Andrew McCarthy accuses Pres. Obama of “borderline treachery” for telling Israel that a future Palestinian state must be drawn along Israel’s original 1967 borders, also called “the Green Line.” Here is a chunk of what he writes (emphasis is mine):
To begin with, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to point out, the 1967 borders are “indefensible.” That is why they have never been the starting point of U.S. policy, even though they always hover over negotiations. In its implacable hostility to Israel, the “international community” chooses to forget how and why the Arab side first grabbed, then lost, the territory in question. For nearly a half century since the adoption of U.N. Security Council resolution 242, the Washington Institute’s Robert Satloff explains, American administrations of both parties have called for eventual Israeli withdrawal to “secure and recognized” borders, a phrase interpreted as “not synonymous with the pre-1967 boundaries.”
By his new articulation, President Obama would deny Israel crucial negotiating leverage. If there is to be a peace settlement (which there cannot be until there are two parties that want peace), Israel must have the latitude to make territorial concessions in exchange for reliable concessions on security and other matters. It cannot be coerced into accepting an Obama-imposed fait accompli that leaves it fatally vulnerable to enemies whose ferocity is only encouraged by this bullying.
Bear in mind that what are called the “1967 borders” were never agreed-upon national boundaries. The Jewish claim on Judea and Samaria has roots in antiquity. This fact was intentionally obfuscated by Obama’s earlier suggestion in Cairo that Israel’s creation was an ill-conceived payback for the Holocaust, as it is by the convention of referring to Judea and Samaria as “the West Bank,” the name Jordan gave them when it seized and occupied them at the conclusion of Israel’s war of independence. The Arabs, of course, never created a Palestinian state when it was within their power to do so. Thus, the final disposition of this territory has never been resolved. It is a subject for negotiations, not predetermined Palestinian sovereignty.
I’m not sure what McCarthy’s claim that the Arabs “first grabbed, then lost, the territory in question” means. There was a lot of grabbing and losing in what is now the state of Israel and the Occupied Territories. This timeline for the period between 1917 and 2010 bears witness to that.
McCarthy’s next sentence is subtly misleading. He writes, “For nearly a half century since the adoption of U.N. Security Council resolution 242, the Washington Institute’s Robert Satloff explains, American administrations of both parties have called for eventual Israeli withdrawal to ‘secure and recognized’ borders, a phrase interpreted as “not synonymous with the pre-1967 boundaries.” The more accurate wording would be, “For nearly a half century since the adoption of U.N. Security Council resolution 242, American administrations of both parties have interpreted that resolution’s reference to ‘secure and recognized boundaries’ to mean ‘not synonymous with the pre-1967 boundaries.’ ” Meaning: It’s U.N. Resolution 242 — not the United States — that calls for “eventual Israeli withdrawal to ‘secure and recognized borders’ ” The United States has always interpreted the phrase “secure and recognized borders” to mean “not the pre-1967 borders.” Or, more accurately, the United States has supported Israel’s interpretation of “secure and recognized borders” to be something other than “the pre-1967 borders.” Resolution 242 itself does not say that “secure and recognized boundaries” means “not the pre-1967” boundaries.
Furthermore, McCarthy omits the context in which the phrase “secure and recognized boundaries” occurs. Here is the entire text of the resolution (emphasis is mine):
The Security Council,
Expressing its continuing concern with the grave situation in the Middle East,
Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security,
Emphasizing further that all Member States in their acceptance of the Charter of the United Nations have undertaken a commitment to act in accordance with Article 2 of the Charter,
Affirms that the fulfillment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles:
Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;
Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force;
Affirms further the necessity
For guaranteeing freedom of navigation through international waterways in the area;
For achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem;
For guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political independence of every State in the area, through measures including the establishment of demilitarized zones;
Requests the Secretary General to designate a Special Representative to proceed to the Middle East to establish and maintain contacts with the States concerned in order to promote agreement and assist efforts to achieve a peaceful and accepted settlement in accordance with the provisions and principles in this resolution;
Requests the Secretary-General to report to the Security Council on the progress of the efforts of the Special Representative as soon as possible.
Obviously, Israel has complied with neither of these principles. Even worse, Israel has actively pursued a policy of creating a set of “facts on the ground,” in Moshe Dayan’s famous expression (scroll down to the paragraph that begins with the sentence, “At the same time Defence Minister Moshe Dayan called for the establishment of ‘facts on the ground’ in the Territories.’ “) This was the organizing principle behind the Allon Plan (named for its author, Yigal Allon):
On July 26, 1967, Defense Minister Yigal Allon presented a plan to then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol for a settlement with the Palestinians, which came to be known as the Allon Plan. The plan was clarified publicly in a 1976 Foreign Affairs magazine article. The basic features of the plan were:
1. Israel would retain control of the Jordan valley and of the “back of the mountain.” According to Israeli military strategists, this control was needed in order to control the West Bank militarily. Most of this area is desert and is not settled by Palestinians or used by them. However, the plan would control Palestinian access to Jordan and would create several separate enclaves.
2. The Jordan river would remain the eastern border of Israel, allowing Israel to prevent foreign armies from crossing into the West Bank and massing for an attack on the center of Israel.
3. Israel would annex areas in the Jerusalem corridor to secure the approaches to Jerusalem.
4. Palestinians would be given control of three populous enclaves – a northern enclave including Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm and Ramallah, a southern enclave including Hebron and Bethlehem, and an enclave including Jericho that included a crossing to Jordan. The enclaves would be connected by connecting roads.
The strategic concepts underlying the plan have been part of Israeli military doctrine since 1948. Labor party settlement policies generally followed this plan, concentrating settlements in the Jordan valley. The settlement in Hebron, and settlements in Ariel and other areas were set up despite Labor government opposition.
The Allon Plan was never adopted as formal policy or law, but it’s not difficult to see how Israel has applied it through the building of settlements in exactly the areas that Israel planned to annex. So not only has Israel failed to comply with Resolution 242 on withdrawing from the lands it captured and occupied in 1967, but it has also been engaged in deliberate sabotage of the peace negotiations that were supposed to rest on the two principles contained in the resolution. Every proposal or plan for a negotiated peace settlement since then has foundered on the settlements that Israel created precisely to achieve that outcome.
Henry Siegman of the Council on Foreign Relations explained how this has worked in the context of the “road map” for peace — a plan created by the U.S. State Department along the lines of a speech George W. Bush gave in June of 2002 (emphasis is mine):
The suggestion is that developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are being driven by the road map, whereas one would have to be deaf, dumb and blind to be unaware that they are being driven by Sharon’s efforts to bypass, undermine and bury the road map.
From the 1967 war onward, Sharon’s key strategic goal has been to avoid a political process at all costs. He understood that the inescapable result of such a process would be Israel’s return to the 1967 border, with only minor adjustments.
Avoiding that process has meant, among other things, expropriating Palestinian land on a grand scale for Jewish settlements, as well as undercutting Palestinian efforts to reach a cease-fire with terrorist groups, since that might undermine Sharon’s claim that there is no Palestinian partner for a peace process.
Avoiding a political process is also the reason behind Sharon’s decision to withdraw Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip in return for an intensification of Israel’s presence in the West Bank – something he understood could succeed only with Bush’s acquiescence, if not explicit support.
Sharon himself explained his dramatic reversal on Gaza as the consequence of his fear that without any movement, the international community might force political negotiations on Israel. Yet his apologists absurdly claim that the withdrawal is intended to facilitate a resumption of negotiations.
When Bush launched the road map in Aqaba last June, he stressed that it required not only an end to Palestinian terrorism, but also an end to all further construction in the settlements and the dismantling of settlement outposts erected since the beginning of the intifada. Surely Bush must have noticed that despite solemn promises to implement these provisions, Sharon and his government failed to dismantle a single outpost while sinking vast new resources into the settlement enterprise.
Now Bush has declared that because of Israel’s “facts on the ground” – the very facts that the road map describes as unacceptable and illegitimate – Palestinians must give up any hope of recovering large areas in the West Bank.
Although Siegman wrote this piece several years ago, about events that occurred when Sharon was in power, the policy really has not changed in any significant way since then.
In my travels on the Internet researching this post, I came across a letter to the editor at the British newspaper The Independent that has an eloquent response to this concept that Israel can continue to take and ask for more, and Palestinians should humbly accept it:
It is an outrageous irony that the Palestinians should have felt it necessary to offer territorial concessions to Israel in their efforts to secure a peace deal (“Palestinians ‘ready to give up Jerusalem sites’ “, 24 January).Palestinians have lost a homeland and a majority are even prepared to recognise the right to exist of the country which has replaced them, Israel, in return for the latter’s withdrawal from the small portion of Palestine still left to them. What more can they give?
These are the words of Moshe Dayan (reported in Ha’aretz, 4 April 1969): “We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish, state here. In considerable areas of the country [the total area was about 6 per cent] we bought land from the Arabs. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages… There is not a place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
Now Israel not only ignores UN resolutions to pull out of the occupied West Bank, but continues to build and expand within it, while we in the West generally look the other way. If the Palestinians were to receive the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in line with UN Resolution 242 (drafted by America in 1967) this would still leave them with only 22 per cent of historic Palestine; a land in which they formed a majority of 10:1 at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
And yet we are told by the likes of Andrew McCarthy that Israel faces an existential threat but Palestinians do not. Although Moshe Dayan himself tells us that when the Jewish people “came to this country [it] was already populated by Arabs,” and that “There is not a place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population,” somehow it’s the Jewish people alone whose claim to the land is rooted in “historical antiquity.” The idea that Palestinians and Jews both have ancient familial and spiritual connections to historic Palestine, and that any just resolution of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis must take the right of Palestinians to exist as a people with their own nation-state as seriously as it does the right of the Jewish people to exist as a people in their own nation-state, is simply not narrow or hateful enough for the likes of Andrew McCarthy.
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