U.S. Administration Will Push Israel To Return To 1949 Armistice Lines

U.S. Administration Will Push to Squeeze Israel Within 1949 Armistice Lines

Hugh Fitzgerald

The U.S. Deep State Administration intends to squeeze Israel back within the 1949 Armistice Lines. A report on this monumental folly is here: “Internal Biden memo said to back 2-state solution along 1967 lines,” by Jacob Magid, Times of Israel, March 17, 2021:

A memo titled “The US Palestinian Reset and the Path Forward,” which was revealed Wednesday to the Abu Dhabi-based The National, also showed that the Biden administration is planning on announcing a $15 million aid package in coronavirus-related humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians as early as this month.

If the Biden Administration gives the Palestinians a $15-million aid package for coronavirus assistance – or gives the PA any aid package, for any purpose – it will be violating the Taylor Force Act, which forbids any American aid being given to the PA as long as its “Pay-For-Slay” program is in force. 

The PA not only continues with that program, but just announced a 50% increase in the amount it will provide the terrorist who murdered five members, including two small children and a baby, of the Fogel family. The PA may try to repackage “Pay-For-Slay” as aid innocently provided based on economic need, and not as a reward for terrorist acts, but as long as PA stipends are provided to terrorists and their families, however that aid is deceptively labelled, the real purpose of those stipends – to both reward and to incentivize terrorism – will be obvious, and Congress should not let the Biden Administration pretend that the Taylor Force Act does not apply.

What will keep the peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors is what kept the peace between the West and the Soviet Union during the Cold War – the strategy of deterrence. As long as Israel remains, and is seen to be, militarily much stronger than its potential enemies, the Jewish state will be able to keep the peace.

To that end – of keeping the peace through deterrence – Israel has to retain certain territories, including the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights. This is not only the unanimous opinion of Israel’s military, but was also the conclusion of the Joint Chiefs, in a report they prepared for President Johnson in 1967, on what territories — that Israel had won in the Six-Day War — it needed to keep for security reasons.

Amr recommends in the memo that the White House back a two-state framework “based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps and agreements on security and refugees.”

This is a meretricious attempt by Hady Amr to suggest that even Netanyahu was willing to engage in negotiations “based on the 1967 lines.” It’s false. During his decades in public life, Netanyahu has always rejected anything like those “1967 lines” as a basis for negotiations. He may have been physically present in the room when such a proposal was brought up by the Americans, but he would not have “participated” in any way other than to flatly reject such a possibility.

In requiring exports from Israeli towns and villages (i.e., “settlements”) in the West Bank to be labelled as “made in Israel,” the Trump Administration was quite properly helping to legitimize those places as part of Israel. It is this that the Biden Administration is now trying to undo. It wants to impose a clear demarcation between Israel in its pre-1967 lines – lines which only reflect where the armies of each side stood when the shooting stopped in 1949, and were never meant to be permanent borders – and the new territories that Israel won in the Six-Day War. 

In so doing, the Biden people are ignoring the Palestine Mandate, and the territories assigned by it to the future Jewish state, which included the entire West Bank. They are also ignoring U.N. Resolution 242, which allows Israel to keep territories won in that war which it needed to retain if it was to have “secure [i.e., defensible] and recognized boundaries.”

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