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Pre-Occupation

(New Republic) - Martin Peretz On August 6, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld had the temerity to call the West Bank and Gaza Strip "the so-called occupied territories." He couldn't have been more correct. The "occupied territories," after all, is shorthand for the idea that Israel has no rights - either legal or practical - to any of this real estate. Like the facile phrase "land for peace," it is meant to short-circuit a dense history and convince the world that the turmoil in the Middle East stems from Israel's unwillingness to return the land it won from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six-Day War, a war imposed on it by Cairo and Damascus with the connivance of Moscow. The 1947 UN partition plan had envisioned an Arab state along with the Jewish one. But in the two decades before the 1967 war, Jordan (which had annexed the West Bank) and Egypt (which had run Gaza as a virtual penitentiary, no one in and no one out) instead ruled the territories for themselves. Given that the end of the Jewish state remains the Palestinians' overriding desire, no Israeli government can trust in the irreversibility of Arab obligations taken at the negotiating table. Nonetheless, on certain matters, in the current talks brokered by the U.S., this Israeli government has already taken that risk. From the perspective of international law, all the equities regarding the West Bank and Gaza accrue to Israel. Here the crux is the Mandate for Palestine confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922, which charged the British with facilitating the establishment of the Jewish national home. The Mandate specifically provided for Jewish immigration and, perhaps most important to the current debate, guaranteed the right to "close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands." Israel's precarious lines of defense need to be much stronger than they were before 1967, and the wall now being built to divide Israelis and Palestinians is part of that strategy. (The wall, by the way, was a wise contrivance not of Israel's hawks but of its doves.) The wall deviates from the pre-'67 borders, as it should. Those who object to these deviations see them as precedents for a future permanent border, which they are not. One demand Israel will almost certainly make is for control over its border with Jordan. Not because King Abdullah seeks Israel's destruction. Rather, Jordan is a danger to Israel because of its weakness. The monarchy has good reason to fear the Palestinians west of the river and at home, who constitute 60% of Jordan's population, maybe more. If they rise, no one can guarantee the outcome.
2003-07-15 00:00:00
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