WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Not just right-wingers, but Eban and Rabin opposed “Two-states along the 1967 lines” with “mutually agreed land swaps.” Come listen to them.
Reminder This Week: Eban’s “Auschwitz Lines” Were About Narrow Borders’ “Insecurity and Danger,” Not Equating Israel to Defenseless Jews in Europe
A Dartmouth College professor this week ridiculed Abba Eban’s famous “Auschwitz lines” characterization of Israel’s 1949 ceasefire lines as “utter incoherence” in claiming that “a sovereign state with a modern military is comparable to disempowered masses rotting in a concentration camp,” which he finds “not only grotesque but a sign of deep collective failure.”
Charming. Stephen Flatow answered him Tuesday in a JNS article, What Exactly are ‘Auschwitz Borders’?, in which he pointed out that Eban – who was far far from what today’s media would mockingly call an “ultra-nationalist” Believer in a “Greater Israel” – was not engaged in what the professor called “Holocaust messianism” but realistic assessment of the 1949 war’s ceasefire lines’ insecurity and danger to Israel.
I bring up Eban this week [1] because Israeli PM Bennett is on the verge of visiting President Biden; [2] because Bennett’s partner, Foreign Minister Lapid, in line to take over Israeli premiership in the second-half of the term, says that while Bennett isn’t for “the two-state solution,” he, Lapid himself, is for it; [3] because the news says that in the looming Biden-Bennett meeting Israeli-Palestinian Arab affairs along with Iran’s plans is on the agenda; [4] because, per former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Shapiro, “a two-state solution along the 1967 [i.e., 1949] lines with mutually agreed land swaps” is “consensus policy” of the U.S. Democratic Party, presently in charge of the White House and both Houses of Congress; and [5] because a “solution” that says Israel has zero claims beyond the 1949 lines [e.g., North and South Korea could make “mutually agreed land swaps”] is, by me, a suicidal surrender of the Jewish homeland’s Jewishly-meaningful heart and defensible hill country heartland, albeit that some of you Gentle Readers [I love you, anyway], alas, like most American Jews, incomprehensibly to me, support it. Perhaps Eban, a tad less “ultra-nationalist” than me, may sway you.
Flatow in his JNS article Tuesday highlighted what Eban had told the UN in the Six Day War’s wake about Israel’s long eastern front:
“Eban told the world body that going back to the old borders was ‘totally unacceptable.’ He pointed out that during the conflict, Israel on its eastern front was faced by ‘the mobilized forces of Jordan, with their artillery and mortars trained on Israel’s population centers in Jerusalem and along the vulnerable narrow coastal plain.’
“That coastal plain was just nine miles wide – narrower than Washington, D.C., or the Bronx….”
But it was in a statement quoted in Der Spiegel on November 5, 1969, that Eban spelled out how dire the insecurity and danger of that eastern front had been:
“We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967. For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz. We shudder when we think of what would have awaited us in the circumstances of June, 1967, if we had been defeated; with Syrians on the mountain and we in the valley, with the Jordanian army in sight of the sea, with the Egyptians who hold our throat in their hands in Gaza, this is a situation which will never be repeated in history.”
But, say you Two-Staters, nobody is actually calling for literally that [contra: UNSC 2334], that there will be “mutually agreed land swaps.” But “land swaps” means Israel has no claim to historic Jerusalem or Judea-Samaria, but must buy with land to which it does have claim (i.e., inside the “green line”) what it would get in such “mutual agreed” deals (don’t bet on Latrun, the natural Jordan Valley border or historic Jerusalem).
Of all the things of value Israel possesses, the most precious, literally the bedrock upon which everything else of value literally rests, is sovereignty over the land of the land of Israel itself. Its meaningful heart and defensible heartland cannot be sacrificed on the altar of “peacemaking.” Rabin understood this when he told the Knesset in his last speech to it that Jerusalem would remain united under Israel and that Israel’s security border in the fullest sense of the term would be the Jordan Valley and not the “green line,” with the Palestinian Arab area west of the Jordan being “less than a state.”
If you accept these positions of non-right-wingers Eban and Rabin, you must oppose the “two-state Solution” called for in UNSC 2334, which proclaimed historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria not “disputed” but “occupied Palestinian territory” to which Jews have no claim, and as well the “consensus policy” of the U.S. Democratic Party favoring “the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps,” which are opposed by most Israeli Jews. To remain both secure and Jewishly meaningful, Israel cannot accept a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan. There is a Palestinian Arab majority state in Palestine east of the Jordan, comprising 78% of what had been the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, and that’s a more than equitable to Arabs existing partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews.