Subsequent to Israel’s territorial successes from May 1948 forward, U.N. mediator Bernadotte is assassinated after suggesting smaller borders for Israel. He does not mention Palestinian Arabs in his interim report.
This draft spoke eloquently about protecting individual, religious, and civil rights for all. Instead individual civil rights in Israel were protected by a series of Basic Laws.
The resolution states that refugees “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace (with Israel) should do so or compensation be paid.” Israel opposes the idea because it jeopardizes Israel as a majority-Jewish state.
Sharett gives an overview of Israeli foreign policy, key issues, and relationships with UN and Arab states.
With crisp analysis, Haganah Commander Yigal Allon, later a Prime Minister of Israel attributes Israel’s successes to multiple factors including the absence of a centralized Arab command, limited Arab military training, underestimating the potential fighting capabilities of local Arabs, and Israel’s success in integrating its citizens into the war effort.
Palestine Liberation Organization seeks Israel’s destruction through armed struggle. It retains this stated policy until December 1988.
After the June 1967 war, the Israeli government sent word through the United States to Egypt and Syria seeking to jump-start a peace process. Apparently no response was received.
Yigal Allon’s plan for handling the areas captured from Jordan during the just-completed Six-Day War reflects Israel’s previous border vulnerability and seeks a West Bank arrangement that is not a strategic or geographic threat.
Arab states declare “no peace, no negotiation, no recognition” with Israel after their collective defeat in the June 1967 War.
Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal from unspecified captured territories in return for the right of all states to live in peace. It does not call for a full withdrawal. It is the basis for treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) and for PLO recognition of Israel (1993).
March 1968 “The Six-Day War,” Israel Government Year Book, 5728 (1967-68), March 1968, Central Office of Information, Prime Minister’s Office The Six-Day War The short, sharp encounter that has come to be known as the…
Without any consultation with Jerusalem, Israel rejects US proposal for full withdrawal.
One of Israel’s greatest writers, Natan Alterman, reminded Israel’s accusers in 1969 that well into the 20th century the Palestinians did not even understand themselves as a separate people with a distinctive national identity marking them off from other Arabs. His argument, if framed as a question, might be formulated along these lines: If no one else, not least the Palestinians’ ancestors, saw their distinctive nation in Ottoman Palestine, how can the Zionists be blamed for not seeing one either? Thus, to fault the Zionists for failing to see what was not yet visible to anyone else, including the Palestinians, is to fault them not for suffering from blindness, but for lacking clairvoyance.
In carrying out research in the 1990s for Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, Routledge, 1999, I undertook 84 interviews with individuals who participated in the diplomacy.
For the first time a US State Department official states the “legitimate interests of the Palestinian Arabs must be taken into account in the negotiating of an Arab-Israeli peace.”
The vast gulf in US and Israeli positions about Palestinian self-determination, the degree of withdrawal from the West Bank, and future borders is precisely stated. A year later at the end of the Camp David negotiations, Israeli and US views had not changed at all.
Naively, the Carter Administration believes that a conference with the USSR would start comprehensive negotiations; instead, the fear of Moscow’s engagement helps drive direct Egyptian-Israeli talks.
Five weeks after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem in November 1977, to accelerate Egyptian – Israeli negotiations, Begin brought to President Jimmy Carter, Israel’s response to Sadat’s peace initiative: political autonomy for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. No Palestinian state was considered.
Early during the Camp David summit, Moshe Dayan, Ezer Weizman and other Israeli officials address resettlement and payment of 1967 and 1948 Palestinian refugees and Israeli military redeployment on the eastern and western borders, while Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance and other Americans emphasize Palestinian sovereignty.
U.S. and Israeli officials at Camp David spend a session focused on the land-for-peace U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 and how it applies to the West Bank, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians. Appropriate for a discussion over 242, whose application depends on the absence of the word “the,” the officials argue over using boundary, border, line, borderline or something else.
Carefully sandwiched between Jimmy Carter’s high-risk visit to Egypt and Israel and the signing of those countries’ peace treaty, the Carter administration allows the U.N. Security Council to deplore Israeli settlement building and demographic changes in Jerusalem.
This was the second UNSC Resolution within four months supported by the Carter administration condemning Israel’s settlement building in the territories. It too greatly angered the Israeli government and American supporters of Israel.
Showing its public opposition to Israeli actions in the lands taken in the June 1967 war, an area that the Carter Administration
wanted reserved for Palestinian self-rule, it ‘strongly deplores’ Israel’s settlement policies. Passage of the resolution three weeks
prior to the New York and Connecticut presidential primaries, cause many Jewish voters to vote in favor of Ted Kennedy
and not for Carter, helping to splinter the Democratic Party.
It calls for “recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, a just solution to the
Palestinian problem, the right to self-determination, [and] for PLO association to the negotiations.”
