[News] Palestine - The false sacredness of the 1967 border

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The false sacredness of the 1967 border

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11063.shtml
Hasan Abu Nimah, The Electronic Intifada, 10 February 2010



When the United States abandoned its demand that Israel freeze 
settlement construction as a prelude to restarting stalled 
Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, the Obama administration urged both 
sides to move straight into discussions about a future Palestinian 
state "based on the 1967 borders."

Setting the border first, it was hoped, would automatically "resolve" 
the issue of the settlements, and this is now the focus of the 
"indirect talks" that US envoy for the Middle East peace process 
George Mitchell is trying to broker.

Of course the settlements, built on occupied West Bank land in 
flagrant violation of international law, would not be removed. 
Rather, the border would simply be redrawn to annex the vast majority 
of settlers and their homes to Israel, and as if by magic, the whole 
issue of the settlements would disappear just like that. This charade 
would be covered up with a so-called "land swap" of which Fatah 
leader Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority often speak as a 
way to soften up the Palestinian public for a great surrender to 
Israeli diktat.

All this is based on the common, but false notion that the 4 June 
1967 demarcation line separating Israel from the West Bank (then 
administered as part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), is the 
legitimate border of Israel and should therefore be the one along 
which the conflict is settled.

This assumption is wrong; the 1967 border has no legitimacy and 
should not be taken for granted.

UN General Assembly resolution 181 of 29 November 1947 called for the 
partition of Palestine into two entities: a state for the Jewish 
minority on 57 percent of the land, and a state for the overwhelming 
Arab majority on less than half the land. According to the 1947 
partition, the population of the Jewish state would still have been 
40 percent Arab. Jerusalem would have remained a separate international zone.

Rather than "resolve" the question of Palestine, partition made it 
worse: Palestinians rejected a partition they viewed as fundamentally 
unjust in principle and in practice, and the Zionist movement 
grudgingly accepted it but as a first step in an ongoing program of 
expansion and colonization.

Resolution 181, called for the two states to strictly guarantee equal 
rights for all their citizens, and to have a currency and customs 
union, joint railways and other aspects of shared sovereignty, and 
set out a specific mechanism for the states to come into being.

The resolution was never implemented, however. Immediately after it 
was passed, Zionist militias began their campaign to conquer 
territory beyond that which was allocated by the partition plan. 
Vastly outgunned Palestinian militias resisted as best as they could, 
until the belated intervention of Arab armies some six months after 
the war began. By that time it was too late -- as hundreds of 
thousands of Palestinians had already been ethnically cleansed from 
their homes. Israel, contrary to myth, was not brought into being by 
the UN, but by war and conquest.

The 1949 Rhodes Armistice agreement, which ended the first ever 
Arab-Israeli war left Israel in control of 78 percent of historic 
Palestine and established a ceasefire with its neighbors Egypt, 
Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Until the second round -- in June 1967 -- 
Arabs had been calling for the abolition of the "illegal Zionist 
entity" planted by colonial powers like a dagger in the heart of the 
Arab nation. They also waitied for the United Nations to implement 
its many resolutions redressing the gross injustices inflicted 
hitherto. The UN never tried to enforce the law or to exert serious 
efforts to resolve the conflict, which kept escalating.

Israel's June 1967 blitzkrieg surprise attack on Egypt, Syria and 
Jordan led to the devastating Arab defeat and to Israel tripling the 
area of the land it controlled. The parts of Palestine still 
controlled by Arabs -- the West Bank including eastern Jerusalem and 
Gaza -- as well as Syria's Golan Heights and Egypt's Sinai fell into 
Israeli hands.

Defeated, demoralized and humiliated, the Arab states involved in the 
"setback", as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser called it, 
accepted the painful compromise spelled out by Security Council 
Resolution 242 of November 1967.

It ruled that the 4 June 1967 border would have to be the recognized 
border of Israel provided the latter evacuated the Arab lands it had 
occupied that year. In other words if the Arabs wanted to recover 
their lands lost in that war they had to end the "state of 
belligerency" with Israel -- a small step short of recognition -- and 
accept Israel's actual existence within the pre-June 1967 borders. 
This eventually became the so-called "land for peace" formula.

Instead of withdrawing from land in exchange for recognition and 
peace, Israel proceeded to colonize all the newly occupied 
territories; it continues to do so 43 years later in the West Bank 
and Golan Heights. Meanwhile it has also become uncontested that 
Israel has a "right" to everything to the west of the 1967 border. 
The only question is how much more land will it get to keep to the east.

Astonishingly, Palestinian leaders, Arab states and the so-called 
international community have all submitted to the lopsided concept 
that Israel should have this right unconditionally without evacuating 
the illegally occupied Arab lands. The legitimacy of the 1967 border 
was tightly linked to Israeli withdrawal and should remain so.

An inherent contradiction in resolution 242 is that while it affirmed 
"the admissibility of the acquisition of the territory by war" it in 
fact legitimized Israel's conquest of 1948, including the 21 percent 
of Palestine that was supposed to be part of the Arab state under the 
partition plan.

In other words, the UN granted Israel legitimate title to its 
previous conquests if it would give up its later conquests. This has 
set a disastrous precedent that aggression can lead to irreversible 
facts. Encouraged by this, Israel began its settlement project with 
the express intention of "creating facts" that would make withdrawal 
impossible and force international recognition of Israeli claims to the land.

It worked; in April 2004 the United States offered Israel a written 
guarantee that any peace agreement would have to recognize and accept 
the settlements as part of Israel. The rest of the "international 
community" as they always do, quietly followed the American line.

The Palestinian submission to the common demand that the large 
settlement blocs be annexed to Israel against a fictitious land swap 
is another vindication of the Israeli belief that facts created are 
facts accepted.

If and only if Israel adheres to all aspects of UN Security Council 
resolution 242 and others, could the 1967 line have any legitimacy. 
Until then, if Israel tells the Arabs that the West Bank settlements 
of Ariel and Maale Adumim are part of Israel, then the Arab position 
can be that Haifa, Jaffa and Acre are still part of Palestine.

Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at 
the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times and 
is republished with the author's permission.



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