An element of the Narrative, as we have just seen, was that Britain was lawfully in Palestine. Had Britain gained sovereignty by the Treaty of Lausanne, it would have had status in Palestine sufficient to exercise a mandate. The Treaty of Lausanne, however, gave Britain nothing.

As events unfolded in 1923, Britain did not try to tell the League of Nations what it would later say in the 1947 explanation. League Council members knew that the Treaty of Sèvres was dead. They knew that the Treaty of Lausanne was not yet ratified, so they would have seen through an explanation like the one devised for the report to the United Nations in 1947.

Once the Treaty of Lausanne was signed, however, the British Government tried to fashion an argument that, were it to be ratified, it would give Britain legal status in Palestine. This was Curzon's argument to the League Council in his16 August 1923 communication that we saw in Chapter 11. The defunct Treaty of Sèvres had specified sovereignty to the Principal Allied Powers and had recited that the Balfour Declaration was to be applied. The Treaty of Lausanne had nothing of that. All Curzon had was its Article 16, whose text bears repeating. It read:

It was the final clause of Article 16 that Curzon recited to the League Council in August 1923. To repeat, in his communication to the League Council, Curzon interpreted this phrase to mean, “Turkey has agreed to accept the disposal of Palestine effected by the parties concerned.” Article 16, however, did not identify those parties. Nor did it specify what may have already been “settled.” At San Remo, the Principal Allied Powers had “settled” nothing but had only anticipated that Britain would keep Palestine and implement the Balfour Declaration if that would be agreed by Turkey in a peace treaty.