah, while beheading some of the males, raping the women and taking them as slaves. The pity is that the bible as history is there for all to read. Sadly, so many ignore what is written.
The Arabs have a spread of territory which is over 13 million square kilometres with a wealth of oil reserves in the Middle East and into North Africa (the Maghreb). Israel’s territory is barely 21,000 square kilometres (it was suppose to be 120,000 sq. km. all of Palestine) and may soon be reduced further in violation of international law and treaties and the Faisal-Weizmann agreement of January 3, 1919, which agreed that all of Palestine is allocated to the Jewish people; if the Jewish biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria is torn from it to create in its midst a terror state called Arab-Palestine: the 23rd Arab state.
When the world extends to the million Jewish refugees who were terrorized, persecuted and expelled from Arab lands and all their assets including 120,000 sq. km/ of real property confiscated nearly 70 years ago the same sympathetic obsession that they extend to the Arabs who needlessly left Israel at the urging’s of the corrupt Arab League, then there maybe hope for a better international community than exists at the present time. The need for oil blinds them to the truth.
Fighting terrorism is not unlike fighting a deadly cancer. It can not be treated just where it is visible – every diseased cell in the body must be destroyed completely with no traces left.
When a poison strikes the human body, the only way to address it, is to remove it and destroy it completely. That is the way the terrorist organizations and its supporters should be treated.
YJ Draiman