The current international legal status of Jerusalem 

Written by: Dr. Majid Tuhan Al-Zubaidi

Abstract of the lecture given by the author at the Galilee Club on the evening of Saturday, February 22, 2025, entitled “The Current International Legal Status of the City of Jerusalem.” In it, the lecturer explained that the Arabs had peacefully possessed the city of Jerusalem since the year 638 AD from the Roman Empire, whose existence in our Arab homeland had ended. They were not disputed by anyone except the armies of France, Britain, and Germany during the “Crusades” period, which lasted for a little over two centuries. Then, Arab sovereignty over the city was renewed until Palestine was placed under the British mandate in accordance with the decisions of the “Mandates Committee” in the “League of Nations,” which was the international organization after the Allied victories in World War I. These decisions stipulated the appointment of an international guardianship from advanced European countries to prepare the peoples of the Ottoman Empire for development and then grant them national independence. This confirms in international law that the mandate did not give any sovereign right or right of ownership to the mandated state over the lands of the people who became under the mandate.

After the demise of the League of Nations and its inability to solve the world's problems, it was replaced by the United Nations, whose General Assembly recommended in its famous Resolution No. 181 issued on November 29, 1947, the partition of Palestine into two states and making the city of Jerusalem, along with Bethlehem, a region separate from the two states and under international guardianship, based on a recommendation from the British Mandate.
In fact, Resolution 181 is not a binding resolution from the UN Security Council, but rather from the second chamber of the United Nations, the UN General Assembly, whose resolutions are characterized by non-binding recommendations. Ironically, it is the resolution to establish “Israel.”

The aforementioned resolution failed to pass the first vote, because the majority of the 56 independent states in the General Assembly at the time were from Latin America, which voted against it out of fear that the Jews would not respect the Christian holy sites in the Holy City. The members of the Zionist delegation, including the activist lawyer at the time and later the first Prime Minister of Israel in 1948, rushed to reassure the Latin American delegations using fraudulent methods. Then the vote was repeated on the resolution and it passed.

The few Arab states that were nominally independent, no more than seven, rejected the resolution for valid legal considerations, the most important of which was that the number of Jews in 1947 did not exceed a third of the population, that the area of land they owned did not reach a quarter of the area of Palestine, and that Jerusalem was the administrative capital of Palestine during the Ottoman rule that continued from the beginning of the sixteenth century AD until the year 1917. Then, one of the principles of the idea of mandates, including the British Mandate, as well as any other mandate, is not to claim a sovereign right or ownership in the land of the people under the mandate, which originally came with the aim of preparing it for advancement and progress in preparation for achieving its independence, and that it is unjust to give the Jews in Palestine 56 percent of Palestine, which has an area of 27 thousand square kilometers.

The 1948 war between the British-armed Jewish guerrilla fighters and the fighters of the independent Arab armies under the general command of the famous British intelligence officer, General John Bagot Glubb, whose number was estimated at about 24,000 fighters against 67,000 Jewish fighters, resulted in those guerrillas occupying 84 percent of the area of unified Jerusalem, which was known as “West Jerusalem.” More than 700,000 Palestinian citizens were displaced, while 60,000 Palestinians remained in Palestine. Then 100,000 Palestinians were added to them after their lands were occupied on the night of October 30 and 31, 1948, in the Triangle and Western Galilee regions, which are among the areas of the Arab Palestinian state recognized by Resolution 181, and whose area is estimated at 3,200 km2!

Before that, the British General Allenby, the victorious conqueror of Jerusalem, had brought in a famous British engineer, the architect of Alexandria, Sir William McLean, in 1918, to design a new organizational master plan for Jerusalem. This plan diverted the construction of services, including roads, construction, and institutions, towards the west, towards the Jewish neighborhoods and colonies, and to surround the old Arab city and its suburbs, increasing the green spaces that were forbidden to build on.
The British were not satisfied with “Maclean” but brought in the greatest British engineer in 1919 directly, the world-famous “Christian Zionist” “Patrick Geddes” who planned a new structure for Jerusalem from the perspective of it being a Talmudic Jewish city and a religious and cultural heritage for the Jews. For example, he planned to build the Hebrew University buildings on a hill overlooking the Noble Sanctuary so that students of Torah, archaeology and anthropology would stand daily and throughout their years of study looking at the “Temple Mount” (the Jewish name for the Noble Sanctuary)!

All the plans and policies of the British Mandate aimed to achieve the Balfour Declaration to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine. This promise was granted by the British government on November 2, 1917, and was included in a decision of the General Mandates Committee of the League of Nations in 1922 regarding Palestine. This ominous declaration became an international decision binding on the world, not just Britain. This was followed by the identification of the Jordan River in the middle as a dividing line between Palestine and the “East Jordan” region, which Britain excluded from the content of the “Jewish National Home” in the Balfour Declaration, by an official decision of the aforementioned General Mandates Committee of the League of Nations in the same year 1922. This generated opposition from extremist Jewish movements to Britain, especially from the extremist groups of Vladimir Jabotinsky, who is the spiritual father of the deceased criminal terrorist Menachem Begin (who became Prime Minister of Israel in 1977 and is the spiritual father of Sharon, Netanyahu and Smotrich). And the likes of them, the terrorist killers9, who were wanted dead or alive by the British Army, and whose pictures were published in many British and Palestinian newspapers due to his crimes of killing a number of British soldiers.

In fact, the Israeli claim of sovereignty over Jerusalem according to Resolution 181 is incorrect for a very simple reason: that resolution recommended that all of Jerusalem be placed under international guardianship and not part of the territory of either the Arab or Jewish states. It is also an advisory resolution as a recommendation.

The lecturer also focused on the resolutions of the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly, and its organizations, such as UNESCO and the International Court of Justice, stating that East Jerusalem is part of the West Bank, which, along with the Gaza Strip, is occupied Palestinian Arab land, and that Israel has no right to impose any kind of sovereignty over it. All its settlements there are invalid and illegal, and that Israel’s presence there is a “belligerent occupation” that does not create a sovereign right or a right to ownership. This occupation contradicts the most important principle of the United Nations’ existence, which is the principle of the inadmissibility of seizing the land of others by force.

The lecturer also touched upon the invalidity, illegality and illegitimacy of President Trump’s decision to move his country’s embassy to any location in Jerusalem, which was rejected by the United Nations, indicating that the real father of the draft resolution to move the US embassy to Jerusalem is the current US Secretary of State, the Zionist “Marco Rubio” (of Cuban origin) with his colleague in 1994 when the two mentioned were members of the US Congress from the Republican Party and they submitted the draft resolution for approval by Congress and binding the US presidency to it, recommending moving the embassy by the end of 1999, but successive US administrations used the legal loophole to postpone its implementation, which is that the president has the right to postpone the implementation of any decision of Congress that may affect US national security, during the era of President “Bill Clinton.”

The lecturer pointed out that Israel’s issuance of a “Basic Law” in 1980, during the era of the terrorist Menachem Begin (who had previously, in November 1949, as a member of the Israeli Knesset, introduced a bill to officially declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel. He proposed declaring Jerusalem within the borders drawn by the British Mandate authorities (including the section under Jordanian control) as the permanent capital of the state and transferring official institutions to the west of the city. The Knesset rejected this bill and merely moved its headquarters to Jerusalem without enacting a law in this regard.), after the Camp David Accords with Egypt, under which Jerusalem was considered its eternal and unified capital, was met with clear rejection by the United Nations, both chambers of the Security Council and the General Assembly. The Council issued Resolution No. 478, “adopted on August 20, 1980, which is one of seven resolutions issued by the United Nations condemning Israel’s attempt to annex East Jerusalem. In particular, UN Security Council Resolution 478 notes Israel’s failure to comply with UN Security Council Resolution 476 and condemns the Jerusalem Law of 1980, which declared Jerusalem is the "complete and united" capital of Israel, as a violation of international law. The resolution states that the Council will not recognize this law and calls on Member States to accept the Council's decision. This resolution also calls on Member States to withdraw their diplomatic missions from the city, which most of the small countries (the Netherlands, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Panama, Uruguay, and Venezuela) have done.

The lecturer touched on the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice regarding East Jerusalem as part of the Palestinian Arab territories occupied in 1967 in its advisory opinion in 2004 regarding the separation wall built by Israel in the West Bank to dismember it. This decision is based on United Nations resolutions, which are the standard and foundations for the decisions of international courts and organizations. Therefore, the Court’s position on Jerusalem became the same as the position of the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly and its international organizations, as a city under illegal Israeli occupation in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution No. 242 issued in November 1967, which affirmed the inadmissibility of the Israeli occupation of Arab territories, including East Jerusalem, and the withdrawal of Israel from all the territories it occupied. The content of this resolution was then repeated in UN Security Council Resolution No. 338 issued following the glorious Ramadan/October War in 1973 by the Council and later in many similar resolutions.