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Each day, we learn of Israel’s theft of yet another slice of Palestine. Piece by piece, acre by acre, the Palestinian nation has been seized by Israeli offensive forces and carved up by Zionist colonizers in contravention of all treaties, accords, “peace” agreements and the like.

Meanwhile, Israel remains accountable to no laws, no treaties and no global organizations. It takes what it wants, when it wants. It kills, destroys, pillages, imprisons, rapes and tortures because it has been allowed to.

It is important to understand how Israel’s wantonness and lawlessness unfolded, especially as the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) recently delegated trusteeship (authority) of Gaza to the Trump administration, essentially handing the United States an internationally sanctioned “mandate” of the enclave.

It is the shameful story of the manner in which the League of Nations, created by the British and other imperial powers, “gave” itself the “mandate” of Palestine; how 28 years later, the United Nations authored a plan to partition the mandate; and how, in 2025, the American empire has sought, in collaboration with Israel, to assume “trusteeship” over Palestinian land in Gaza.

The Imperial Mandate System, 1919

The British and French empires learned, after the horrors of World War I, that they could further their colonial interests in the Middle East, not by aggression, but within the legal framework of international institutions.

The League of Nations served that purpose when, in 1919, after the First World War, the victorious Allied powers established the mandate system—traditional colonialism disguised as benevolence. The mandates, meant to be temporary, served to legalize British and French imperial gains over former Ottoman Empire colonies in the Arab Middle East.

Underlying the mandate system was the imperious racist assumption that the people who had lived for thousands of years on the land were incapable of governing themselves, that they needed the “tutelage of an advanced nation” before achieving independence—an attitude that has yet to change.

The text of the 1919 League of Nations Covenant (Article 22), for example, reveals the inherent racism of the imperial powers; it stated:

To those colonies and territories… which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this........

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