No, the New U.S. Peace Plan Doesn’t Violate UN Resolutions

In November 1967, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242, cited in every subsequent peacemaking proposal, calling on Israel to withdraw from “territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The then-U.S. ambassador to the UN Arthur Goldberg has stated—as has his British counterpart, who drafted the resolution—that the text deliberately does not say “the territories” or “all the territories”; in other words, it emphatically did not demand a complete Israeli withdrawal. Thus, writes Evelyn Gordon, the oft-repeated claim that the recent American peace proposal violates UN resolutions is incorrect; to the contrary, it is the first to take Resolution 242 seriously:

In the resolution’s own words, a “just and lasting peace” would require “secure and recognized boundaries” for all states in the region. But the pre-1967 lines (properly, the 1949 armistice lines) did not and could not provide secure boundaries for Israel. As Goldberg explained, the resolution called for “less than a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces” precisely because “Israel’s prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure.” And since Israel had captured these territories in a defensive rather than an offensive war, the drafters considered such territorial changes fully compatible with the resolution’s preamble “emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.”

But then, having successfully defeated the Arab and Soviet demand that Israel be required to cede “all the territories,” America abandoned its hard-won achievement just two years later, when it proposed the Rogers Plan. That plan called for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines with only minor adjustments. . . . This formula made a mockery of Resolution 242 because it failed to provide Israel with “secure boundaries.” Yet almost every subsequent proposal retained the idea of the 1967 lines with minor adjustments, even as all of them continued paying lip service to 242.

Now, for the first time, a plan has attempted to take that resolution seriously and provide Israel with defensible borders. . . . The plan’s limited version of Palestinian sovereignty derives from the need for defensible borders as well, since as the past quarter-century has shown, Palestinian military control over territory means kissing Israeli security goodbye.

Read more at Evelyn Gordon

More about: Peace Process, Trump Peace Plan, United Nations, West Bank

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF