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Israel's Right to the "Disputed" Territories

(Wall Street Journal Europe) Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon - There is this perception that Israel is occupying stolen land and that the Palestinians are the only party with national, legal and historic rights to it. Not only is this morally and factually incorrect, but the more this narrative is being accepted, the less likely the Palestinians feel the need to come to the negotiating table. The boundaries of the West Bank were set 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. At Jordan's insistence, the 1949 armistice line became not a recognized international border but only a line separating armies. After the Six-Day War, when once again Arab armies sought to destroy Israel, the Jewish state subsequently captured the West Bank. Eugene V. Rostow, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in 1967, stated in 1990: "Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338...rest on two principles, Israel may administer the territory until its Arab neighbors make peace; and when peace is made, Israel should withdraw to 'secure and recognized borders,' which need not be the same as the Armistice Demarcation Lines of 1949." Lord Caradon, the British UN Ambassador at the time and Resolution 242's main drafter, said in 1974 that, "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial." The U.S. ambassador to the UN at the time, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, stated in 1973 that, "the resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories without defining the extent of withdrawal." This would encompass "less than a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territory, inasmuch as Israel's prior frontiers had proven to be notably insecure." Even the Soviet delegate to the UN, Vasily Kuznetsov, conceded that the resolution gave Israel the right to "withdraw its forces only to those lines it considers appropriate." Rostow found no legal impediment to Jewish settlement in the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria as the territory had been known around the world for 2,000 years until the Jordanians renamed it. He maintained that the original British Mandate of Palestine still applies to the West Bank. He said "the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan River, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, was made unassailable. That right has never been terminated and cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its neighbors."
2009-12-30 08:47:43
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