Palestinian Authority demands based on egregiously false assumptions
Arlene Kushner
We here in Israel have been asleep at the wheel. In a rush of concessionary zeal after Oslo, we chose to refrain from making our own case. At first this decision, made at a governmental level, was intended to demonstrate our eagerness for peace. But after a time it was almost as if we had forgotten how to speak for ourselves with vigor and forthrightness.
Mahmoud Abbas, PA president, and others speaking on behalf of the Palestinian position, regularly refer to the “June 4, 1967 border.” What Abbas et al have in mind is the line, commonly called the Green Line, behind which Israel operated before the Six Day War that began on June 5, 1967. Implied is that this line constitutes Israel’s “real” border, and that Israeli presence beyond this is automatically “illegitimate.” Thus, goes the PA argument, there can be no justice, no fairness that will lead to peace, unless Israel returns to her border.
Yet the simple, irrefutable, historical fact is that this line was not a border at all, but merely an armistice line. It was drawn when hostilities ceased at the end of the 1948-49 War of Independence — a war initiated, it should be noted, by the Arab League, which attacked the nascent state of Israel as soon as independ¬ence was declared.
Not only was it an armistice line, it was intended to be temporary. In the signed armistice agreement with Jordan (which was on the other side of that line) there was a clause stating that this line would not prejudice future negotiations on a permanent border. Thus the case cannot legitimately be made that the Green Line has any legal status in determining Israel’s “true” border. It does not. That border has yet to be determined. In negotiations. <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3703694,00.html">read more</a>
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