Fact-Free Middle East Negotiations?

Arlene Kushner
Senior Media Research Analyst
Center for Near East Policy Research
22 October '10

The dispute between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with regard to the freezing of Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) is predicated on the assumption that Israel's border is the '67 line -- called the Green Line -- that pertained before the Six Day War. The Palestinian claim, broadly accepted by the international community, is that everything on the other side is rightfully theirs.

There is, however, an essential problem with this: The Green Line was never Israel's border, but rather a temporary armistice line. When hostilities initiated by the Arab League after Israel's founding ended, Israel and Jordan signed an armistice agreement. It included acknowledgment that the armistice line would not prejudice future negotiations to determine Israel's permanent border.

After the 1967 war, when Israel secured control of Judea and Samaria, the Security Council passed Resolution 242. It did not require that Israel move back to the Green Line. Recognizing Israel's need for secure borders, it maintained that those borders must be determined via negotiations.

This instance of factual misrepresentation is merely one of a host of misrepresentations and distortions of truth so pervasive as to render honest resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict impossible. Under an onslaught of Arab PR, critical facts are now ignored or forgotten by most of the world. Attempts to resolve the conflict are built on premises constructed of air or, perhaps more accurately, founded on quicksand.

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