Regardless of whether the Palestine Mandate has been referred to as being a Class "A" Mandate, it is patently obvious that in actual substance it was not. The text of the Mandate reads differently from that of the Syria and Mesopotamia Mandate documents, which (unlike the Palestine Mandate document) place emphasis on paragraph 4 of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant (according to which Class "A" Mandates are defined).
It is not only the 1937 British Peel Commission Report which distinguished the Palestine Mandate from Class "A" Mandates ("The Mandate is of a different type from the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon and the draft Mandate for ‘Iraq. These latter, which were called for convenience "A" Mandates, accorded with the fourth paragraph of Article 22... Article I of the Palestine Mandate, on the other hand, vests "full powers of legislation and of administration" , within the limits of the Mandate, in the Mandatory.")
Additionally, the 1947 UNSCOP Report on Palestine backed up the distinction made by the Peel Commission Report, almost verbatim:
"176. With regard to the principle of self-determination, although international recognition was extended to this principle at the end of the First World War and it was adhered to with regard to the other Arab territories, at the time of the creation of the "A" Mandates, it was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there. Actually, it may well be said that the Jewish National Home and the sui generis Mandate for Palestine run counter to that principle.
177. As to the claim that the Palestine Mandate violates Article 22 of the Covenant because the community of Palestine has not been recognized as an independent nation and because the mandatory was given full powers of legislation and administration, it has been rightly pointed out by the Peel Commission:
" (a) That the provisional recognition of certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire as independent nations is permissible; the words are can be provisionally recognized, not 'will' or 'shall';
" (b) That the penultimate paragraph of Article 22 prescribes that the degree of authority to be exercised by the mandatory shall be defined, at need, by the Council of the League;
" (c) That the acceptance by the Allied Powers and the United States of the policy of the Balfour Declaration made it clear from the beginning that Palestine would have been treated differently from Syria and Iraq, and that this difference of treatment was confirmed by the Supreme Council in the Treaty of Sevres and by the Council of the League in sanctioning the Mandate."
Since we have both an official report from the designated League of Nations Mandatory power and from the UNSCOP committee clearly distinguising the Palestine Mandate from the very definition of a Class "A" Mandate, it would be patently wrong to include the Palestine in the list of Class "A" Mandates in this article, without making that fundamental distinction: that in actual substance, the Palestine Mandate is markedly "sui generis" and does not fit the Class "A' definition. As the article stands at the moment, it fails to do so.
