A Short Course for Keir Starmer on Israel and UN Resolution 242

Here’s the promised next installment (the first is here) of the short course for Keir Starmer on Israel, UN Resolution 242, and when being anti-Israel is antisemitic (which is, alas, most of the time).

The Mandate for Palestine, so often and so maddeningly ignored, is the essential founding document for the modern state of Israel. But when it comes to determining Israel’s rights to the Jordan Valley and some other parts of the West Bank, it is not the only relevant document.

There is an entirely independent basis for Israel’s claim to extend its sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and the settlements in Judea and Samaria (“the West Bank”). That is U.N. Resolution 242, passed on November 22, 1967, which dealt with the territories Israel had won in the Six-Day War.

The chief drafter of Resolution 242 was Lord Caradon (Hugh M. Foot), the permanent representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations from 1964 to 1970. At the time of the Resolution’s discussion and subsequent unanimous passage, and on many occasions since, Lord Caradon always insisted that the phrase “from the territories” quite deliberately did not mean “all the territories,” but merely some of the territories:

Much play has been made of the fact that we didn’t say “the” territories or “all the” territories. But that was deliberate. I myself knew very well the 1967 boundaries and if we had put in the “the” or “all the” that could only have meant that we wished to see the 1967 boundaries perpetuated in the form of a permanent frontier. This I was certainly not prepared to recommend.

On another occasion, to an interviewer from the Journal of Palestine Studies (Spring-Summer 1976), he again insisted on the deliberateness of the wording. He was asked:

The basis for any settlement will be United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, of which you were the architect. Would you say there is a contradiction between the part of the resolution that stresses the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and that which calls for Israeli withdrawal from “occupied territories,” but not from “the occupied territories”?

Nota bene: “from territories occupied” is not the same thing as “from occupied territories” – the first is neutral, the second a loaded description. Lord Caradon answered:

I defend the resolution as it stands. What it states, as you know, is first the general principle of inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war. That means that you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it. We could have said: well, you go back to the 1967 line. But I know the 1967 line, and it’s a rotten line. You couldn’t have a worse line for a permanent international boundary. It’s where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948. It’s got no relation to the needs of the situation.

Had we said that you must go back to the 1967 line, which would have resulted if we had specified a retreat from all the occupied territories, we would have been wrong.

Note how Lord Caradon says that “you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it,” with that “merely” applying to Jordan, but not to Israel, because of the Mandate’s provisions allocating the territory known now as the “West Bank” to the Jewish state. Note, too, the firmness of his dismissal of the 1967 lines as nothing more than “where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948,” that is, nothing more than armistice lines and not internationally recognized borders.

In addition to their rights derived from the Mandate for Palestine, Israelis should not be prevented from exercising their right, under Resolution 242, not to give back “all the” territories it won by force of arms, but instead to keep territories needed for “secure and defensible borders.” The Israelis have a perfect right – legally and morally – to hold onto those parts of Judea and Samaria that they now control. And they have a perfect right to build towns and villages (not “settlements,” for that word has come to imply both transience and illegitimacy) on “state and waste lands,” as the Mandate for Palestine specifically allows.

Many people today are hellbent on arriving at a “solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict. But what makes them think there is a “solution” to the Arab and Muslim war against Israel? The evidence supports quite a different view. I don’t think there is a “two-state” or three-state or n-state “solution” to a conflict that will continue forever, because it is based on Muslim hostility to a Jewish state, whatever its dimensions, on land Muslims once possessed, and in the midst of Muslim Arabdom.