by Dore Gold
With unconfirmed rumors
appearing in the press about what is likely to happen in the peace
process in the months ahead, now is the time to recall exactly what
Israel's rights are in its territorial dispute with the Palestinians
over the future of the West Bank.
Those rights were first
enshrined in the most famous and important U.N. resolution in the peace
process, U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. This month marks the
anniversary of the resolution. The first draft was proposed on Nov. 7,
1967, while the final draft was adopted unanimously by all 15 Security
Council members on Nov. 22 that year.
Understanding the
significance of Resolution 242 is not an exercise in the study of some
obscure aspect of decades old diplomatic history. Over the years the
resolution evolved into the basis of the entire peace process, including
the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, the 1991 Madrid peace
conference, the 1993 Oslo Accords, the 1994 Jordanian-Israeli peace
treaty, and draft agreements with Syria. Back in 1973, on the eve of the
Geneva Peace Conference, the U.S. even provided a letter of assurance
to Israel that it would prevent any party from tampering with Resolution
242. Israeli diplomacy sought to protect Resolution 242 as though it
was a crown jewels of the Jewish state.
Resolution 242 is best
known for its famous withdrawal clause, which did not call on Israel to
pull back to the pre-war 1967 lines. While the Soviet Union insisted
that the resolution specifically call for "a withdrawal from all the
territories occupied" by Israel in the Six-Day War, the U.S. and Britain
countered with very different phraseology that was reflected in the
final draft, that was eventually adopted by all 15 members of the
Security Council. It would only state that there had to be a withdrawal
"from territories."
The U.S. and Britain
recognized that the pre-1967 line had only been an armistice line from
1949 and was not a final international border. Indeed, Article 2 of the
original 1949 Armistice Agreement between Israel and Jordan clearly
stipulated that it did not prejudice the territorial "claims and
positions" of the parties since its provisions were "dictated
exclusively by military considerations."
The battle over the
language of the withdrawal clause was not just conducted by overly
legalistic advisers to the British and American missions to the U.N.;
everyone understood that these distinctions had enormous significance,
for they went all the way to the apex of power in both Washington and
Moscow and were settled in direct communications between President
Lyndon Johnson and Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin.
The British, under
Prime Minister Harold Wilson, were the main drafters of Resolution 242.
Their Ambassador to the U.N. in 1967, Lord Caradon, clarified what the
language of the withdrawal clause meant in an interview published in
1976 in the Journal of Palestine Studies: "We could have said, 'Well,
you go back to the 1967 line.' But I know the 1967 line, and it’s a
rotten line. You couldn’t have a worse line for a permanent
international boundary. It’s where the troops happened to be on a
certain night in 1948. It’s got no relation to the needs of the
situation. Had we said that you must go back to the 1967 line, which
would have resulted if we had specified a retreat from all the occupied
territories, we would have been wrong."
Any Israeli withdrawal had to be to "secure and recognized borders," as the resolution stated.
Lord Caradon's American
counterpart, Arthur Goldberg, fully supported this interpretation
repeatedly over the years, such as in his 1988 statement: "The
resolution stipulates withdrawal from occupied territories without
defining the extent of withdrawal." Goldberg was a legal scholar who
served previously on the U.S. Supreme Court, before coming to the U.N.
Others backed his
interpretation as well. The senior U.S. figure in the State Department
with responsibility for the Middle East, Joseph Sisco, went on NBC's
Meet the Press on July 12, 1970, and also said: "That resolution [242]
did not say 'withdrawal to the pre-June 5 lines.''' In short, there was
no argument about how Resolution 242 should be interpreted. Israel had
rights to retain some West Bank territory, so that at the end of the day
it could obtain defensible borders in any future political settlement.
By the way, it is
notable that according to Resolution 242, Israel was entitled to this
territory without having to pay for it with its own pre-1967 territory.
There were no land swaps in Resolution 242. Nor was there any corridor
crossing Israeli sovereign territory so that the West Bank could be
connected to the Gaza Strip (just as there is no land corridor across
Canada connecting Alaska to the rest of the U.S.). These diplomatic
innovations were thought of by negotiators in the 1990s, but Israel in
no way is required to agree to them, according to Resolution 242. In his
memoirs, Abba Eban, then Israel's foreign minister, described the
readiness of the U.S. and Britain, in particular, to agree to a revision
of the pre-war boundaries as a "major breakthrough" for Israeli
diplomacy.
Yet there were also
efforts underway over the years to erode this Israeli achievement. Some
diplomats argued that the French version of the resolution said "from
the territories," rather than "from territories." Anglo-American
diplomacy had carefully avoided the definite article in the English
version. Whether the French version was a translation mistake or a
consequence of how French grammar deals with abstract nouns didn't
matter. Resolution 242 was negotiated in English, and 10 out of 15
members of the U.N. Security Council were English-speaking countries.
Thus the English version of Resolution 242 was the decisive version to
work with.
In 1970, British Prime
Minister Wilson had been replaced by Edward Heath. In January 1973,
Britain joined the European Economic Community, leading to a major
erosion of its position on Resolution 242. On Nov. 6, 1973, in the
aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the EEC issued a joint declaration
which reflected its own growing sense of vulnerability to threats of an
Arab oil embargo. It was a time when no European state would even allow
U.S. cargo aircraft with badly needed spare parts for the IDF to refuel
on their way to Israel -- only Portugal agreed, but insisted on the
U.S. using its airfield in the Azores. Europe as a collective felt it
needed to appease the Arab oil-producers. As a result, the EEC
declaration, which now included Britain, explicitly stated that Israel
had to withdraw to the armistice lines of 1949. Under pressure, the
British abandoned the essence of a resolution that they themselves had
drafted six years earlier.
One of the intriguing
aspects of Resolution 242 was that it said nothing about Jerusalem. In a
letter to The New York Times on March 6, 1980, Arthur Goldberg wrote:
"Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem, and this omission was
deliberate." He explained that he never described Jerusalem as "occupied
territory." Goldberg was reacting to the policy of the Carter
administration, which was criticizing Israeli construction practices in
east Jerusalem and misrepresenting Israel's legal rights. Goldberg
believed that the status of Jerusalem had to be negotiated, but he
insisted that "Jerusalem was not to be divided again."
Israel itself may have
contributed to confusion about its rights in Jerusalem. The 1993 Oslo
Accords formally recognized Jerusalem as a subject for future final
status negotiations. Yet that did not mean that Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin was prepared to re-divide Jerusalem. Negotiability was one thing;
withdrawal was something else. In his final Knesset address, on Oct. 5,
1995, one month before he was assassinated, Rabin declared: "The borders
of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond
the lines which existed before the Six-Day War. We will not return to
the June 4, 1967 lines." Rabin spoke the language of Resolution 242. He
added that Israel would retain "a united Jerusalem."
The effort to erode
Israel's rights recognized in Resolution 242 has continued. Over the
past few years, the Middle East Quartet suggested to Israel that if it
would say that the basis of the negotiations would be the 1967 lines,
then Mahmoud Abbas would come back to the negotiations. This strategy
didn't work back then and contradicted Resolution 242.
Ultimately, U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry succeeded in restarting negotiations
without making the 1967 lines the basis of a final settlement. As Israel
engages in the current sensitive talks with the Palestinians, it is
imperative that it recall its legal rights, especially to those states
who voted for Resolution 242 but now demand that Israel withdraw to the
1967 lines, contrary to what the U.N. originally established.
Dore Gold
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6253
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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