Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and issue of 1967 borders

According to reliable reports, the Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is insisting that the only basis for any future political arrangements with Israel is "the 1967 borders."

Indeed, he has made this a precondition for negotiations with Israel. And he is not the only one today talking about the 1967 lines. President Carter's, national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-authored with former Rep. Stephen Solarz, D-NY, an April 11 article in The Washington Post calling for a territorial solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "based on the 1967 borders." Brzezinski had recently been invited to discuss the Middle East with the President Obama's National Security Adviser Jim Jones.

Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to slip by using the same language during a visit to Bahrain on February 4, 2010: "We believe that the 1967 borders, with swaps, should be the focus of the negotiations over borders."

That sentence contradicted the formal policy of the Obama administration that she carefully crafted herself, which said that the U.S. believed that it was possible to reconcile the Palestinian position demanding the 1967 lines with the Israeli position calling for secure boundaries, which took into account Israeli security requirements and realities on the ground.

Clinton subsequently corrected herself, but her statement in Bahrain should be understood as reflecting the kind of automatic phraesology that is heard in Washington policy circles in recent years. 

The point is that the 1967 lines are coming back as a common reference point when many officials and commentators talk about a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In August 2010, the Quartet, that diplomatic body that is comprised of the U.S. EU, the UN and Russia, has been discussing the 1967 line for a joint declaration intended to pull Abbas into direct negotiations with Israel.

Unfortunately, it is increasingly assumed that there once was a recognized international border between the West Bank and Israel in 1967 and what is necessary now is to restore it.

Yet this entire discussion is based on a completely mistaken understanding of the 1967 line, given the fact that in the West Bank, it was not an international border at all. 

Formally, the 1967 line in the West Bank should properly be called the 1949 Armistice Line.  Looking back to that period, on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts there had been a history of international boundaries between British Mandate and its neighbors.

But along the Jordanian front, what created the armistice line was solely where Israeli and Arab forces stopped at the end of the War of Independence, with some added adjustments in certain sectors. As a result, the 1949 line, that came to be known also as the 1967 border, was really only a military line. 

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.

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. 

Yet in recent years a reverse process has been underway to re-establish the 1949 Armistice line, calling it the 1967 border and sanctifying it as a legitimate international boundary. This is one of the side effects of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which talks about the 1967 lines.

The 2003 Road Map introduced a problematic terminology that a peace settlement "ends the occupation that began in 1967." This was partially offset by the reference to Resolution 242 in the Road Map, as well, with its caveats against a full Israeli withdrawal from the territories and its call for establishing secure boundaries.

Under President Barack Obama, the 1967 lines have become a reference point for the peace process again. President George W. Bush made clear in his 2004 letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon 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."

But while the Bush letter was approved in June 2004 by massive bipartisan majorities in both houses of the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration has avoided stating that it is legally bound by the contents of the letter.

This came out in a long exchange between a Fox News reporter and the State Department's Deputy Spokesman, Robert Wood, on June 1, 2009. The Obama administration has not renounced the letter, but it has not re-affirmed it, either.

Over the last decade, Israel has made repeated mistakes in allowing the restoration of the 1967 lines and the downgrading of Resolution 242. It should have fought harder over the language of the Road Map back in 2003.

Israel's right to defensible borders, that must replace the 1967 lines, has a strong foundation in international law and in the past policies of the UN Security Council. It would be a cardinal error to allow these rights to be eroded now, especially if new peace talks begin and the Palestinians seek to win international support for a Palestinian state, based on their demand to see Israel pull back to the 1967 lines.

Dore Gold is the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations (1997-1999) and foreign policy advisor to the prime minister. He is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.