And your penchant for paraphrasing is suspicious, once again thoroughness and accuracy in textual analysis is extremely important, lambasting that as "pedantry" shows you don't really care what the text says, you only want to talk about what you think it says.
On the contrary, I am trying to engage people in conversation with thoroughness and accuracy and textual and historical and legal analysis. But the constant rubber ball of "that word isn't in the text" when attempting to have a discussion is not conducive to an analysis.
The term "independent" or "state" does not appear in the text though.
Yes, but as previously mentioned, the POINT of the mandate system was to provide tutelage to emerging independent states (Article 22).
Second, you did say "doesn't mention any people eligible for self-government but the Jewish people" yet the term "self-government" isn't in the text, there's nothing that couples "self-government" and "Jewish people", I told you this earlier.
"Self-governing institutions" is in the text. Specifically, "...secure the establishment of the Jewish national home ... and the development of self-governing institutions."
My point, again, is that only the Jewish people were discussed in the document in this context.
Frankly I can see that you are very familiar with the text
I appreciate that acknowledgement.
but have interpreted it in a fanciful way that amounts to a misrepresentation of the mandate.
Again, the point of this entire line of questioning was to respond to
Billo_Really 's claim that "Israel took more land than she was given". Which is THE common refrain and accepted understanding, even though it is factually incorrect.
The claim is that Israel was "given" (I detest that language, but tolerate it for ease of discussion) a demarked and delineated territory with determined and recorded boundaries, and that she now exerts control outside those boundaries is an astonishing claim. And yet, there doesn't seem to be a single historical document in the relevant period of history to prove that claim.
I've been discussing this topic for decades, and no one - not one - whether expert or layman or keyboard warrior - has EVER been able to submit for me a primary source document which provides for ANY OTHER sovereign over the territory except Israel and which provides for a boundary demarcation line between Israel and said so-far unknown and unnamed other sovereign. The Mandate for Palestine certainly does not provide that, no matter how much you want to quibble about language.
(Speaking of quibbling with language, the common term "Occupied Palestinian Territories" to my knowledge didn't come into use by the UN, let alone common usage, until the 1990s and "Occupied Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem" some years later).
Most people lean on 242 to support the existence of this mysterious other sovereign. Or the existence of territory under the control and sovereignty of this mysterious other. This is unsatisfactory, at best, since 242 speaks specifically to "every state in the area" and "member states".
Let me be perfectly clear. None of this denies the inviolable right of Arab Palestinians to self-determination, a right which belongs to every peoples, including the Jewish people. I would like nothing more for the Arab Palestinians to achieve that goal, along with other groups who aspire to it. But there is a very great difference between the right to such a thing and the emergence or existence of such a thing. There is international law which outlines how new states emerge and under what conditions.
