The League of Nations and the mandate system
For the first time the powers build a standing union of states against another war, and it is that union which grants Britain the mandate over the Land of Israel.
The Covenant of the League formed a separate part of the Treaty of Versailles and came into force on 10 January 1920; the first Council met in Paris on 16 January and the first Assembly in Geneva on 15 November of that year. There were forty two founding members. The United States, whose president had conceived the League, did not join it.
The lands taken from the Ottoman Empire and from Germany were neither declared ownerless nor handed over as property: the League introduced mandates, that is administration in its name and answerable to it, in classes A, B and C. The Land of Israel fell into class A, among the lands of which the Covenant said that they stood close to self rule. The mandate over it was approved by the Council of the League in July 1922, on the 22nd by some accounts and on the 24th by others, and it came into force on 29 September 1923. Its preamble repeated the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 and named the historical connection of the Jewish people with that land.
The League did not stop the war. In April 1946 it dissolved itself and handed its affairs to the United Nations, and by then the mandate over the Land of Israel had two years left.
Sources
Documents of the period
- The Covenant of the League of Nations, 1919; the text of the Mandate for Palestine, 1922 — the classes of mandate and the preamble of the mandate repeating the Balfour Declaration
Scholarship
- Studies in the history of the League of Nations and Mandatory Palestine — the meetings of 1920, the number of founding members and the day the mandate came into force
Basis: documents and evidence.