Responding to former Israeli ambassador Dore Gold’s Weekly Standard piece arguing against the ‘67 lines, APN’s Lara Friedman congratulates Gold for (mostly) avoiding the "defensible borders" red herring, but then drills down on what the dispute is really about: Israeli conservatives want to keep most of the West Bank land taken for settlements, but don’t want to pay anything for it.
Most of the world, including American Jews and many or even most Israelis, recognizes that Palestinian readiness to accept Israel inside the 1967 lines, in 78% of what was historic Palestine, and to accept a Palestinian state in the remaining 22%, is an eminently reasonable basis for peace. Likewise, the Palestinians’ apparent readiness to accept an agreement in which, in exchange for land swaps, Israel keeps many settlements — unilaterally imposed Israeli facts on the ground that have long been a bone in the throat of the Palestinians — also demonstrates extraordinary reasonableness.
Contrast this with an Israeli right-wing demand that Israel should be able to take whatever it wants in the West Bank without paying in kind, and it is easy to see why most right-wing pundits prefer to change the subject to "defensible borders." Greed is not pretty. And when greed is your starting point, it is hard to claim the moral high ground.
The sense of entitlement driving resistance to the ‘67 lines as a basis for negotiations is actually pretty remarkable, but it’s of a piece with a broader expectation of a U.S. rubber stamp for Israeli preferences and policies, regardless of how those policies might impact U.S. interests. A great recent example of this is Commentary editor Jonathan Tobin’s Jan Brady-like indignation over the idea that Netanyahu might have to actually do something helpful in return for the U.S. expending its diplomatic energy and capital against the Palestinians’ UN statehood resolution in September. And after everything Netanyahu has done for Obama!
For more details on the ‘67 lines, see this MEP backgrounder from last week.
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