WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Amb. Oren’s book “Ally” relates how “two-states along the 1967 lines with mutually agreed territorial swaps” was originally just Palestinian Arabs’ “goal,” but was adopted as U.S. policy during his term as Israel’s ambassador. It unjustly endangers our people’s historic homeland, and we must not meekly accept it.
Israel-Endangering Obama-Biden “Two-State Solution” Not Written in Stone, Don’t Acquiesce In It
A 5/18/20 Times of Israel article quoted former U.S, Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro:
“Support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps remains a consensus policy within the Democratic Party ….”
At this month’s neighborhood public library used book sale, I picked up for a dollar historian-professor-author-ambassador-MK-paratrooper Michael Oren’s book Ally, centrally including his 2009-2013 service as Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. It was during that time that what the Obama administration had originally recognized as an Israeli-contested Palestinian Arab “goal” – “two states along the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps” – became U.S. policy. Oren describes this change – by me, both Jewishly and militarily fatal for Israel – in his book.
Although many Israelis including then-PM Bibi at one time supported a qualified two-state solution in some form, President Trump, whose administration intervened between Obama’s and now Biden’s, developed a plan, signed off on by both Bibi and Gantz, that offered Palestinian Arabs autonomy in part of Judea-Samaria with Israeli security control. (See Trump Amb. To Israel David Friedman’s book Sledgehammer.)
Biden’s now back to “two-states along the 1967 [i.e., 1949] ceasefire lines with mutually agreed swaps.” Here’s what “a spokesman for the US Embassy in Jerusalem told JNS,” 11/24/23 [post-Oct 7], US: Palestinians Must Choose Own Leaders, Even as Poll Shows Massive Support for Hamas:
“‘We continue to believe that a negotiated two-state solution along the 1967 lines with mutually-agreed-to swaps is the best way to advance a sustainable peace,’ he continued.” [emphasis added]
Jewish Press, 6/6/23, quoting U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that week at AIPAC:
“As Blinken put it: ‘As the President said on his recent trip to Israel and the West Bank last summer, a two-state solution – based on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps – remains the best way to achieve our goal of Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace, with equal measures of security, freedom, justice, opportunity, and dignity.’” [emphasis added]
Oren’s book Ally (p. 115, emphasis added) quotes the Obama administration’s “Terms of Reference” (“TOR”) designed “to square contradictory Israeli and Palestinian policies and place the United States in a viable mediating position” developed early in his presidential term:
“We believe that through good-faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.” [emphasis added]
In May, 2011, however (see Ally, p. 215), Obama delivered a nationally televised speech, “U.S. Policy in Middle East and North Africa,” in the course of which he declared:
“We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”
“The Internet headlines instantly flashed: OBAMA ENDORSES THE ’67 BORDERS. The rest of the speech, intended to be one of the most memorable of his term, was roundly ignored. The Palestinian Authority, joined by the Quartet, applauded the 1967 reference, and Republicans condemned it as ‘throwing Israel under the bus.’” Bibi called for the President “to reaffirm that Israel would never return to the 1967 lines, that Israel would remain in the Jordan Valley ….” (Ibid.) Obama did tell AIPAC a couple days later: “Israelis and Palestinians will negotiate a border that is different from the one that existed on June 4, 1967.” (Ally, p, 224)
The Israelis (see Ally, p. 208) had earlier been concerned that Obama was developing a peace plan that might embrace “the 1967 lines,” and saw this as both adopting as U.S. policy what it had previously seen as the Israeli-contested Palestinian Arab goal, and as seeking return to what no longer existed:
“… America’s embrace of the 1967 lines would undermine the Terms of Reference so fastidiously forged by Hillary Clinton. That TOR talked of ‘the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines’ – that is, not the Israeli or American goal. Endorsing those borders, even with mutually agreed land swaps, meant granting an immense concession to the Palestinians, while they refused to even enter peace talks. It meant tying those talks to lines that, in broad areas in an around Jerusalem and along the Jordan Valley, no longer existed.”
What To Make of All This?
Oren (Ally, p. 210) states the Israeli position that “by endorsing the Palestinian position on the 1967 lines, the White House had overnight altered more than forty years of American policy.”
There’s history backing this. The post-Obama, pre-Biden Trump plan offered Palestinian Arabs autonomy, not a sovereign state, in part of Judea-Samaria. UNSC 242, after the Six Day War, intentionally called for Israeli withdrawal from “territories,” not “the territories,” recognizing the need for “secure boundaries,” which nine-miles-wide in the lowland middle and narrow corridor to just new Jerusalem definitively aren’t. The Palestine Mandate, with its Jewish national home and provision for Britain to exclude from it only Palestine east of the Jordan, didn’t contemplate an Arab state in part of Palestine west of the River in addition to the one east of it. And Jews have the strongest historical claim to western Palestine, the land of Israel, where they’ve been sovereign now three times, with Israel being the next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, and Palestinian Arabs sovereign there never.
“Two states along the 1967 [1949] lines with mutually agreed swaps” was not written in stone three thousand years ago, and those long-defunct 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines, never “1967 international borders,” snaking through geographically-unmarked areas between which Israeli and Jordanian armies then stood, were never among the Holy Land’s holy places. What is geographically visible is the River Jordan, separating the land of Israel from eastern Palestine, Jordan, where Palestinian Arabs are its substantial majority people. That’s Palestine’s Arab-Jewish “two-state solution.”