SECURITY COUNCIL
RESOLUTION 242:
A VIOLATION OF LAW AND
A PATHWAY TO DISASTER
Howard Grief
Howard Grief served as a legal adviser to Professor Yuval
Ne’eman at the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure in
matters of international law pertaining to the Land of
Israel and Jewish rights thereto. A Jerusalem-based
attorney and notary, as well as a specialist in Israeli
constitutional law, Howard Grief is the author of the
"Petition to Annul the Interim Agreement" which was
presented to Israel’s Supreme Court. (The Court, calling
the Petition "a political position" extricated itself from
dealing with the matter.) The Petition was published as
ACPR’s Policy Paper No. 77 and describes the illegal
nature of the Israel-PLO Agreements under Israeli law
and their non-applicability under international law.
Several feature articles of his have appeared in the pages
of Nativ. He is the author of a forthcoming book dealing
with the Legal Foundation and Borders and Israel under
International Law.
ISBN 978 965 7165 77 5
Copyright © ACPR Publishers
January 2008 / Shvat 5768
Jerusalem, November 2007
SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 242: A VIOLATION OF
LAW AND A PATHWAY TO DISASTER
Howard Grief
Resolution 242, adopted by the United Nations Security Council five and a half months after
the outbreak of the Six-Day War of June 1967, stated the principles for the establishment of a
just and lasting peace in the Middle East. The goal of Resolution 242 was “to achieve a
peaceful and accepted settlement in accordance with the provisions of this resolution”. Since
Resolution 242 was not self-enforcing, a settlement of this kind could only be achieved
through direct negotiations between the parties who were affected by the resolution. The Draft
Resolution that became Resolution 242 was introduced by the United Kingdom Permanent
Representative, Lord Caradon (Hugh Mackintosh Foot) on November 16, 1967 and passed
unanimously on November 22, 1967. Caradon based his Draft Resolution on Chapter VI of
the UN Charter dealing with the “Pacific Settlement of Disputes” containing non-binding
provisions involving “parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger
the maintenance of international peace and security” (Article 33 of the Charter). This
Resolution was not based on Chapter VII of the Charter dealing with actions or enforcement
measures with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression, as
laid down in Articles 41 and 42 of the Charter. Though the legal basis of Resolution 242 is
not actually specified in the resolution itself, it can be deduced from its terms and language to
be a non-obligatory recommendation and from the fact that it does not make any prior
determination of the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of
aggression, as required by Article 39 of the Charter. This determination is a necessary
condition before any enforcement measures can be taken by the UN for failure by the parties
to the conflict to comply with the decisions of the Security Council.
As a consequence of Resolution 242 being only a recommendation to the states involved in
the Six-Day War of June 1967 concerning the best way to achieve a just and lasting peace in
the Middle East, it cannot be classified as “international law” nor can it produce “legal rights”
in favor of any parties to whom it is meant to apply. Neither, for that matter, does the
Resolution produce “legal obligations” that are imposed upon all the states concerned,
requiring them to act in conformity with the resolution unless those states agree mutually to
do so. It is also important to note that Resolution 242 is applicable to states only, and not to
non-state entities such as the “Palestine Liberation” Organization.
Two principles, supposedly in fulfillment of the UN Charter, are enunciated in the Resolution
to attain “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” or a peaceful and accepted settlement.
The first principle applies to Israel alone and calls for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces
from territories occupied in the recent conflict”. The use of indefinite language as regards
Israel’s contemplated withdrawal was intentional. The British text was preceded by an
American draft resolution introduced a week earlier on November 7, 1967 and fully reflected
the US position on the question of Israel’s recommended withdrawal “from territories
occupied in the recent conflict”. Neither the British nor the American draft resolutions
identified the territories from which a withdrawal of forces would be made, nor was a time
frame given for this withdrawal. These points were to be decided, as already indicated, by
negotiations between the parties and hence no immediate Israeli withdrawal was required to
comply with the resolution. The American draft was based on talks previously held with
Israel to obtain its consent to withdraw from most but not all “the” territories allegedly
“occupied” by Israeli armed forces in the Six-Day War. In those talks, Israel agreed to
withdraw from all of Sinai but not from the Gaza Strip which it wanted to keep, provided a
peace treaty could be concluded with Egypt. Israel refused to withdraw from the other
territories without proper security adjustments or border changes, the extent of which may or
may not have involved major changes to the pre-Six-Day War borders, depending on how
“secure” the negotiated borders would be. In order for Israel to have secure borders with
Jordan, in accordance with the resolution, extensive border modifications were required,
otherwise they would always be insecure. On the other hand, the US believed that only
“minor” border changes should be made, but no substantive alterations.
The American position on the extent of the Israeli withdrawal was first enunciated by
President Johnson in a speech delivered on June 19, 1967. He stated:
There are some who have urged, as a single, simple solution, an immediate return to the
situation as it was on June 4. As our distinguished and able Ambassador, Mr. Arthur Goldberg,
has already stated, this is not a prescription for peace, but for renewed hostilities.
Certainly troops must be withdrawn, but there must also be recognized rights of national life,
progress in solving the refugee problem, freedom of innocent maritime passage, limitation of the
1
arms race, and respect for political independence and territorial integrity.
President Johnson thus linked any Israeli withdrawal of troops with the attainment of all five
principles that he set out in his speech. He emphasized strongly that the withdrawal of Israeli
forces was not to be immediate, but would take place only when the other conditions he listed
were also fulfilled.
The American position on Israel’s withdrawal was challenged in the Security Council by
three other draft resolutions submitted by Latin American countries, the Asian-African
nations of India, Mali and Nigeria and separately by Soviet Russia. These three drafts
demanded a complete Israeli withdrawal to the lines existing prior to the outbreak of war, i.e.,
to the June 4, 1967 lines. However, none of them ever reached the stage of a vote in the
Security Council, since after much wrangling between the members, it was unanimously
decided at the end to support only the British text of Lord Caradon, that deliberately used the
very same indefinite language on Israeli withdrawal as the draft American resolution did.
Thus it is clear that Resolution 242, when finally adopted, did not require a total Israeli
withdrawal of forces “from all the territories”, but only “from territories”, which took into
account Israel’s security concerns on this question.
If any further evidence is needed to prove that Resolution 242 did not oblige Israel to withdraw
completely to the June 4, 1967 lines, it is provided by three of the formulators of this resolution,
Arthur J. Goldberg, US Ambassador to the UN, George Brown, the British Foreign Secretary in
1967 at the time the resolution was adopted, and Lord Caradon, the sponsor of the resolution.
In the words of Ambassador Goldberg in a speech he delivered on May 8, 1973 in
Washington:
Resolution 242 (1967) does not explicitly require that Israel withdraw to the lines occupied by it
before the outbreak of the war. The Arab States urged such language; the Soviet Union…
proposed this at the Security Council, and Yugoslavia and some other nations at the Special
Session of the General Assembly. But such withdrawal language did not receive the requisite
support either in the Security Council or in the Assembly.
Resolution 242 (1967) simply endorses the principle of “withdrawal of Israel’s armed forces
from territories occupied in the recent conflict”, and interrelates this with the principle that
every state in the area is entitled to live in peace within “secure and recognized boundaries”.
The notable omissions – which were not accidental – in regard to withdrawal are the words
“the” or “all” and “the June 5, 1967 lines”. 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,
2
1967.
Substantiating Ambassador Goldberg’s interpretation of Resolution 242, George Brown stated
in January 1970:
I formulated the Security Council resolution. Before we submitted it to the Council we showed
it to the Arab leaders. The proposal said Israel will withdraw from territories that were occupied
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and not from “the” territory, which means that Israel will not withdraw from all the territories.
More corroboration is provided by Lord Caradon:
Withdrawal shall take place to secure and recognized boundaries, and these words were very
carefully chosen: they have to be secure, and they have to be recognized. They will not be
secure unless they are recognized. And that is why one has to work for agreement. This is
essential. If we had attempted to draw a map, we would have been wrong. We did not. And I
would defend absolutely what we did. It was not for us to lay down exactly where the border
should be. I know the 1967 border very well. It is not a satisfactory border, it is where troops
had to stop in 1947, just where they happened to be that night. That is not a permanent
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boundary.
Later, in an interview with a Lebanese newspaper, the Beirut Daily Star, on June 12, 1974,
Lord Caradon is quoted as saying:
It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967 because
those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the
soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just
armistice lines. That is why we did not demand that the Israelis return to them.
The second principle in Resolution 242 taken directly from the UN Charter to achieve a just
and lasting peace in the Middle East applies to every state in the region. This principle affirms
what the Charter supremely requires of all states: “Termination of all claims or states of
belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and
political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure
and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” The language setting forth this
goal was a reflection of Article 2, paragraph 4, of the UN Charter, which lays down the
obligation that “all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use
of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state...” The
acceptance of this second principle by Arab states which approved Resolution 242 meant in
effect the recognition by them of the State of Israel. This principle was the reason why Israel
agreed to accept the resolution of November 22, 1967, for not only did it accord recognition
of Israel by those Arab states accepting the resolution, it also urged them to end their state of
belligerency against the Jewish State and acknowledge its right to live in secure and
recognized boundaries. Moreover, they also had to respect Israel’s sovereignty and political
independence. Theoretical Arab recognition also resulted from one of the recitals in the
Preamble stating the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area
can live in security and also from the second clause of Resolution 242 which “affirms further
the necessity for guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political independence of every
state in the area through measures including the establishment of demilitarized zones”.
The Arab states of Egypt and Jordan both initially accepted Resolution 242 in the hope that
Israel would then withdraw from the territories they had just lost to Israel in the Six-Day War,
which either they had illegally acquired in the 1948 War or which never legally belonged to
them under international law. In regard to Jordan, the pro-Arab, anti-Israeli journalist and
author, Donald Neff, claims in a book he wrote that a secret agreement existed between the
US and Jordan under which the US gave what he called “ironclad assurances” to King
Hussein of Jordan, “that the US was prepared to support the return of a substantial part of the
West Bank to Jordan with boundary adjustments, and would use its influence to obtain
5
compensation to Jordan for any territory it was required to give up”. The assurances given to
Hussein, writes Neff, were made by US Secretary of State Dean Rusk, UN Ambassador
Arthur J. Goldberg and President Johnson himself in a meeting with Hussein at the White
House on November 8, 1967. Neff reports that Hussein asked Johnson how soon he could
expect Israel to withdraw and was told by him that it would take place in six months and this
6
time frame was allegedly reiterated by Goldberg. Neff further states that Israel acquiesced to
the terms of the secret agreement. However, Israel flatly denied ever doing so.
Goldberg for his part not only denied the accuracy of the assertion that Resolution 242
presupposed only minor border changes, but emphatically denied that any assurance or
commitment had ever been given to King Hussein by the American Government that it would
ensure Israel’s withdrawal from the Jordanian West Bank, as the King falsely claimed in US
newspaper interviews. In his own newspaper article refuting Hussein’s allegation of a secret
agreement with the US, that it would compel Israel’s withdrawal from the Jordanian “West
Bank”, Goldberg wrote:
In 1967, I was the permanent representative of the United States in the United Nations. In that
capacity, I met with King Hussein in New York during November 1967 on four occasions.
These conversations, as described in the reporting cables on file with the US Department of
State, foreshadowed the United States drafting of, and concurrence in, United Nations Security
Council Resolution 242 of November 1967.
In the course of these meetings, I made it clear to King Hussein that I was speaking at the
express authorization of President Lyndon Johnson. It was, I stated, the US view that in light of
the fact that Jordan had entered the 1967 war after Israel had urged it not to do so, and had been
defeated, the United States could not guarantee that the West Bank would be returned to Jordan.
The most we could do, I made clear, would be to use our influence to help Jordan get the best
deal possible.
I did say that we did not visualize a Jordan limited only to the East Bank. This is a far cry from a
commitment to Jordan that we would guarantee Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank. The
statement in Secretary Henry Kissinger’s memoirs that I assured King Hussein that we would
compel Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-June 5, 1967 border, except for minor border
rectifications, is inaccurate and unsupported by the contemporaneous records of the Department
7
of State.
Goldberg’s robust rebuttal of King Hussein’s allegation of a secret commitment made to him
by the US is significant. Goldberg enjoyed a close relationship with President Johnson and
evidently knew his thinking on the subject of Resolution 242 and what it meant. Because of
his personal role in helping to draft the resolution, he was uniquely able to refute the
mischievous account of Henry Kissinger who served as Secretary of State in the Richard
Nixon and Gerald Ford Administrations. During his period of public service, Kissinger was
very active in urging Israel’s withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. He conveniently used the
lie spread by Hussein to try to compel Israel to return to what Israeli Foreign Minister Abba
Eban called the “Auschwitz borders” of Israel that existed with Jordan prior to the Six Day
War.
The other principal enemy combatant, Syria, absolutely refused to accept this resolution
because it did not recognize the existence of Israel and did not want to negotiate with it to
make peace. However, Syria changed its mind after it was defeated in the Yom Kippur War of
1973 and suffered a further loss of territory. It then agreed to UN Resolution 338, adopted on
October 22, 1973, which called upon the parties to implement Resolution 242 in all its parts.
Taken together, the two principles of Resolution 242, if implemented by the parties to the
conflict, would require Israel’s withdrawal, not, as already noted, from “all” the territories it
allegedly “occupied” in the Six-Day War – the term “occupied” is fraught with legal meaning
under the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 – but only a
withdrawal to “secure and recognized boundaries”.
The Arab and Russian interpretation of this resolution, i.e., that Israel must immediately
withdraw its forces back to the pre-June 5, 1967 lines without regard to secure and recognized
boundaries, and even before negotiations take place, is completely unfounded. The
withdrawal could only occur when all other provisions and principles mentioned in the
resolution were resolved at the same time and not before. However, in keeping with the
Khartoum Summit Conference Resolutions of September 1, 1967, the Arab states refused to
enter into any peace talks with Israel, or recognize it, a stance which forestalled any planned
Israeli withdrawal. The stalemate ended in the case of Egypt only when such talks did begin,
talks that resulted in a peace treaty signed on March 26, 1979, in which Israel agreed to
withdraw completely from Sinai over a period of three years. In that particular case, the
armistice borders of 1949 were now deemed to be in reference to Resolution 242 “secure and
recognized”, as opposed to the former Auschwitz armistice borders with Jordan.
Aside from any mis-interpretation of Resolution 242 by Russia and the Arab states, the very
principle of Israel withdrawal was inimical to Israel and was not required under the UN Charter
as the Resolution purported. In fact, the Security Council does not have and never had the
authority or right to order Israel to withdraw from territories that constituted historical and legal
areas of the Jewish National Home and Land of Israel that had been recognized implicitly or
explicitly as belonging to the Jewish People in various acts of international law: the San Remo
Resolution of April 25, 1920; the Franco-British Boundary Convention of December 23, 1920;
and the Mandate for Palestine, confirmed by the League of Nations on July 24, 1922 and
accepted by the United States in the Anglo-American Treaty on Palestine of December 3, 1924.
The principle of withdrawal in Resolution 242 is premised on the words emphasized in the
Preamble of this resolution, which refers to the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by
war”. This dictum, it must be noted, is wrong, since it ignores the situation where a state,
threatened with imminent aggression or destruction by one or more other states, takes
preemptive action and captures parts of the territory of those states in a war that breaks out
between them. In this case it is certainly admissible under international law for the state under
imminent attack to keep the territory that was captured from which the planned aggression
emanated. The dictum also smacks of great hypocrisy since many states in past centuries have
aggrandized their territory by capturing lands from other states by means of war – that
Resolution 242 naively states is “inadmissible”. A good example of this is the United States
which took two-fifths of the territory of Mexico as a result of the Mexican War, 1846-1848.
This territory includes what are today the states of California, Nevada, Utah and parts of
Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming. France for its part added to its domain by
taking Alsace-Lorraine from Germany in World War I, and also fought battles over territories
that today comprise France, such as Savoy, Nice and Corsica that were once part of pre-unified
Italy, Sardinia and Genoa. Moreover, over the preceding centuries Germany, Italy and Russia
also acquired territories in war with other states, and other examples abound. By contrast, the
State of Israel, which is a creation of the Jewish People and an inherent part of it, never acquired
legal title to the liberated Jewish territories as a result of war it itself initiated, but only as a
result of the decisions taken by the Principal Allied Powers at the San Remo Peace Conference
on April 24-25, 1920 and in various acts of international law. The territories liberated in the Six-
Day War had been illegally removed by Britain from the Jewish national patrimony during the
28 years Britain administered Palestine as a mandated territory from July 1, 1920 to May 14,
1948. What happened in the Six-Day War was that the State of Israel, threatened with stark
Arab aggression and destruction, restored to the Jewish nation in a war of self-defense those
areas of the Jewish National Home and the Land of Israel that originally belonged to it under
international law. The situation was similar to what France achieved in World War I, when it
restored Alsace-Lorraine to its patrimony, after this territory had been taken by Germany in the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Alsace-Lorraine was never called “occupied German
territory” after France re-conquered it. Moreover, the dictum of the “inadmissibility of the
acquisition of territory by war” should be applied not to Israel, but to Jordan which illegally
occupied Judea and Samaria in the 1948 War of Independence, and also to Egypt which did the
same in regard to Gaza. It is thus a serious misrepresentation to characterize Israel’s restoration
of Jewish-owned territory as an “occupation”, as Resolution 242 did, when it was nothing of the
kind. To the extent that Resolution 242 calls for an Israeli retreat from parts of the historical
Jewish homeland, which includes Judea, Samaria and Gaza as well as the Golan and at least part
of Sinai, it is to that extent illegal under international law. In terms of the UN Charter under
which Resolution 242 was supposedly made, this resolution violates a key provision thereof,
Article 80, which declares in effect that until a trusteeship agreement has been concluded to
replace the then-existing Mandate for Palestine (no such agreement was ever made), nothing
shall be construed to alter the rights of any states or peoples or the terms of existing
international instruments. The language of Article 80 refers implicitly to the rights of the Jewish
People acquired under the Mandate for Palestine and other international acts related to the
Mandate. Resolution 242 can therefore have no application to any area of the Jewish National
Home and Land of Israel or alter Jewish legal rights thereto. Insofar as the resolution does alter
these rights, by calling for an Israeli withdrawal from territories historically connected with the
Jewish People, that were repossessed in the Six Day War, it is a violation of international law
and definitely not a principle in fulfillment of the UN Charter as Resolution 242 falsely alleges
in paragraph 1(i) of the resolution. In this regard, since none of the territories that Resolution
242 infers were “occupied territories” were in actual fact “occupied territories”, but part of the
national patrimony of the Jewish People, or at the very least not owned by Arab states, this
resolution becomes devoid of any legal meaning. It represents not international law, but a
travesty of that law.
In addition to the resolution’s incompatibility with international law that bestowed the legal
right to all of Palestine on the Jewish People, the resolution also violated Israel’s own
constitutional law in the form of the Area of Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance and the
Proclamation issued on September 2, 1948 by Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion, formally
known as “Israel Defense Forces Government in the Land of Israel” (or simply “the Land of
Israel Proclamation”). Israeli constitutional law as it existed when Resolution 242 was adopted
on November 22, 1967 prohibited Israel’s withdrawal from the territories comprising the Land
of Israel that were liberated in the Six Day War. That fact, however, did not stop the Eshkol
Government from accepting Resolution 242, a clear violation of Israeli law that has produced
disastrous repercussions for the country ever since. Rather than withdrawing from the territories
reconquered by the IDF in 1967, Israel was obliged to incorporate those territories into the State
in accordance with the provisions of the aforementioned Area of Jurisdiction and Powers
Ordinance and the Land of Israel Proclamation or, at the very least, leave them open for future
incorporation under section 11B of the Law and Administration Ordinance.
From another aspect, it is sterile to argue that Israel is not obliged to withdraw from liberated
Jewish territories (Judea, Samaria, Gaza, Golan and Sinai) merely because of the fact that
Resolution 242 uses indefinite language rather than the definite article '‘the” before the word
“territories” in the official English version in which the resolution was drawn up, but not
incidentally in the text of the UN’s four other official languages (French, Spanish, Russian and
Chinese). While it is undoubtedly true that Resolution 242, based on the indefinite language
employed therein, does not require a complete Israeli withdrawal, Israel’s rights to lands
constituting its ancient and modern patrimony should not be founded on this grammatical
argument, as it so often is by those who mistakenly believe that this resolution is a beneficial
document in support of Israel’s position and rights. Israel’s legal case for keeping Judea,
Samaria, the Golan Heights and formerly Gaza and Sinai is based on a much sturdier
foundation, without regard being paid to the indefinite language of Resolution 242 which first
and foremost calls for an Israeli retreat, even if it is to secure and recognized boundaries or what
are sometimes called “defensible borders”. That foundation was created in the global peace
settlement following the Great War of 1914-1918 between the Principal Allied Powers and the
Central Powers. In the settlement that was then made, the aspirations of the Arab Independence
Movement were amply fulfilled, gaining most of the land mass of the Middle East, while all of
Palestine was left for the establishment of the Jewish National Home, i.e., a future Jewish State,
as signified by the Arabs themselves in the Weizmann-Feisal Agreement of January 3, 1919. It
was thus a great mistake for Israel to approve this resolution which denied or ignored its rights
to all of Palestine, as recognized in the global peace settlement concluded in 1919 and 1920. It
was really an act of utter folly by Israel to succumb to American pressure on this critical point,
requiring it to withdraw from parts of the Jewish homeland, just as it was to accept the
terminology of the resolution – that these territories should be characterized as “occupied”. The
result of this folly was to seriously undermine Israel’s iron-clad legal case to the liberated
Jewish territories.
Israel should have made it clear to the American Government from the very beginning that it
is not required to withdraw from any of the aforementioned territories and that it considered
them part of the Jewish national patrimony. This was true even in regard to Sinai which,
except for a relatively small portion of land in the north-west part of the peninsula, was not an
officially recognized appendage of Egypt in 1967 under international law. During the
Ottoman Period prior to 1906, the Sanjak of Jerusalem that unofficially comprised the core
part of “Palestine”, but not the whole of it, included a large slice of Sinai in its northern and
central section, from El-Arish to the port of Suez and thence across to Aqaba. From 1906 to
1949, the administrative boundary in Sinai was pushed back under British coercion to a line
extending from Rafah to Taba, which in 1949 became the armistice line until 1967. The
Egyptian-Israeli Armistice Agreement stated specifically that the demarcation line “is not to
be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary”.
Resolution 242 adds two more requirements for achieving a just and lasting peace in the Middle
East. First, it affirms the necessity for guaranteeing freedom of navigation through international
waterways in the area. This was a reference to Egypt’s closure of the Tiran Straits to Israeli
shipping, an act of war which was a major factor in sparking the Six-Day War, as President
Johnson said in his June 19, 1967 speech. The narrow straits connect the Gulf of Eilat with the
Red Sea. In addition, Egypt had prevented Israel from using the Suez Canal which, as an
international waterway, was also included in the call for freedom of navigation for all nations in
the Middle East.
Second, Resolution 242 “affirms further the necessity for achieving a just settlement of the
refugee problem”. The “refugee problem” had more than one meaning. It was naturally a
reference to the existing Arab refugee problem that has been immune to resolution and has
grown exponentially over the years by illogically adding to the original number of refugees in
1948 and 1967 most of whom have already passed away, all of their descendants including,
amazingly enough, even grandchildren and great-grandchildren who never lived in or fled
from Mandated Palestine, and providing them with free rations, medical care, educational
facilities and other services. Most of these so-called refugees live in Gaza where about four-
fifths or 80% of the population receive support and benefits from the United Nations. The
Arab refugee issue has been shamelessly exploited by the twenty-two Arab states as a
propaganda weapon against Israel. No other group of displaced persons in the world has held
the status of refugees for such a long period of time. The whole idea of Arab refugees
remaining refugees even after 60 years, or in effect forever, is nothing less than a gigantic
fraud that should be brought to an end by one simple method, the disbanding of the UN
agency (UNRWA) and the withdrawal of all US and European funding for it, that serve to
perpetuate the ongoing fraud.
“A just solution of the refugee problem” also carried with it a reference to the problem of
Jewish refugees from Arab countries who were driven out or escaped from Moslem
persecution both before and after the rebirth of the State of Israel. In fact, the number of
Jewish refugees exceeded the number of Arab refugees who fled Palestine and Israel during
the course of war. There were about 800,000 Jews who left Arab countries – up to one million
if Shi’ite Iran is included – as compared to about 700,000 Arabs who left what became the
State of Israel both in 1948 and 1967.
No mention is made in Resolution 242 of the so-called “Palestinians” and their alleged right
of self-determination. That would only come later, on December 10, 1969, when the General
Assembly adopted Resolution No. 2535 (XXIV) which affirmed “the inalienable rights of the
people of Palestine”, followed in later years by a slew of other resolutions of the same type
that converted the “refugees” into a new “nation” unknown in history and no different from
other Arabs living in Israel and the Arab states.
To carry out Resolution 242, a special Representative was designated by the Secretary-
General “to proceed to the Middle East, to establish and maintain contacts with the States
concerned in order to promote agreement and assist efforts to achieve a peaceful and accepted
settlement in accordance with the provisions and principles in this resolution”. This
representative was Gunnar Jarring, the Swedish diplomat who failed in his mission because
the Arab states would not recognize Israel, negotiate with it nor make peace with Israel, in
accordance with the Khartoum Arab Summit Resolutions of September 1, 1967.
Resolution 242 was further re-affirmed in Security Council Resolution 338, adopted on October
22, 1973 in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. This new resolution called for a cease-fire and the
implementation of Resolution 242 in all of its parts through negotiations conducted between the
parties concerned in order to establish a just and durable peace in the Middle East. Though
Resolution 338 uses the word “decides” in urging the parties to start negotiations immediately,
concurrently with the cease-fire, to ostensibly bring this resolution within the parameters of
Article 25 of the Charter, which requires UN members to carry out the binding “decisions” of
the Security Council, the essential meaning or nature of Resolution 242 as a non-binding
recommendation under Chapter VI of the Charter is not changed. A Chapter VI resolution
cannot be converted into a Chapter VII resolution by this clever tactic, when the language of the
original resolution remains exactly the same. Furthermore, no sovereign state can be forced into
negotiations with another state against its will. Therefore, Resolution 242 remains a non-binding
resolution under Chapter VI of the Charter, to which Article 25 does not apply.
In the years that followed the adoption of Resolution 242, the American position on Israeli
withdrawal moved much closer to the Arab position as originally understood by King Hussein
of Jordan. A harbinger of a new American interpretation of Resolution 242 came in a speech
delivered by the US representative to the UN, Charles W. Yost, in the Security Council, that
dealt with the question of the status of Jerusalem. Yost, acting under the explicit instructions
of President Nixon, deplored the application of Israeli law to what he called “the occupied
portions of the city”. He further expounded on this point:
The United States considers that the part of Jerusalem that came under the control of Israel in
the June war, like other areas occupied by Israel, is occupied territory and hence subject to the
provisions of international law governing the rights and obligations of an occupying power.
Among the provisions of international law which bind Israel, as they would bind any occupier,
are the provisions that the occupier has no right to make changes in laws or in administration
other than those which are temporarily necessitated by his security interest, and that an occupier
may not confiscate or destroy private property. The pattern of behavior authorized under the
Geneva Convention and international law is clear: the occupier must maintain the occupied area
as intact and unaltered as possible, without interfering with the customary life of the area, and
any changes must be necessitated by immediate needs of the occupation. I regret to say that the
actions of Israel in the occupied portion of Jerusalem present a different picture, one which
gives rise to understandable concerns that the eventual disposition of East Jerusalem may be
8
prejudiced and the rights and activities of the population are already being affected and altered.
As seen by the foregoing statement of Ambassador Yost, the US Administration under
President Richard Nixon now formally considered eastern Jerusalem as “occupied territory”,
being part of the “West Bank” of Jordan, and it did not recognize the application of Israeli
law, jurisdiction and administration to this part of Jerusalem. This was a departure from the
policy adopted by the previous Johnson Administration on the question of Jerusalem, as stated
by Yost’s predecessor, Arthur J. Goldberg, even though it, too, had not approved unilateral
steps taken by Israel to include the eastern part of the city within its legal jurisdiction. In a
letter he sent to the New York Times on March 12, 1980 “to set the record straight”, as he put
it, he wrote:
Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem and this omission was deliberate. I wanted to
make clear that Jerusalem was a discrete matter, not linked to the West Bank.
In a number of speeches at the UN in 1967, I repeatedly stated that the armistice lines fixed after
1948 were intended to be temporary. This, of course, was particularly true of Jerusalem. At no
time in these many speeches did I refer to East Jerusalem as occupied territory.
9
My speech of July 14, 1967, which Hodding Carter distributed, did not say that Jerusalem was
occupied territory. On the contrary, I made it clear that the status of Jerusalem should be
negotiable and that the armistice lines dividing Jerusalem were no longer viable. In other words,
Jerusalem was not to be divided again.
This is a far cry from Ambassador Yost’s statement that we conceived East Jerusalem to be
occupied territory, to be returned to Jordanian sovereignty.
The Yost statement to the UN Security Council was followed by the unanimous adoption of
Resolution 267 on July 3, 1969 that censured Israel in the strongest terms for all measures and
actions it had taken to change the status of Jerusalem. The Yost statement also set the stage
for the Rogers Plan enunciated several months later by US Secretary of State, William Pierce
Rogers. In a speech he gave on December 9, 1969 containing his plan, he revealed how the
Nixon Administration now interpreted Resolution 242 on the question of Israeli withdrawal,
not merely from eastern Jerusalem but from all of the so-called “occupied territories”:
The Security Council resolution neither endorses nor precludes [the] armistice lines as the
definitive political boundaries. However, it calls for withdrawal from occupied territories, the
non-acquisition of territory by war, and the establishment of secure and recognized boundaries.
We believe that while recognized political boundaries must be established and agreed upon by
the parties, any changes in the pre-existing [armistice] lines [of 1949] should not reflect the
weight of conquest and should be confined to insubstantial alterations required for mutual
security. We do not support expansionism. We believe troops must be withdrawn as the
resolution provides. We support Israel’s security and the security of the Arab states as well. We
10
are for a lasting peace that requires security for both.
By saying that Israel’s borders should not reflect the weight of conquest and that any changes
in the June 4, 1967 lines should be confined to insubstantial alterations and by opposing
Israeli “expansionism”, Rogers was adopting an unmistakable pro-Arab position that Israel
should give up almost all its territorial gains in the Six-Day War and go back to the pre-
existing lines of June 4, 1967 that clearly were not the defensible borders required under
Resolution 242. President Nixon himself stated on July 1, 1970 that “Israel must withdraw to
11
borders that are defensible”. The Rogers Plan was basically though not explicitly endorsed
by President Reagan on September 1, 1982 when he presented a peace proposal whose real
architect was Secretary of State George P. Schultz, in which the President said that the United
States, while it does not support the establishment of an independent “Palestinian” state in the
“West Bank” and Gaza, neither does it support annexation or permanent control of those areas
by Israel. He further stated that Resolution 242 applies to all fronts, including the “West
Bank” and Gaza, though this is not stated in the resolution itself and is therefore only an
hypothesis and not an actual fact. According to President Reagan, the extent to which Israel
should be asked to give up territory, “will be heavily affected by the extent of true peace and
normalization and the security arrangements”. The conclusion seemed to be that for full peace
with the Arab states there would need to be nearly full Israeli withdrawal from all territories
taken in the Six-Day War, with only insubstantial alterations. This prescription for the
attainment of peace was a clear reflection of the Rogers Plan. The Reagan Plan, as explained
by Secretary Shultz to King Hussein in a letter addressed to him in January 1983, also
endorsed the concept that eastern Jerusalem which Israel had already annexed by a
government order issued on June 27, 1967 (promulgated the following day) was part of the
“occupied territory”. This was bizarre in light of Arthur Goldberg’s repudiation of this very
idea. Goldberg, a former Supreme Court justice, was intimately involved in the framing of
Resolution 242 and therefore ought to have known what was or was not included in this
resolution.
One of the strangest reactions to Resolution 242 came from Menahem Begin. He was a
minister of the National Unity Government of Israel in December 1967 when it was decided
to accept the resolution, but he was apparently not privy to this decision. After he learned of
it, he expressed his disapproval, but did not resign from the Government. However, when the
Government in which he served accepted the Second Rogers Plan on July 31, 1970, to renew
a cease-fire and “standstill” in the military situation between Egypt (then officially called the
United Arab Republic) and Israel and also to pursue an agreement for the establishment of a
just and lasting peace between Jordan and Israel as well as between Egypt and Israel, Begin
and the Gahal bloc of the Herut and Liberal parties quit the Government. He did so because
the new Rogers Plan was explicitly based on Resolution 242 which required Israeli
withdrawal “from territories occupied” in the 1967 conflict that under the American
interpretation included Jerusalem and the Jordanian “West Bank”, and also all other fronts.
For Begin that meant a new partition of the Land of Israel which also jeopardized Israel’s
security. Begin’s commendable reaction was consistent with his life-long principles as a
devout adherent of the Land of Israel that inexplicably excluded the Sinai Peninsula.
However, when he became Prime Minister and signed the Camp David Framework
Agreement for Peace in the Middle East, he abandoned his previous opposition to Resolution
242. The preamble of this agreement states that the agreed basis for a peaceful settlement of
the conflict between Israel and its neighbors is United Nations Security Council Resolution
242, in all its parts. Furthermore, the final status of the “West Bank” and Gaza was to be
decided upon in negotiations based on all the provisions and principles of UN Security
Council Resolution 242. In accepting the applicability of Resolution 242 to Judea, Samaria
and Gaza, Begin, whether he realized it or not, was accepting the damaging concept
embedded in the resolution that these regions of the Land of Israel were considered “occupied
territories” from which Israel was obliged to withdraw, even if the withdrawal was not to be a
complete one but only to secure and recognized boundaries. This concept was a bedrock
principle of the resolution that should have prevented Begin from endorsing Resolution 242
as the agreed basis for reaching any possible peace agreement with the Arab states concerned.
Begin’s acceptance of Resolution 242 was a stark repudiation of all that he previously
professed. His volte-face contrasted with the steadfast position taken by his successor, Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who stoutly believed that Israel had the right to retain all of the
territory then under its military control since in his interpretation Resolution 242 did not apply
to Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Moreover, Shamir believed that Israel had fulfilled its alleged
obligations under the resolution by withdrawing from all of the Sinai, which constituted over
90% of the so-called “occupied territories”. Shamir’s interpretation was the right one for, as
already noted, Resolution 242 falsely assumed that all the liberated territories of 1967 were
“occupied territories”, contrary to both international law, including the UN Charter, and
Israeli constitutional law. In truth, all of these territories were part of the Land of Israel that
were either included or illegally excluded from the Jewish National Home whose borders
were supposed to embrace all of the lands historically connected with the Jewish People under
the San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920. By the time Shamir became Prime Minister on
October 10, 1983, Israel had already carried out a full-scale withdrawal from Sinai, as a result
of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of March 26, 1979, thus bringing to an end the assumed
“occupation” of Sinai. No additional withdrawals were required from the other territories
since they were not really “occupied territories”, exactly as Shamir believed.
Finally, in a radical shift from President Johnson’s position, President George W. Bush,
acting in concert with the United Nations, Russia and the European Union, gave American
support to the Road Map Peace Plan advocating “an independent, democratic and viable
‘Palestinian’ state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors”
in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. This plan, which grew out of Resolution 242 and cited it in the
preamble as one of its foundations, envisages an end of Israel’s so-called “occupation” of
these territories that it said began in 1967. The idea that a new Arab state in what was once
Mandated Palestine would live in peace and security with Israel and be democratic is a naive
expectation or illusion that flies in the face of all of the empirical evidence that Arab violence
is and has always been endemic and that the establishment of true democratic institutions is
foreign to the Arab psyche and do not exist today in even a single independent Arab state. To
further claim that a new Arab state in former Palestine would be a panacea to the existing
Arab antagonistic approach to the Jewish State is not only baseless, but more importantly is a
gross denial of Israel’s legal rights under international law to all of the Land of Israel as
determined by the Principal Allied Powers after the end of World War I which created
Palestine, not for a fictitious nation called “Palestinians”, but rather for the Jewish People.
There is no need for another Arab state in Palestine since Jordan was created by the British
for that very purpose, and moreover, twenty-two Arab states already exist in the Middle East.
A new Arab state would become a terrorist irredentist state with disastrous repercussions for
Israel. Official support for such a state by the US, Europe and Israel represents nothing less
than a loss of sanity by the leaders of these countries.
Over the years, Resolution 242 became a cornerstone document in international diplomacy
seeking to bring about a just and lasting peace between Israel and the Arab states. It has been
cited in all the major documents drawn up for this purpose ever since November 1967, such as
the Camp David Framework Peace Agreement of September 17, 1978, the Egypt-Israel Peace
Treaty of March 26, 1979, the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles of August 20 and September
13, 1993, and, as already noted, the Road Map Peace Plan announced by the US Department of
State on April 30, 2003. Resolution 242 is essentially a “land for peace” document or a new,
updated UN Partition Plan which works against Israel’s best interests. It represents nothing less
than a pathway to the destruction of the Jewish State if implemented according to the official
interpretation by the US State Department and all the Presidents who have parroted that
interpretation. Ironically, Israel, through its official spokesmen, also acts as if it was beneficial
and essential for bringing an end to Arab hostility to the existence of the Jewish State in the
Middle East, not appreciating the great damage it has already caused to Israel’s legal case in the
eyes of the world by urging Israeli withdrawal from its ancestral lands that are also vital for its
overall security. If Israel itself agrees to withdraw from these lands that historically and legally
belong to it, it is not surprising that almost all countries in the world now demand that Israel
implement a full or nearly full withdrawal to achieve “peace”. Israel is bringing upon itself the
disaster that would be caused by carrying out this kind of withdrawal by initially accepting
Resolution 242, when it should not have done so, and then by making it an integral part of all
subsequent “peace” proposals or documents with the Arab world. The only way to end this
ongoing noxious “peace process” that terminates Israel’s legal rights to the so-called “occupied
territories” is to denounce formally once and for all the deleterious “land for peace” formula as
exemplified by Resolution 242.
Endnotes
1
Bernard Reich (ed.), Arab-Israeli Conflict and Conciliation: A Documentary History, Praeger
Publishers, Westport, Connecticut, 1995, Document Entitled: “Johnson’s Five Principles of Peace”,
pp. 97, 99.
2
Yosef Tekoah, In the Face of Nations, David Aphek (ed.), NY: Simon & Schuster, 1976, p. 257.
3
Yosef Tekoah, ibid., p. 263.
4
Yosef Tekoah, ibid., pp. 263-264.
5
See his book, Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days That Changed the Middle East, NY: Linden
Press/Simon & Schuster, 1986, pp. 341, 345.
6
Ibid., p. 342.
7
“Hussein’s Misreading of History”, The Jerusalem Post, May 28, 1984, p. 8.
8
John Norton Moore (ed.), The Arab-Israeli Conflict, NJ: Princeton University Press, Princeton,
Volume III, Documents [1974], pp. 993-994.
9
Hodding Carter, the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs in the Jimmy Carter
Administration.
10
Reich, op. cit., p. 105.
11
Yosef Tekoah, op. cit., p. 261.
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