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A Return to Defensible Borders

(Azure-Shalem Center) Dan Diker - * A week after his White House summit with President George W. Bush in April 2004, Prime Minister Sharon stood before the Knesset and presented a list of American assurances he had secured as a quid pro quo for promising to withdraw all Israeli troops and civilians from the Gaza Strip. The Bush letter said: "The United States reiterates its steadfast commitment to Israel's security, including secure, defensible borders, and to preserve and strengthen Israel's capability to deter and defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats." * Stephen Schwebel, who would become the legal adviser to the U.S. State Department and later president of the International Court of Justice in the Hague, concluded that Israel had an internationally sanctioned right to seek modification of its borders with respect to the territories from which it was attacked in June 1967. The West Bank and Gaza were taken from states (Jordan and Egypt) which had no right under international law to hold them. * Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in his last Knesset address in October 1995, said: "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....The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley in the broadest meaning of that term." * Rabin intended for Israel to be protected by the total 4,200-foot incline from the Jordan riverbed up the eastern slopes of the West Bank hill ridge. Rabin added that Israel would also maintain a united Jerusalem, and keep settlement blocs east of the 1967 lines. * Israel needs defensible borders, particularly in the West Bank, to guarantee a political settlement that will not be undermined by the combination of Israeli vulnerabilities and the hostile intent that is still expressed by several of Israel's neighbors, including the Palestinians. * If Israel is to arrive at a solution to the conflict that will end its military presence in Palestinian population centers, provide for the country's long-term security, and maintain its deterrent capability against aggression from both a future Palestinian state and its Arab neighbors, it will have to take a firm stand with regard to its frontiers. The writer is a senior policy analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and project director of its Defensible Borders Initiative.
2005-08-03 00:00:00
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