Summary
The United Nations International Trusteeship System as an alternative to the Mandate for Palestine. In Report to the General Assembly (UNSCOP), trusteeship figures as the interim arrangement proposed by the Anglo-American Committee in 1946 and by the British Government in 1947, and as the only remaining means of discharging international responsibility for a mandated territory after the League of Nations and the Permanent Mandates Commission were dissolved — but one that had not automatically taken over the mandates system’s functions (Ch. V, Recommendation I comment).
Details
- The Anglo-American Committee of 1946 recommended that Palestine continue to be administered under the Mandate pending the execution of a Trusteeship Agreement under the United Nations, envisaging a long period of trusteeship in view of the depth of Arab-Jewish antagonism; its constitutional principles were that Jew shall not dominate Arab and Arab shall not dominate Jew, and that Palestine shall be neither a Jewish State nor an Arab State (Report to the General Assembly (UNSCOP), lines 1278, 1574-1578).
- The Morrison Plan of 1946 placed Jerusalem and Bethlehem, together with the Negev, under the direct control of the British Government’s representative acting as trustee for Palestine in virtue of a United Nations Trusteeship Agreement; the Bevin Cantonization Plan of 1947 provided for a five-year period of British trusteeship to prepare the country for independence, with the Trusteeship Council to advise on future procedure if a Constitutional Assembly could not agree; and on 7 February 1947 the British delegation proposed a five-year British Trusteeship as a preparation for independence, which both the Arab delegations and the Jewish Agency rejected (Report to the General Assembly (UNSCOP), lines 1284-1288, 1580-1582).
- In the comment on Recommendation I (termination of the Mandate), the report holds that territories can be placed under Trusteeship only by means of individual Trusteeship Agreements approved by a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly, and that the most the mandatory could now do, if the Mandate continued, would be to administer in its spirit without discharging its international obligations as the mandates system intended (Report to the General Assembly (UNSCOP), lines 1646-1668).
- The report’s Chapter IV recapitulation classes the continuation of the Mandate or the establishment of a Trusteeship among arrangements that “could only be temporary”, suggested against the virtual certainty that no solution could fully satisfy both parties (Report to the General Assembly (UNSCOP), lines 1614).
Related pages
Report to the General Assembly (UNSCOP), Mandate for Palestine, Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry