Even then, however, Israel would only be required to withdraw its armed forces “from territories” – not from “the territories” or “all the territories” (proposals that were defeated in both the Security Council and the General Assembly).
The absence of “the” – the now famous missing definite article – was neither an accident nor an afterthought.
It resulted from what Yale Law School Professor Eugene W. Rostow, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, described as more than five months of “vehement public diplomacy” to decisively clarify the meaning of Resolution 242.
No prohibition – or even limitation – on Jewish settlement, guaranteed west of the Jordan River under the League of Nations Mandate forty-five years earlier, was adopted.
As the Legal Forum letter indicates, “1967 borders” (so labeled recently by President Obama) “do not exist, and have never existed.” Under the terms of the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and the invading Arab states, the newly established “Armistice Demarcation Lines” were “without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines.”
Therefore, the letter signers conclude, those borders “cannot be accepted or declared to be the international boundaries of a Palestinian state.”
Should the UN General Assembly approve the current Palestinian proposal, the Palestinians would also be in “fundamental breach” of the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Accord, when the signatories agreed not to attempt to change the status of contested territory before permanent status negotiations were concluded – certainly not before they were even begun.
* * * * *
After the Six-Day War the core Zionist commitment to settling the land of Israel, which had driven state-building efforts since the 1880s, passed from secular to religious Israelis. That transformation surely explains why successive Israeli governments, whether led by Labor or Likud, have either maintained silence – or demonstrated intense hostility – toward Zionist settlers wearing kippot or long skirts.
At best ambivalent – and usually hostile – toward Jews in Judea and Samaria, government officials have resolutely maintained silence about the international guarantees for the “close settlement” of Jews west of the Jordan River.
Joined by a chorus of academic intellectuals, journalists, and cultural luminaries, they have been exceedingly leery of strengthening religious Zionism by authorizing new settlements or enlarging existing ones. The special venom toward settlers displayed by current Defense Minister (and former prime minister) Ehud Barak expresses the deep-rooted hostility of Labor Party and left-wing Zionists toward their despised ideological challengers.
Not all settlers, to be sure, are religious. The majority doubtlessly chose to live in Judea and Samaria because housing prices were lower, and the quality of life better, in their sparkling new communities than where they previously lived.
Perhaps one hundred thousand settlers are religious Zionists who claim the land as Israel’s biblical birthright and inheritance. Unlike Tel Avivians, who gaze across the Mediterranean to Los Angeles and the Silicon Valley for their sources of cultural inspiration, these Israelis stand on the bedrock of Jewish history, looking to the past and to sacred texts, not to the West, for inspiration.
Critics from the secular left have been unrelenting in their castigation of settlements. In Lords of the Land (2007), the first comprehensive history of the settlement movement, historian Idith Zertal and Haaretz journalist Akiva Eldar lacerated settlers for their illegal occupation of “Palestinian” land. The “malignancy of occupation,” they wrote, “in contravention of international law,” has “brought Israel’s democracy…to the brink of an abyss.”
But persistent efforts to undermine the legitimacy of Israeli settlements, wrote international legal expert Julius Stone thirty years ago, have been nothing less than a “subversion…of basic international law principles.” They still are. Yet the United Nations, with an international constituency that has been relentlessly hostile to Israel ever since it first hallucinated that “Zionism is racism” in 1975, keeps trying.
