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Defensible Borders in the Age of the Islamic State

(Mosaic) Dore Gold - The terrorist threat to Israel from the east is unlike anything Israel has seen before in terms of scale and character. Today, organizations like the Islamic State (IS), in possession of robust weaponry that includes sophisticated anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, have defeated whole divisions of the Iraqi army and confiscated vast amounts of equipment and money. This year, operating with battalion-size formations, IS and its ideological cousin the al-Nusra Front have defeated Syrian armored forces and made deep inroads into the heart of Iraq. More fundamentally, at present, no one has sovereignty over the West Bank. The last sovereign power there was the Ottoman Empire. After World War I, the West Bank became a part of British Mandatory Palestine, which was designated to become the Jewish national home. The 1948 Arab war to annihilate the newly established State of Israel ended with the West Bank in Jordanian hands, and there it remained until 1967. In June of that year, Jordan joined an Arab war coalition, led by Egypt, that was aimed explicitly at finishing the job begun in 1948. That war ended with Israel in control of the West Bank. Because Israel had acted in self-defense in 1967, noted scholars of international law, including Stephen Schwebel, who later served as president of the International Court of Justice, and Eugene Rostow, a former dean of Yale Law School and Undersecretary of State in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, recognized its claims as stronger than those of any other party. Indeed, UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in the aftermath of the June 1967 war, affirmed that Israel was not required to withdraw fully from the West Bank or return to the pre-1967 lines, but rather was entitled to "secure and recognized boundaries" that were still to be determined through negotiation. In short, the West Bank remains disputed territory to which both Israel and the Palestinians have claims. The West Bank is not "Palestinian" territory; there was no Palestinian state there prior to 1967, and the Palestinians never had sovereignty there. Israel has legal rights that need to be acknowledged, and security concerns that must be incorporated into any understanding of where the final borders will lie. The writer is president of the Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs.
2014-10-24 00:00:00
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