On a summer morning in 1999, I received an unexpected telephone call from London at my office. Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization had agreed to begin talks for a final peace to settle the conflict over Palestine. A treaty was anticipated. The British Government was concerned that while Israel had a staff of lawyers competent in international law, the Palestinians did not. A treaty could more readily be agreed upon if the Palestinians had solid legal backup. A panel of lawyers assembled by the British Government had just met to make plans for legal consultation. At the meeting, my name was mentioned as a possible addition to the panel.

Two months later, I found myself sitting down for an exploratory meeting with officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization. One of the British lawyers opened the session by quipping that Prime Minister Tony Blair was backing the project to make amends for the Balfour Declaration. On the other side of the table, the quip was received politely for the icebreaker that it was intended to be. The question of whether Britain's issuance and implementation of the Balfour Declaration might indeed have been less than legal hung in the air for only a moment, before the conversation turned to the matters at hand.

As participants on both sides of the table knew, however, it was a question at the very heart of the conflict over Palestine that began when Britain took the territory from Turkey. A change in the complexion of Palestine's population under Britain's tenure generated the conflict that the anticipated treaty was to end. During the interwar years, when it governed Palestine, Britain went to considerable lengths to establish itself legally and to frame its implementation of the Balfour Declaration as legitimate. That effort, which involved arrangements with other powers of the day and with the League of Nations, was largely successful as a matter of public relations. That success set the stage for the United Nations to make a recommendation about Palestine's future.

Much ink has been spilled over Britain's role in Palestine from a policy perspective, but less attention has been devoted to whether Britain's governance and the changes it brought about were based in legality, such that they could appropriately serve as a basis for a territorial disposition in the country.