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How the Palestinian Leadership Is Ignoring History

(New Republic) Alan Dershowitz - It is imperative to world peace that the Palestinians pay a price - even if it's only a symbolic price - for rejecting the generous Clinton/Barak offer and responding to it with a second intifada in which 4,000 people were killed. It is also important that Israel not return to the precise armistice lines that existed prior to the 1967 war. If the Palestinians were to achieve a return to the status quo prior to Jordan's attack on Israel in June of 1967, then military aggression will not have been punished, it will have been rewarded. That's why Security Council Resolution 242 which resulted from the end of the Six-Day War intended for Israel to retain territory necessary to give it secure boundaries. (Indeed, the formal application submitted by Abbas to the UN sought membership based on UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947, which would put the borders where they were before the Arab armies invaded the new Jewish state in 1948. This would reward multiple aggressions.) If the end result of Jordan's 1967 attack on Israel - an attack supported by the Palestinian leadership and participated in by Palestinian soldiers - is that the Palestinians get back everything Jordan lost, there will be no disincentive to comparable military attacks around the world. If the Palestinians get more than, or even as much as, they rejected in 2000 and 2001 (and did not accept in 2007), then further intifadas with mass casualties will be encouraged. A price must be paid for violence. That's how the laws of war are supposed to work and there is no reason to make an exception in the case of the Palestinians. But the negotiations must not begin where previous offers, which were not accepted, left off. They must take into account how we got to the present situation.
2011-09-28 00:00:00
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