By Tawfiq al-Ghussein
6 May 2026
The legal status of the British Mandate for Palestine has long been treated as a settled matter within the history of international law, typically framed as part of the institutional settlement overseen by the League of Nations after the First World War.
Within this conventional account, the Mandate system appears as a transitional mechanism, intended to guide former Ottoman territories toward eventual self-government under international supervision. Yet this narrative becomes far less stable when examined through a stricter legal lens, particularly in light of the arguments advanced by John Quigley1, whose work calls into question whether Britain ever possessed a coherent legal basis for its authority in Palestine.
At the same time, this position sits within a broader scholarly debate in which other jurists have interpreted the Mandate system as an imperfect but genuine attempt to reconfigure imperial governance within a legal framework. The tension between these readings is not incidental, it is precisely where the legal problem resides.
What emerges from this debate is not a simple binary between legality and illegality, but a more revealing tension between competing conceptions of international law itself. On one view, law is a set of principles that must precede and constrain the exercise of power. On another, it is a developing framework that absorbs and regulates political realities as they unfold. The Mandate for Palestine sits uneasily between these positions. It can be read as an early experiment in international governance, or as an instance in which legal form was used to consolidate outcomes already determined by force.
This dynamic becomes materially visible at the very moment it claims legal form. Nowhere is this clearer than in the transition from wartime occupation to the institutional framework that would become the British Mandate for Palestine.
Britain entered Palestine as a belligerent occupant—with no right to determine its political future
What is often presented as a settled legal foundation was, in fact, far more unstable. Britain entered Palestine not as a sovereign authority, but as a belligerent occupant. In classical international law, occupation confers administrative control, not the right to determine the political future of the territory. Yet it was precisely this latter authority that Britain proceeded to exercise.
The Mandate system, formalised through the League of Nations, is typically understood as conferring international legitimacy upon this arrangement. But this assumption rests on a conceptual slippage between endorsement and legal competence. The League did not resolve the underlying question of sovereignty, nor could it transfer rights that Britain itself did not possess.
In this light, the Balfour Declaration appears less as the origin of a legal order than as an anticipatory political act, one that precedes and exceeds the legal authority later invoked to sustain it. The “Mandate for Palestine” was not the juridical foundation it is often assumed to be, but a framework in which legality was asserted in advance of its own conditions.
At the conclusion of the First World War, Britain’s position in Palestine was that of a military occupier following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Under the established principles governing occupation, codified most clearly in the Hague Regulations of 1907, such authority was explicitly limited.
Occupation did not confer sovereignty, nor did it permit the occupying power to undertake fundamental political transformations or to determine the long-term constitutional future of the territory. Its function was administrative and temporary, constrained by the obligation to preserve the existing legal and social order insofar as possible. From this perspective, the shift from occupation to governance appears difficult to justify within the existing legal framework, a point that underpins Quigley’s critique.
Defenders of the Mandate’s legality, however, have argued that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire created a juridical vacuum that could not be addressed by classical doctrines alone. In this reading, the League of Nations did not simply ratify imperial control, but sought to mediate it, transforming conquest into trusteeship.
A hybrid structure in an evolving international order
Scholars such as Susan Pedersen2 have emphasised that the Mandate system introduced new forms of oversight, reporting and international scrutiny that placed at least some constraints on imperial administration. The Mandate, on this account, was neither purely legal nor purely political, but a hybrid structure reflecting an evolving international order.
Yet this defence, while more sophisticated, does not resolve the underlying difficulty.
It shifts the argument from legality to functionality, from whether authority was lawfully acquired to whether it was exercised under emerging norms. Quigley’s intervention cuts beneath this by returning to first principles: by what right was authority assumed in the first place? If the answer lies not in a prior legal entitlement but in the consolidation of power followed by institutional recognition, then the Mandate appears less as a legal innovation and more as a juridical accommodation of geopolitical reality. Law, in this formulation, does not precede authority, it stabilises it.
That slippage between policy and law becomes particularly visible in the incorporation of the Balfour Declaration into the Mandate framework.
Issued as a statement of British policy, the Declaration carried no binding legal force at the time of its articulation. Its subsequent elevation within the Mandate structure effectively transformed a unilateral political commitment into a principle endowed with quasi-legal authority.
Some defenders have suggested that this reflected an emerging international consensus, or at least the alignment of major powers within a new diplomatic order. Yet consensus among powers cannot be equated with legality. If anything, this transformation illustrates how easily the boundary between law and policy can be traversed when institutional mechanisms are available to translate one into the other.
Equally significant is the absence of meaningful consent from the population most directly affected.
A hierarchy in which peoples are objects of governance, not subjects of political will
The Mandate system was justified through the language of a “sacred trust of civilisation,” a formulation that demands closer scrutiny. Far from being a neutral legal principle, it encodes a hierarchy in which certain populations are positioned as objects of governance rather than subjects of political will. It allows imperial authority to be reframed as custodianship, masking asymmetry beneath the language of obligation.
The inhabitants of Palestine were not consulted in any substantive manner regarding the imposition of British rule or the terms under which it would operate. Their political future was determined externally, through wartime agreements and post-war diplomacy, with little regard for what would later emerge as a foundational norm of international law: self-determination. Even within the intellectual climate of the early 20th Century, this absence of consent complicates claims to legitimacy and weakens the assertion that the Mandate rested on a stable legal foundation.
Reconsidered in this light, the British Mandate for Palestine does not resolve into a single legal conclusion. Instead, it exposes the limits of the legal order that produced it.
Britain’s authority was neither wholly lawless nor securely lawful, it was constructed in the space where power sought recognition and law provided it. The significance of that ambiguity does not belong to the past alone, it continues to shape how legality is claimed, performed, and contested in the present.
Tawfiq Al-Ghussein is a writer and researcher focusing on international law, geopolitical strategy, and Middle Eastern political economy. His work has been published in Elaph, L’Antidiplomatico, and Pagine Esteri.
1 John B. Quigley is professor of international law at Ohio State University, where he is the Presidents’ Clun Professor of Law Emeritus. Porefessor Quigley has been active in international human rights work, especially on Israel and Palestine, for more than half a century.
2 Susan Pedersen is a Canadian historian and James P.Shenton Professor of Core Curriculum at Columbia University, New York City. Professor Pedersen is the author of The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (OUP, 2015).