Britannia Radio

A Generation-Long Period of

Political Bankruptcy

By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

In a November 12, 2010 Jerusalem Post Magazine piece, "Neighbors, Not a Love Story," Moshe Shemesh, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University, unwittingly provides some clues as to why Israel has been retreating toward her 1949 Auschwitz lines.

Shemesh, who once served as a senior IDF intelligence officer, discusses at length negotiations between Israel and King Hussein following the Six-Day War of June 1967. Shemesh argues that "The main obstacle to a clearly defined policy for a settlement with Jordan—at the heart of which was the territorial issue—was the national unity government that blocked any decisions related to the future of the West Bank" (emphasis added).

Since Shemesh insists that King Hussein was sincerely committed to resolving this issue, the reader is set up to blame Israel for the failure of these negotiations. At the outset of his article, however, Shemesh states that "A close examination of the historical record shows that the two sides moved on parallel lines that could never meet." What were these parallel lines?

"Hussein," says Shemesh, "repeatedly reiterated that the agreement had to be honorable so that he could 'sell' it to the Arabs. Hussein therefore insisted that 'there must be no reference to submission of the defeated to the dictates and demands of the victors.'"

To avoid offending Arab pride, Israel would therefore have to refrain from retaining possession of any part of the West Bank, such as control of the Jordan River as the security border. Indeed, this, says Shemesh, was "totally unacceptable" to Hussein.

Shemesh points out that "Hussein's starting point for a political settlement was UNSecurity Council Resolution 242. The bilateral debate was over two issues: the interpretation of the resolution, and its implementation."

"Jordan like Egypt," says Shemesh, "favored the Arab interpretation: an Israeli withdrawal from 'the territories.' Israel, however, preferred a narrower interpretation: withdrawal from 'territories' (minus the definite article)."

Shemesh omits the fact that the American State Department officially maintained that the exclusion of the definite article “the” before the word “territories” in the resolution means, and was intended to mean, that Israel is not obliged to return to the 1949 armistice lines. This was the understanding of Professor of Law Eugene Rostow, who helped draft Resolution 242. Let's look at this resolution more closely,

As the present writer pointed out 32 years ago in Sadat's Strategy, Resolution 242 requires the application of the following principles: “(1) withdrawal of Israel’s armed forces from territories occupied in the war; and (2) the right of every State in the area to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats and acts of force.”

I continued by saying the following: "Even if one construed the first principle as requiring Israel to withdraw on all fronts, this principle runs into a geopolitical oxymoron with the second principle [which Shemesh, like many other commentators, completely ignores]." This is precisely what I said in Sadat's Strategy, which appeared in Hebrew in December 1978 (three months before the March 1979 signing of the Israel-Egyptian peace treaty). So I'm back to repeating what I said more than three decades ago:

"By confirming Israel’s right to 'secure' and 'recognized' boundaries, the second principle is an attempt to square the circle. The simple truth is that 'secure' and recognized' boundaries are antithetical concepts given the ideological character of Israel’s neighbors—despotic on the one hand, and Islamic on the other. Thus, what may reasonably be regarded as 'secure' boundaries by Israel will not be 'recognized' by Arab states.

"For example, in a (now declassified) secret memorandum dated June 27, 1967, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that Israel retain control of the Judean and Samarian mountain ridges overlooking her vulnerable population centers on the coastal plain. The report also recommended that Israel should retain Gaza, the Golan Heights, and a portion of the southern Sinai to secure its access to the Red Seathrough the Strait of Tiran. [Notice that Israeli control of the Jordan River security border, according to Shemesh, was alone "totally unacceptable" to Hussein.]

"Despite the geopolitical dilemma involved in 'secure' versus 'recognized' boundaries, I raised the question: Which of these two politically antithetical concepts takes legal as well as moral precedence?

"According to the UN Charter and to international law in general, every nation has an inherent right to self-preservation. But inasmuch as no one is more concerned about a particular nation’s preservation than that nation itself, it follows that each nation must be the ultimate judge of what is required for its preservation. Hence the concept of secureboundaries takes precedence over the concept of recognized boundaries.

"It may be objected that Israel will not be secure until it has borders recognized by its neighbors. But this begs the fundamental issue. The objection presupposes that the Arab states can be trusted to remain content to have Israel withdraw from Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. Yet, despite their professions of peace, Arab states—all dictatorship—can hardly live in abiding peace with each other, much less with the Jewish and relatively democratic state of Israel.

"The objection also fails to consider the fact that whereas recognition of international boundaries is primarily a legal matter dependent on the will of others—in this case, the fluctuating will of Arab autocrats—secure and defensible boundaries is primarily a military matter dependent on permanent geographic factors on the one hand, and a nation’s own will and resources on the other."

Shemesh fails to make these distinctions; and he focuses on the obvious territorial issue while ignoring the more fundamental issue: the cultural and theological animosity of Muslims toward Jews and the Jewish state, the existence of which places in question the validity of Islam. But Shemesh's obscurantism, so typical of Israel's Left and of leftwing commentators, happens to be the public position of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a position manifested in his negotiating mantra of "reciprocity." This concept is foreign to Arab Muslim mentality. Like Shemesh, Netanyahu is trapped in a generation-long period of political bankruptcy.