Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 28
How a missing three-letter word in 1967 saved Israel from disaster
“Words have more power than atom bombs,” said the wordily-named Pearl Strachan Hurd. Israelis have long recognised the wisdom of that quote.
Immediately after the Six Day War of June 1967, Israelis were euphoric. For the second time in a generation, they had defeated far larger military forces without the help of foreigners (apart from the relatively small diaspora Jewish community). Their country had emerged unscathed from another near-death experience. What happened next would determine the future course of the conflict.
A hastily convened UN Security Council was split along the usual Cold War lines. At British instigation, the famous resolution 242 was drafted. While emphasising the somewhat malleable and ambiguous judicial principle of “the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force,” it pointedly refrained from demanding a total Israeli withdrawal but instead called on Israel to withdraw “from territories” she had occupied in the conflict.
Seldom has so much political controversy been generated by a subtle point of grammar. In the original English version, the exclusion of the word “the” before “territories” obviated the need for Israel to withdraw from all the territories she had taken. Had that word been inserted, it would have consigned Israelis back to the vulnerable 1949 ceasefire lines – “the Auschwitz Lines” as Abba Eban called them, recalling the abyss into which Israel peered on the eve of the Six Day War. The French version, by contrast, had (probably deliberately) mistranslated from the original English to include the lethal “the” – thereby disadvantaging Israel via a linguistic ruse.
Arthur Goldberg, the US ambassador to the UN and a key drafter of Resolution 242 commented: “The notable omissions in language used to refer to withdrawal are the words ‘the,’ ‘all,’ and the ‘June 5, 1967 lines.’ I refer to the English text of the resolution. The French and Soviet texts differ from the English in this respect, but the English text was voted on by the Security Council, and thus it is determinative. In other words, there is lacking a declaration requiring Israel to withdraw from the (or all the) territories occupied by it on and after June 5, 1967.”
This was not diplomatic sophistry [1]. The removal of that three-letter word from the final draft of the resolution – despite repeated attempts to insert it – was a diplomatic coup for Israel, and an especially impressive one given that the co-drafters, the UK Foreign Secretary George Brown and his UN Ambassador Lord Caradon, had hardly figured among Israel’s strongest supporters in the past.
Resolution 242 was eventually passed on 22 November 1967. Israel immediately accepted the resolution while the Arab League rejected it outright, reiterating their knee-jerk rebuff to Israeli peace overtures in August 1967 at Khartoum known as the Three Nos: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. (To be fair, Egypt and Jordan grudgingly agreed to “consult” with the UN about its implementation but their insistence on reading it as if the definite article were included – as well as their demand for the return of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees to Israel – ensured that the consultation would go nowhere as the resolution they “accepted” was a fictitious one).
Thereafter, a deadlock ensued that has lasted decades. Israel’s insistence on retaining at least a sliver of territory to act as a buffer against potential further armed aggression from her neighbours proved amply justified. As former Israeli Labour politician Einat Wilf [2] has written: “The humiliating defeat of five Arab armies in 1967, and the loss of the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula in a short span of six days, did nothing to change the basic Arab mythology of the temporary nature of Israel. While the western world was establishing the formula of ‘land for peace’, the Arab world clarified its rejection of it.”
The two key achievements of the Six Day War, from Israel’s perspective, were formidable: first, the Jewish state had survived another onslaught from multiple Arab armies whose declared goal was her annihilation, and second, the post-war prioritisation of her security concerns – in particular her protestation that the 1949 armistice lines were indefensible – was formally acknowledged by an otherwise indifferent (or hostile) international community. A full, unconditional and immediate withdrawal of Israel troops from Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, as demanded by all of her adversaries, was off the table for the time being. Israelis had some breathing space, and it was Israel’s erstwhile nemesis, the British government, that had played a major role in granting it to them via the Security Council.
Let’s dispose of the myth that, regardless of resolution 242, Israel had a legal and moral obligation to return all of the captured territory. As every educated teenager knows, there is nothing unusual in territory acquired in a defensive war being ceded by the vanquished to the victors – the Second World War saw precisely that geo-political process unfold on a large scale after 1945 [3]. Israel, as so often, was subjected to different standards. Again and again, the Arab League thundered its demand that Israel relinquish every centimetre of occupied territory as a precondition for negotiation, and the international community, fearful of the economic power wielded by the Arab oil cartel OPEC, cravenly capitulated.
All who lived through the latter decades of the twentieth century will recall how frequently Israel was accused of “intransigence.” The historical record proves the baselessness of that charge. Despite the fact that Israel had won a war of survival against her far more powerful neighbours, and despite the diplomatic cover afforded by resolution 242, successive Israeli governments have proved astonishingly magnanimous in victory, to a degree unprecedented in the annals of warfare.
When Anwar Sadat broke ranks with his rejectionist Arab allies, Israel returned to Egypt the entire Sinai peninsula, at a stroke relinquishing 90 percent of all the territory she had occupied in the 1967 war; the ensuing “cold peace” was a consequence of the Egyptian refusal to implement all the clauses of normalisation they had agreed with the Israelis.
Nevertheless, further Israeli withdrawals followed, from the northern West Bank and all of Gaza – the former as part of the peace treaty with Jordan in 1994, and the latter in a courageous but failed experiment in 2005 to enable the residents of Gaza to rule themselves without threatening their Israeli neighbours. These high-risk redeployments of the IDF involved the evacuation of thousands of Jewish settlers, often in the face of hostile Israeli public opinion, giving the lie to the claim that Israeli settlements are an intractable obstacle to peace.
Israel offered further withdrawals to the Syrians (who rejected them all) and, above all, to the Palestinians. A territorial compromise with Syria has become a remote prospect given the way that country’s totalitarian leaders have reduced their country to a blood-soaked disaster zone. The offer to the Palestinians remains on the table – yet Palestinian leaders, despite their commitment under the Oslo Accords of 1993-95 to negotiate a final peace agreement, have rejected it five times since the turn of the millennium alone (in 2000, 2001, 2008, 2014, 2016 and 2020). These failed initiatives were variations on the same theme in which Israel would allocate up to an eye-watering 96% of the West Bank to Palestinian sovereignty, along with land swaps for the remainder.
The outcome of the Six Day War cannot be deemed responsible for the absence of peace. On the contrary, Israel’s extraordinary largesse would have been impossible in the absence of the 1967 victory and the strengthened bargaining position that the captured territories handed Israeli negotiators. But a bargain can only be struck if both sides are willing to compromise. Israel was always willing to place her security at risk by trading “land for peace” and Egypt and Jordan belatedly accepted (and benefited) from that formula. Arafat and Abbas, for reasons best known to themselves, repeatedly declined it.
It was the Arab League’s infamous Three Nos – not Israel’s triumph – that crushed the hopes for peace raised by the Six Say War. To this triple negative, the Palestinian leadership added a fourth, one that has underpinned all Arab rejectionism for a century – no acceptance of Jewish sovereignty behind any borders. It reflects the stance of Palestinian leader Amin Husseini in the 1920s and it remains the watchword of the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas in the 2020s.
Words matter. If a three-letter word saved Israel in 1967, the Arab leaders’ devotion to a two-letter word has betrayed their own people for over a century. That’s all anyone trying to make sense of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and all the pain it has caused, needs to know: no more, no less. Just “no.”
1. Lövy A. Resolution 242 doesn't mean what people think it means – opinion. Jerusalem Post, 23 November 2021
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/resolution-242-doesnt-mean-what-people-think-it-means-opinion-686795
2. Wilf E. Fathom 2017. As long as the Arab world views Israel as a temporary aberration to be conquered, Israel will stand fast.
3. Europe after World War 2 (1949). Diercke International Atlas.
