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The Real Danger of the Hague Ruling

(Jerusalem Post) Yossi Klein Halevi - The real meaning of the court's decision is to delegitimize not Israel's right to self-defense but its right to claim any territory, even for self-defense, over the "green line." The danger of that decision is to create the legal groundwork for an imposed solution that would force Israel back to the 1967 borders, even without a peace agreement - Arafat's dream scenario. So the war Israel needs to fight now isn't so much over the decision itself but its premise: that all land beyond the 1967 border belongs by right to Palestine. In determining that Israel has no legitimate claim to any of the long-disputed territory it won in 1967 in a defensive war of survival, the court has, in effect, overturned UN Resolution 242, the basis of the land for peace formula. In a Middle East that celebrates acts of terrorism as sacraments and denies the most basic legitimacy to the Jewish story, from the existence of the Temple to the existence of gas chambers, it would be madness to return to the eight-mile-wide borders of 1967 - whose vulnerability, after all, tempted the Arab world to try to destroy Israel.
2004-07-23 00:00:00
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