What's Wrong with Asking Israel to Stick to its 1967 Borders?

To most of my readers this is old news, and tiring news. But President Obama has spoken (Thursday May 19^th), and some reaction seems appropriate.

Here's an old Israel supporter who has gradually lost faith in the Israeli leadership. In the fall of 1990, representing my institute in Oslo, I spent a couple of hours at the dinner table talking to our up-and-coming political visitor from Israel, Benyamin Netanyahu – he was a most charming and spirited interlocutor, setting out in our conversation his deep concern about peace with the Palestinians and the need for a basic change to come about in their mutual relations. This was three years before the famous Oslo accords. It was therefore very difficult for me to understand later on that he would not sign off on that agreement, and that as time went by he slowly made it clear that he would not support its implementation, finally declaring that he would fight it in every way he could. Some of my colleagues who had watched his rise over a longer period warned me back then that I'd been had. It took me quite some time to accept that they were probably right. For the past decade or more I have resigned myself to the understanding that this man was not – and is not – credible.

Of course, Israeli politics is not run by one individual; from an initially fairly stable political unit it has become a complex short-term coincidence of incoherent political forces, each of which is insufficient to provide a stable course for the nation. Yet it has been tough for many of us who have sympathized with Israel's right to exist alongside its neighbours, to see the unrelenting course taken by its governments in the past decade. The Palestinian side has helped the extreme side of Israeli politics immensely with its own practice of (and ideological support for) indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilians. And so the old practice of an eye for an eye – the ancient law of Hammurabi, as familiar to Israel as it is to the rest of the region – goes on without pause. Israel attacks the Palestinians, and the Palestinians attack Israel, and no one knows for sure what is a retaliation and what is a fresh offence. The story is almost too familiar to repeat.

The Palestinians missed their chance in 1948 when they could have had what they are now denied – the entire West Bank and Gaza strip. They preferred instead to push the Israelis into the sea, having all Arab neighbours jointly attack the newly established state of Israel to achieve its extermination. After two years it was obvious that they had failed. The tottering Israeli state survived. Palestinian residents of Israeli-held territories left in large numbers, some under threat of force, others out of fear. The ensuing decades saw repeated attempts to shift the balance between the parties with surprise attacks, mostly by the Arab neighbours, but also by Israel (the 1956 war). The disastrous Arab failure in the 1967 Six-Day War - initiated by Israel after an escalating campaign of Arab provocations - led to Israel's long-term occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza strip and East Jerusalem as well.

I cannot believe that the great circle of Israel's (now gradually diminishing) sympathizers abroad would reject the 1967 borders. To terminate the occupation, to me, is the only way forward. The long series of permissions being unstoppably granted for new Israeli settlements to be established in the West Bank, and the unscalable wall to protect them, are a disgrace. Evidently the Obama administration is of the same opinion. It may be too little, too late.

With the Arab uprisings and regime changes of this year, democracy is uncertain to advance and some kind of primitive pay-back seems to be looming in any case. Israel has long held the key to its own future, but refused to put it into the lock. It may be a late stage now - perhaps too late? - to expect that same key to be able to turn things to the better.

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Unarmed Civilian Assassinated in His Home

There are many ways of relating Osama bin Laden's final fate. We have hardly seen the end of the story, especially when Western “experts” charge that a breach of international law has been committed by the United States (Ove Bring in Sydsvenska Dagbladet, David Allen Green in the New Statesman). So, the enforcement agent must put his own life and that of his team-mates at risk in order to ensure the humane treatment of one who has organized suicide bombings of thousands of people? Sure. Mind you, they did not even ask for his ID. 

In my view, it is not the HR principles that are stupid. In fairness, while Bring sees this as a serious matter, Green says he will hardly lose any sleep over it. Then again, many in the Muslim world think like the Swede, which leads them to call for reprisals against the US.

The obligation to provide bin Laden with a fair trial must be laid at Pakistan's door. The US took its own measures when its ally failed to do what it could and should have done.

There is a good old rule of foreign policy that says if you don't effectively control your own territory, others will – or at least they will take advantage of you. Territorial control is a military task. Pakistan, however, has a military that is busy with other matters, domestic politics above all. The only border they guard jealously is that with India. So it was apparently easy for the US Navy Seals team to swoop down from Afghanistan in their helicopters and snatch bin Laden where he was hidden in northern Pakistan, next to a Military Academy. The hue and cry afterwards about the transgression on Pakistan's sovereignty was predictable. However, blaming others for failing to respect an unguarded border is hard to take seriously, even more so considering the circumstances.

Now the dispute is on concerning who's to blame for bin Laden's eight-year residence in the area where he was found. We need not ponder long to guess that someone must have known. Of course, within the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence there are many different sections, and as in any large political organization sections often become factions with aims of their own, some corresponding to movements in the subterranean landscape of Pakistani politics. One of the ISI sections was previously in charge of training mujahedin to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, among them the young Osama. No one knows for sure when they stopped doing that after the Soviets bowed out in 1988. I read somewhere recently that turning a blind eye to inconvenient facts is said to be a necessity in Pakistan's political culture. That is a believable statement.