Following World War I, the world powers established the Mandate System. The allotment of the former Ottoman province of Palestine to Great Britain required the British administrators to fulfil two conflicting tasks. One was to safeguard the rights of all inhabitants of Palestine, as stipulated in the Covenant of the League of Nations, the other was to promote a Jewish National Home in the territory, which had been the official British policy since the Balfour Declaration. The first Attorney General in British Mandate Palestine, Norman Bentwich, embodied this conflict. Bentwich, born in 1883, was an ardent supporter of the Zionist case for a Jewish homeland in Palestine during his decade in charge of the legal implementation of the mandate. Oscar Weller looks at the intriguing life of this multi-faceted individual in the context of a torn region.
