“Can you blame the nations for not respecting your rights if you yourself don’t know what the rights are?” asked Dr. Jacques Gauthier, decrying the “shameful conduct of the nations” in reneging on international pledges and agreements made early in the 20th century.

While lands outside of Jerusalem were also promised to the Jews, their status isn’t as clear as is that of Judaism’s holiest city. The key, clarified Gauthier in an interview with the Jewish Tribune, is the Jewish people – or its representatives – has not relinquished its claim.

The severing of territory from the Jews’ land allocation in Palestine to create what became Jordan, on the other hand, was accepted, albeit reluctantly, by the Zionist leadership.  This acceptance was conditional, said Gauthier, on the Jews’ receiving the remainder of Palestine.

Similarly, Israeli governments have accepted the inevitability of losing at least some of the West Bank [Judea and Samaria], thus weakening their claim to those lands, too.

The claim to Jerusalem, however, has never been relinquished. Indeed, Israel annexed the city after the Six Day War, a move they eschewed for Judea and Samaria.

Gauthier, who is not Jewish, successfully defended his doctoral dissertation about Jerusalem’s legal status in 2006 at the Graduate Institute of International Studies of the University of Geneva in front of three exacting critics.

Gauthier crammed 25 years of research, 1,300 pages and 3,000 footnotes into a lunch-time 50-minute presentation at Bennett Jones LLP in Toronto. The event, presented by the Speakers Action Group and the Canadian Jewish Civil Rights Association, drew about 100 people.

His presentation centred on the events that took place in the wake of World War I, when the victorious Allies convened in Paris. Their six-month-long deliberations there and a subsequent meeting in San Remo, Italy, hammered out the novel idea that territories of the vanquished – in this case, the Ottomans – would be reallocated to other parties not repossessed by the victors themselves.

Among the groups requesting land at the meetings were the Zionists and the Arabs – the latter represented by the Hashemites of Mecca, later to become the ruling family in Jordan.

“I am making the case,” Gauthier said, “that the people at the table had the right to dispose of these lands.”

This point is crucial to his case, because when the powers gathered again in San Remo in 1920, they accepted the claims of both the Arabs and the Jews: the Arabs received lands in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and the Jews, Palestine. These rights were then codified in treaties, said Gauthier.