For the past few weeks, headlines in Israel have warned that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' upcoming request for nonmember state recognition at the U.N. General Assembly will do serious damage to Israel. They are, however, mistaken. Each U.N. member country signed the international treaty known as the U.N. Charter, which came into effect in 1945. The U.N. can act only within the framework of this pact, and any decision made by any body operating within the U.N. framework that contradicts the charter is invalid. Abbas' decision to petition the U.N. Thursday evening contradicts Article 80 of the charter and has no validity. In the absence of any validity, Abbas cannot use it in the way the media is claiming. Experts in international law have all decided this: Canadian lawyer Dr. Jacques Gauthier; Canadian former Justice Minister Professor Irwin Cotler; former Foreign Ministry legal adviser and former U.S. ambassador Dr. Meir Rosen, who was among those who drafted the Camp David peace treaty with Egypt; attorney Howard Griff from Jerusalem; and Professor Eugene Rostow, who was dean of Yale Law School for 11 years, all agree with this analysis of Abbas' move. All are recognized experts in international law who specialize in the legal status of the Palestinian Mandate. How does Article 80 of the U.N. Charter render Abbas' decision invalid? Article 80 is part of an international treaty and is subject to international law. It preserves the rights of states and peoples, which includes the rights of the Jewish people to have sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel, unless a mechanism is established, based on mutual agreement between all countries and parties involved, to turn the Mandate mechanism into a trusteeship. There was a window of about three years to do this, according to Chapter 12 of the U.N. Charter. That window was between Oct. 24, 1945 the day the U.N. Charter went into effect and May 14-15, 1948, when the Jewish people exercised their sovereign right to declare a state, immediately following the end of the British Mandate over the Land of Israel. That window has long passed, and no mutual agreement was reached then that would derogate from the Jewish rights of sovereignty. With the closing of this window, the rights of the Jewish people in the framework of the British Mandate became rooted in law. Those rights were defined in the Land of Israel Mandate, a legal document and part of international law. The mandate granted only the Jews the irrevocable right to sovereignty over all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This right has never been altered by international law and is still in effect today. As a result, the U.N. does not have the ability to detract from these rights, and any attempt to do so is contrary to international law. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's late father, Professor Benzion Netanyahu, was a member of the Jewish delegation to the U.N., whose mission was to protect the rights of Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel under the Mandate from any erosion in an uncertain world. Article 80 was a result of that delegation's work. It is only appropriate that his son should now use the tool the father designed. The time to use it for the goal for which it was intended is now.
