Abbas's Demand For 1967 Borders Is Diplomatic Sleight-Of-Hand (Updated)

One of the key demands that Abbas is making as a precondition before he will negotiate peace face-to-face with Netanyahu is that there be agreement that negotiations be based on the 1967 borders.

The problem is--there are no 1967 borders.
To be more precise, there is no such thing as a 1967 border between Israel proper on the one hand and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) on the other. While historically there have been international boundaries established between Israel and Egypt as well as Israel and Syria--what is called the 1967 border between Israel and the West Bank is actually the 1949 Armistice Line, a military line.

Dore Gold explains the history:

In fact, Article II of the Armistice Agreement with the Jordanians explicitly specified that the line that was designated did not compromise any future territorial claims of the two parties, since it had been "dictated by exclusively by military considerations."
In other words, the old Armistice Line was not a recognized international border. It had no finality. As a result, the Jordanians reserved the right after 1949 to demand territories inside Israel, for the Arab side.

This is a fact that though ignored now, was well-known by the parties involved at the time:

On the eve of the 1967 Six Day War, it was noteworthy that the Jordanian ambassador to the UN made this very point to the UN Security Council, by stressing that the old armistice agreement "did not fix boundaries".

After the Six-Day War, the architects of UN Security Council Resolution 242 insisted that the old armistice line had to be replaced with a new border. This was significant since Resolution 242 became the sole agreed basis of the Arab-Israeli peace process.

It provided the foundation for Israel's peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, years after. Back in 1967, Lord Caradon, the British ambassador to the UN admitted at the time: "I know the 1967 border very well. It is not a satisfactory border, it is where the troops had to stop." He concluded: "It is not a permanent border."

Caradon’s U.S. counterpart, Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, added that "historically, there have never been secure or recognized boundaries in the area," and he added that the armistice lines did not answer that description.

For the British and American ambassadors, at the time, the Resolution 242 that they drafted involved creating a completely new boundary that could be described as "secure and recognized," instead of going back to the lines from which the conflict erupted.

President Lyndon Johnson made this very point in September 1968: "It is clear, however, that a return to the situation of 4 June 1967 will not bring peace. There must be secure and there must be recognized borders."

It is for this reason that Resolution 242 did not call for a full withdrawal from all the territories that Israel captured in the Six Day War; the 1949 Armistice lines were no longer to be a reference point for a future peace process.

Read the whole thing.

The point is that President Bush wrote in a letter to PM Ariel Sharon in 2004 that "it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."--a letter that was approved overwhelmingly by both the House and Senate. While Obama has not said that it is bound by that letter, Obama has said on numerous occasions that he supports secure borders for Israel.

It is past time for Obama to reconcile this apparent contradiction.

Obama has engaged in dragging Abbas kicking and screaming to the negotiations table.
Now Obama should finally do his part as well and make clear what 'secure borders' means--and openly acknowledging that the 1948 Armistice Line is not a border (let alone a secure one) would be a start.

UPDATED: In an article last year, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon touched on this same issue when he wrote about Israel's Right in the 'Disputed' Territories:

The name "West Bank" was first used in 1950 by the Jordanians when they annexed the land to differentiate it from the rest of the country, which is on the east bank of the river Jordan. The boundaries of this territory were set only one year before during the armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan that ended the war that began in 1948 when five Arab armies invaded the nascent Jewish State. It was at Jordan's insistence that the 1949 armistice line became not a recognized international border but only a line separating armies. The Armistice Agreement specifically stated: "No provision of this Agreement shall in any way prejudice the rights, claims, and positions of either Party hereto in the peaceful settlement of the Palestine questions, the provisions of this Agreement being dictated exclusively by military considerations." (Italics added.) This boundary became the famous "Green Line," so named because the military officials during the armistice talks used a green pen to draw the line on the map.

After the Six Day War, when once again Arab armies sought to destroy Israel and the Jewish state subsequently captured the West Bank and other territory, the United Nations sought to create an enduring solution to the conflict. U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 is probably one of the most misunderstood documents in the international arena. While many, especially the Palestinians, push the idea that the document demands that Israel return everything captured over the Green Line, nothing could be further from the truth. The resolution calls for "peace within secure and recognized boundaries," but nowhere does it mention where those boundaries should be.

Using the 1948 Armistice Line as a starting point for negotiations is one thing, but Abbas--ever anxious to avoid the give-and-take of negotiations--is looking for one more precondition that alleviates the necessary work of actually sitting down and negotiating for peace.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

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