One really wonders if Harold has ever really investigated the issue. 1. There are no 67 borders. What you call borders are Armistice lines and are defined in the Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement signed on April 3, 1949. Nowhere is the term border used to define the green line. 2. Article 6, subsection 8 states "The provisions of this article shall not be interpreted as prejudicing, in any sense, an ultimate political settlement between the Parties to this Agreement." Subsection 9 states; "The Armistice Demarcation Lines defined in articles V and VI of this Agreement are agreed upon by the Parties without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either Party relating thereto." These 2 subsections state that the Armistice Lines have no bearing on a final settlement between the parties. In effect, it says that any future settlement will be worked out between the parties. Jordan eventually gave up claim too the West Bank and turned the problem over to the Palestinians. But that does not mean in any sense that they can disregard the Armistice Agreement. BTW, there are similar provisions in the Armistice Agreements with Egypt and Syria. As far as return of refugees goes, nowhere is it states that Israel accept the return of all refugees. The UN resolution says return of refugees without stating a number. That again is left up to negotiations. Same with Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital. Nowhere is it stated that this should be. Only the Palestinian demand.

the US recognized Israel, de jure, on January 31, 1949. The president has the right to recognize foreign states. This is considered part of the conduct of foreign policy powers of the president and is not one of the acts requiring the advice and consent of the senate as listed in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution.

Please get these types of articles out in to every form of international media wherever and whenever you can, repeatedly. There is a massive issue of global miseducation.

#39. Palestine is forever fictional, like Oz and Narnia. So its a moot point to speculate about its religion.

and read more. #35 is closer to the mark than you are. See, 299 U.S. 304 (1936), in which the U.S. Supreme Court interprets Art II as making the President the "sole organ of the nation in its external relations." That decision still stands.

It is Palestine who complied with all of the Quartets mediation requirements last year and submitted a position statement while Israel first claimed that they had another two months before the deadline and then abandoned all pretense of complying with the Quartet and insisted instead on direct "face to face" negotiations without preconditions (itself a precondition.) At two subsequent "face to face" meetings Israel refused to commit itself to ANY concrete position on ANY of the issues leaving the Palestinians with nothing to discuss. To this day the Israeli people themselves have no clue about the government's actual position on any of the issues including that of borders. The GoI is playing games, mostly for political purposes.

Its appropriate that Fictional Palestine has fictional legal experts to argue on its behalf. One such fictional legal expert is Jump Off the Balcony. Israel's legal ownership of Judea and Samaria has been incontrovertibly proven by many world leading jurists such as Eugene Rostow (author of U.N. Resolution 242) and Professor David M. Phillips, Northeastern University School of Law. In fact, the P.A. refuses to even debate this issue because they know the truth is totally on Israel's side. M.K. Danny Ayalon challenged them to do so.

Countries why no one cared to give any real life changing rights and left them stateless for the last 65 years the sad trueth is Palestinians allowed almost every arab rugim to use them inorder to boost their image but these rugims done nothing to make real changes to palestinians daily lives Time to wake up

There are PARTITION borders proposed by the UN and ACCEPTED by Israel. What are you doing...even referring to the 67 armistice lines? Go back to the partition BORDERS. What are you doing DEEP inside the occupied territories? Your hand has reached deep inside the cookie jar, but little do you know, that your hands' have gotten so far from thieving and occupation, now it's too late to withdraw. The only logical solution is the democratic one, resulting in Palestine from River to Sea - again!

Those were non-binding recommendations of the UN General Assembly, which your side rejected from the beginning. The Jewish Agency accepted the Partition Plan in 1947. But not the government of the State of Israel. The Partition Plan boundaries have never been recognized in Israel's legal code. Ever. When Israel applied to join the UN in 1949, it announced that the only condition that can be made for joining the UN is compliance with Art. 4, para. 1 of the UN Charter. That had been the advice of the Security Council, and the General Assembly accepted it. Israel made no commitment to implement the Partition Plan.

It is pretty impossible to move the palestine arabs form A, B, but in C the number of arabs, appr 50000 is one per square of 250-250 meters, do you see the arab and his goat in the middle? From Jericho there is a road almost to the Jordan river. Build a bridge over to Jordan there, as a hint. Abbas wants a border. Build one around area A, B where possible. Near there Israel can build a small city, and invite all arabs in area C to move there for free. Unfortunately the Israeli government is doing wrong everywhere, letting illegal arabs and beduins build in area C, ask Women in Green.

rest of the BS...it's just a waste of time for Israel to steal more land... ICC..ICC, ICC, ICC.. TATA

Take a literate school child of normal intelligence. He or she looks at a map of Israel. He or she sees a tiny land surrounded by a gigantic Arab Empire. It is obvious to him or her that it would be lunatic for tiny Israel to cede her more than 3,500 year old ancestral heartland to slightly enlarge the Arab Empire. He or she would also see that Israel's waist would shrink to a suicidal 9 miles if Israel ever did anything so craven. The truth is totally obvious to the school child, though it escapes the idiots of the Israeli left.

from the main problem, which was Iran. He referred to Saddam as a "caged bird". And he didn't say "Attack Iran". And so what if Israel remained silent? The argument from silence does not hold much water.

Unconstitutional decisions of a group of political hacks known as supreme court justices, remain unconstitutional even though they are shoved down the throats of the people and called law. The Constitution is the final authority even though the people are too cowardly to assert their authority. But, there is an ultimate Authority who will straighten this whole mess out and I sure hope you are on His side when it goes down soon.

You continually parrot the lies your self serving "Palestinian" leaders have been telling you since 1948. In 1948, they told suckers like you to leave while they massacre the Jews... Meanwhile,your leaders have been stuffing their Swiss bank accounts while fools like you pay the price. You are clearly a master at self delusion. Israel is here forever. Palestine, on the other hand, exists solely in Jordan. It never will exist anywhere else.

Look up the words "disputed" and "occupied" and while you're at it, look up "puerile and "infantile" too. You persist in making outlandish claims about the legal status of the occupied territories based on the iconoclastic polemics of dead lawyers and which even the State of Israel does not endorse. At the same time, you ignore the fact that: -Israel has been negotiating directly with the Palestinians for over twenty years; -Palestine is internationally recognized as a sovereign state by an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations; -the UN GA, SG, SC, ICJ, ICRC, High Contracting Parties of the Geneva Convention, and the nations of the world, including the U.S. and EU, have joined in a universal condemnation of the settlements as flagrant violations of international law; -the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that settlements within disputed or occupied territory are not a part of Israel; -successive Israeli governments have endorsed the principle of “two states for two peoples, which principle is supported by a majority of the MKs sitting in the Knesset today. You voice mere opinions; I voice verifiable facts which you simply ignore. Which of us is living in a fictional fantasy world?

They explicitly said that the Res. 242 was drafted in line with the principle that Israel would NOT be compelled to return to the old 1949 ceasefire lines, which in their view was unacceptable. There is, moreover, no mention of the establishment of a palestinian state. The principle of "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war", which is used in the non-operative part of the resolution, was included in order to highlight that the formalization of final territorial boundaries should come as a result of peaceful negotiations. That principle is designed to prevent aggressive wars waged for territorial expansion. It is a legal abstraction to claim that those who had acquired territory through self-defense must then be compelled to withdraw from it. It is also a legal abstraction to treat Chapter VI UNSC resolutions and UNGA resolutions as legally binding, enforceable directives.

As such, it behooves you to drop your tone of superiority. The US, and the UN drafters of Res. 242, have stood behind the principle that there should be NO full withdrawal to the 1949 ceasefire lines, and that this border was unacceptable and undesirable. Those were ceasefire lines, never international boundaries, and the West Bank was never a high contracting party or sovereign territory, and settlement has been peaceful and voluntary, not deportation or forcible transfer. The ICJ and other courts are not legally empowered bodies that can render voluntary settlement illegal, so all statements to the contrary are political, not strictly legal. What Obama said about settlements is that "they are illegitimate, but not illegal". Clearly he opposes the settlements in principle and wants to jump on the international bandwagon in opposing them, but why would he make such a statement if he felt convinced that he had the law on his side?

The "Supreme Court" is called "supreme" for a reason. Look up the word's meaning. Your claim that Supreme Court Justices make unconstitutional decisions and that individuals are competent to interpret the U.S. Constitution for themselves is analogous to claiming that your chosen Rabbi or Beis Din is not competent to judge matters of halacha. And that David, is truly "off the deep end."

When is Russia going to withdraw from Shikotan and the Habomai Islands? It invaded an occupied the Kuril Islands and expelled their Japanese inhabitants after the conclusion of WW2? When is China going to withdraw from Tibet? It invaded and occupied Tibet in 1950, long after the conclusion of WW2.

You echo Rostow but, it is the understanding of the Nations that actually voted for Res. 242 that count --and they do not endorse Rostow’s analysis--nor any other argument that attempts to reconcile or legitimize the settlements under Res. 242. Your statement that territorial boundaries should come as the result of peaceful negotiations is unquestionably true -- without regard to any distinction between offensive or defensive war. That said, having been attacked, Israel has the right to continue its militarily occupation for legitimate security purposes until such time as such a threat no longer exists but the rules of occupation explicitly prohibit the civilian settlement of occupied territory. (This is likely why Israel initially claimed its settlements were paramilitary bases and we still use the term “outposts.”) UNGA and Art VI SC resolutions and advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice are certainly more indicative of actual international law than the polemics of individual lawyers or documents like the Levy Report. Thank you for a surprisingly civil response. p.s. Your use of the expression “legal abstraction” is perplexing; perhaps you mean “legal absurdity”?

What's the ''Beis Din"" Balcony, you should know it's Beit Din. Other than that, count me out of your parade here!

Not only Rostow, but the other British and American drafters of Res. 242 (Lord Caradon, J.L. Hargrove , Arthur Goldberg and Baron George-Brown) have all stated repeatedly that the resolution was deliberately crafted in a way that the Israel would NOT be obligated to return to the pre-1967 lines. And the British and American delegations voted in line with that interpretation, in line with the policies of their respective governments. And that is the interpretation understood by Israel when it a accepted Res 242 as basis of negotiations under the Oslo Accords. The Soviet Union and its satellites and the "Non Aligned" bloc followed an interpretation that favored the Arabs, but like I said, this has no binding force on Israel. The 4th Geneva convention speaks of deportation and transfer, and high contracting parties. To attempt to forbid voluntary, peaceful settlement in non-sovereign territory on state land is a deriliction of the word and spirit of the Geneva Convention. Israel's position on the matter has been moderate and proper, drawing the line at building on privately owned land, and I don't see it changing anytime soon.

Shachar, do me the favour of reading # 56. by Dan Calic. Thanks Dan.

foisted upon the Israeli public to justify the government's settlement gambit . It is neither "moderate or proper" to build on "disputed land" while keeping a gun pointed at the other party to the dispute in order to prevent them from doing the same. That much should be obvious even to you. Will the border settlements that Israel is allowed to keep be worth the price paid by the thousands of settlers who have to leave? You'll have to ask them. You think that our government will not betray the settlers? That's what they thought in Sinai and Gaza. So think again. The EU and U.S. have just begun to begin turning the screws in earnest; They need a peace agreement even more than Israel or the Palestinians do. And admit it or not, we need their support more than we need the settlements.

True. Never be bothered by nasty commentators like Sarrah B.

And surely know that how you sometimes reflexively pronounce or spell yiddish/Hebrew expressions in English depends on when and where you first received your Jewish education. I don't believe I ever counted you in the parade or the crowd.

Excuse me, but can you clarify one point? Is Res. 242 binding and enforceable? Careful, habibi, I happen to know the answer to that one. You, on the other hand, may wish to explore the difference between resolutions passed under Chapter VI and those passed under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. Guess which ones are enforceable and binding? Guess under which one Res. 242 was passed. Game, set and match, habibi. Go back onto your balcony.

under the principle of pacta sunt servanda notwithstanding the fact that it was passed under Chapter VI. R242 is binding upon Israel not simply because Israel has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to the resolution but because R242 has been explicitly incorporated in treaties and agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, Egypt, Jordan, etc. (Of course, if you want to argue that R242 is merely a non-binding recommendation then you cannot use it to claim that it renders the occupied territories “disputed” or in any way legitimizes the settlements.) Enforceability is an entirely different question. Since Israel is unlikely to submit to the ICJ or respect its judgment, enforcement of the principles of R242 would require a further SC resolution under Chap.VII. The differences between Ch.VI and Ch.VII SC resolutions has been discussed in Ynet comments several times. I’m surprised that you were either paying attention or have started reading more. Why not look now at UN Charter Art.24, 25 and related ICJ opinions? :) p.s. I don’t need to return to my balcony since I cannot leave it: it hangs over the valley of the shadow of death.)