Britannia Radio

Obama, Netanyahu, and UN Resolution 242

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

What’s so shocking about Obama’s speech of May 18 in which he insisted Israel's withdrawal to her pre-1967 borders, i.e., the 1949 armistice lines? That has been the professed policy of the US State Department since the Six Day War of June 1967, when Israel repossessed Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. That Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should protest against Obama’s policy statement is mere theatre. He has facilitated that policy since he first became chairman of the Likud Party in March 1993. Allow me to say I’m not disturbed by this not so novel development. The people of Israel need this malignant breath of clarity.

This clarity, however, does not remove the misconceptions and mendacity related to UN Resolution 242, which Mr. Netanyahu has fostered since he was first elected prime minister in May 1996. Before continuing, let’s take a close look at Resolution 242.

As I pointed out 33 years ago in my book Sadat's Strategy, Resolution 242 requires the application of two 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.” Obama emphasized the second principle in his May 18 speech, and failed to mention the exclusion of the definite article “the” preceding the word “territories” in the first principle. The exclusion of that definite article means—and was intended to mean even by the State Department—that Israel is not obliged to withdraw from all the territory in question, that is, to pre-1967 borders. This was the understanding of Professor of Law Eugene Rostow, who helped draft Resolution 242.

But "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." 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, namely this:

"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 Sea through the Strait of Tiran.

"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 secure boundaries 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 dictatorships—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."

So much for what I said in 1978. Now, back to Obama who obviously ignores these distinctions. But then, Israel’s own leaders, including Netanyahu, fail to make these distinctions, thanks to their fixation on the policy of land-for-peace. Fixated on the obvious territorial issue he is mute regatrding the more fundamental issue: the cultural and theological animosity of Muslims toward the Jewish state, whose existence places in question the validity of Islam. No politician dares say a word about this.

In fact, addressing a joint session of the US Congress on July 10, 1996, Netanyahu gratuitously denied the obvious, the clash of civilizations between the Islamic Middle East and the Jewish State. He has persistently obscured the ideological and implacable nature of this conflict by his bankrupt land-for-peace policy called "reciprocity," a concept foreign to Islamic mentality.

Let’s connect some dots. On October 1, 1997, Netanyahu was interviewed in his office by Anna Isakova of the Russian-language newspaper Vesti. Enough to report his saying the following:

The left-wing press is trying to portray me either as having no goals or as aiming to ruin the peace process. There is not an iota of truth in this. I set three goals when I assumed office, and I am moving toward them systematically and tenaciously.

The first is to establish the principle of reciprocity between us and the Palestinians. With the previous government, the custom was that we gave, the Palestinians took, and we got nothing in return. Changing this situation was not easy, but the change is gradually sinking in. [I ask, sinking in what?]

The second goal [he continued] was to accelerate the permanent status negotiations. Why waste time on petty squabbles over the interim agreement?

The third goal is a final, firm agreement between us and the Palestinians … [by which] Israel will have sufficiently wide contiguous security zones. Jerusalem, naturally, will remain undivided. [But jump-started final agreement by endorsing a Palestinian state in June 2009!]

What Netanyahu said in this interview 14 years ago conveys his contempt for the public. He was sucking up to the media, as he does to Arab despots whose hands are stained with Jewish blood. Let’s understand the ramifications.

Israeli prime ministers perpetrate the false and pernicious impression that Arab despots are no less disposed to candor and peace than Israel. This ignores the mendacious and malevolent nature of Arab-Islamic culture, acknowledged by former Muslims such as Wafa Sultan and Nonie Darwish. But then Netanyahu is not a woman, and these women are not politicians.

I ask: What is the Palestinian Authority but a consortium of Jew-hating Arab thugs? By negotiating with these villains, Israeli prime ministers not only demean themselves, they also demean Israel and Judaism, and they mislead and corrupt mankind in the process—including the president of the United States.

Moreover, Israeli prime ministers convey the false impression that agreements reached with these Arab Jew-haters will bind their successors, as if these Muslims will renounce their Islamic theology and 1,400-year tradition of slaughtering "infidels." All this makes nonsense Netanyahu’s rhetoric of “reciprocity”—a mantra that obscures the inherent contradictions between Israel and her enemies.

It is in this light that we are to understand Obama’s insistence on Israel’s withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. Obama is not merely a philoMuslim. Nor is he merely an excrescence of American multiculturalism. If he is the product of multiculturalism, it’s that which is found in Israel whose ruling elites lack Jewish national pride and purpose, and who display moral equivalence by hobnobbing with spokesmen of a profoundly flawed and violent civilization.

I conclude with a quote from a renowned Lebanese-born scholar, Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University. In his book The Dream Palace of the Arabs,Ajami portrays the thoughts of the most prominent of literati of the Arab world who sorrowfully behold the “death of Arab civilization.” He writes that “Arab society had run through most of its myths, and what remained in the wake … of the many proud statements people had made about themselves and their history, was a new world of cruelty, waste, and confusion.”*

There are theological reasons for this decay, and they have been brilliantly discussed in Robert R. Reilly’s book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind. It will explain, without saying a word about UN Resolution 242, that its phrase, "secure and recognized" borders, repeated in Obama’s May 18 speech, is an oxymoron.

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*Fouad Ajami, The Dream Palace of the Arabs (Vintage Books, 1999) pp. 123; 121, 220-222, 310-311.