A Peace of Reconciliation
A Peace of Reconciliation The hope for a peace of reconciliation in the Middle East flickered and faded and flickered again during the past month. Although soundly thrashed on the field of battle...
...A Peace of Reconciliation The hope for a peace of reconciliation in the Middle East flickered and faded and flickered again during the past month...
...The search for a settlement moved in July from the Security Council, where it had been lodged when the crisis exploded in May, to the General Assembly, at the demand of the Soviet Union...
...This is a way to a peace of reconciliation...
...Her determination, moreover, to use the occupied areas as bargaining leverage in any negotiations that might yet take place is wholly understandable...
...Happily, however, a reverse trend seems to have set in among thoughtful Israelis...
...As The New York Post put it: "It is conceivable that Egypt could not have brought itself to surrender formally to Israel for many more long days...
...The Old City, we are told by those who know it well, is a rather small, compact, and clearly defined area which is so located that it would not be difficult to maintain it under separate political administration...
...Britain's Lord Caradon, his country's permanent representative at the United Nations, spoke much sense when he pointed out that the United Nations, for all its floundering and frustration, had provided the forum in which it became possible for Egypt and her Arab allies to accept the Security Council's appeal for a ceasefire...
...Indeed, some Arab sources, egged on dangerously by Soviet rhetoric and arms, clamored for a new war of revenge and annihilation...
...There is clearly a sharp political struggle within Israel...
...Surely every available resource of every nation on earth should be mobilized to alleviate the pitiful plight of the victims of the war in the Arab nations...
...Even before the United Nations takes up its delicate and difficult role of peacekeeping along the frontiers, it has a positive contribution to make in following up its achievement in securing a ceasefire by consulting and mediating with Israel and the Arab states in the pursuit of a peace of reconciliation...
...As The New York Times reported, some Israeli officials demand retention of the Golan heights in Syria overlooking their exposed Galilee settlement...
...Dayan said his thoughts on the Strip also applied to the Jordanian territory on the west bank of the Jordan River...
...Although soundly thrashed on the field of battle for the third time in less than two decades, the Arab nations, united by their hatred of Israel and by their humiliation in defeat, stubbornly persisted in their refusal to recognize Israel and negotiate a peace settlement...
...Subsequently, the Israeli government, in the face of worldwide protest, relaxed its position by giving the refugees a month to return —but only if they could demonstrate that they were "not security risks," certainly a difficult negative requirement...
...This time, too, Israel should consent to the presence of United Nations' forces on her side of frontiers where tensions have developed and exploded in the past...
...We oppose the demand of the more hawkish Israeli leaders, notably Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, that Israel retain permanently such conquered areas as the Gaza Strip and the west bank of the Jordan River...
...Jerusalem has deep religious and emotional significance for the Jewish people...
...The attitude of the people of Israel is readily understandable...
...There are some things that are impossible for a small country...
...Having achieved a ceasefire, the United Nations can now play an affirmative role as the third party to which Ambassador Arthur Goldberg referred when he presented the United States resolution to the General Assembly...
...But this provision never became operative...
...King Hussein of Jordan, whose country fought best and fared worst in the recent hostilities, had indicated as much in private conversations with British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and French President Charles de Gaulle...
...It was from Jerusalem, Moslems believe, that Mohammed sprang to Heaven...
...It is a way that involves nothing less than a reversal of the present Arab position—and a capacity by Israel to match her military prowess with an equal application of humanitarianism and statesmanship for the large-range goal of peace...
...Israel's assurance to the other great religions that the holy places will be open at all times to all visitors, and that Christians and Moslems could administer or supervise the shrines holy to them, makes a good deal more sense, but does not go nearly far enough to satisfy the needs and desires of Moslems and Christians...
...Johnston's Jordan River plan was deemed to be soundly based on engineering surveys, and was accepted by all three parties "on the technical level," including the delicate and critical problem of allotment of percentages of available water...
...plan had been conceived as an autonomous Arab Palestine state, and seized the Old City of Jerusalem...
...Although it failed to command the required two-thirds vote on the major issues reviewed above, the General Assembly did achieve a unanimous decision on two other resolutions...
...Others call this hypocritical and would return the west bank to Jordan while moving the border eastward somewhat from Israel's narrow and exposed waist...
...How much more blood would have been shed...
...What if there had been no United Nations, no Security Council, and no appeal for a ceasefire...
...But if the General Assembly achieved no affirmative resolution of the issues, its votes cast significant light on the trend of world opinion...
...Limitless possibilities for social and economic development of the entire region will open up once there is political agreement to live-and-let-live...
...In April, 1949, Jordan formally annexed the Old City, and it was not until seven months later that the Israelis announced that they would keep their part of Jerusalem...
...This was adopted by a vote of 99 to 0, with the Israeli delegation declining to vote because it "is, in our view, outside the legal competence of the General Assembly...
...Israel's Premier Levi Eshkol made great sense, it seems to us, when he told United Press International: "We will hold onto this land as a guarantee until the Arabs come to the peace table...
...The refusal of the General Assembly to demand immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israeli forces from positions occupied in Arab territory represented a triumph of reality over rhetoric...
...One such program, calling for a sort of TVA on the Jordan River to benefit Syria, Jordan, and Israel, was developed by the late Eric Johnston, who made many journeys through the Middle East in the 1950s as President Eisenhower's roving representative...
...peacekeeping force on both sides of the boundaries, and 3) develops a program through which Israel, with the economic assistance of wealthier nations, resolves the long and bitter dispute over the fate and compensation of the Palestinian refugees who have fared so miserably since they fled or were expelled from the lands that today are the state of Israel...
...It is the city of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Geth-semane, and other shrines sacred to Christianity...
...To have insisted on a return to prewar positions without a peace settlement—or even some semblance of desire to engage in give-and-take negotiations—would have been to require a return to the intolerable positions and conditions that exploded in war on June 5. Israel is right to insist on Arab acceptance of her legitimacy as a nation and on Arab agreement to engage in peace talks...
...Moreover, as a basic ingredient Light shading shows area seized by Israel in 6-day Middle East conflict: all of Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, the Jordan bulge west of the Jordan River, and Syrian heights on Israel's northern border...
...Significantly, the resolution that attracted the largest vote, although it failed of the required two-thirds, was the Latin American proposal that sought to 1) link Israeli withdrawal with negotiations to end the state of war on both sides, 2) grant Israel free and innocent passage through the international waterways of the region, and 3) provide for demilitarized zones in the tension areas along the frontiers of Israel and her Arab neighbors...
...Israel commanded world-wide admiration with her David-like conquest of the Arab Goliath...
...But after floundering for about a month over half-a-dozen clashing resolutions, the General Assembly wearily prepared to return the problem to the Security Council, as this was written...
...It would not seriously divide the greater, new Jerusalem that Israel would continue to control," The New York Times noted in an editorial as strongly supporting the internationalization of the Old City as it has supported Israel's cause in its conflict with the Arabs...
...So great was the resistance to these annexationist proposals that Dayan's comments were swiftly repudiated by Israel's U.N...
...It was approved 116 to 0. The second resolution, introduced by Pakistan, declared invalid Israel's unification of Jerusalem...
...But the plan ran aground when Syria, inevitably, raised objections to cooperating economically with a state whose political existence it refused to accept...
...Fighting broke out between the Arabs and the Jews, and the forces of what was then Trans-Jordan crossed over to the west bank of the river, took possession of what under the U.N...
...Because the Israeli sector of Jerusalem is her national capital, The Progressive believes that it is impractical to internationalize the entire city...
...The most decisive votes of the Assembly on the basic issue confronting it came in the paragraph-by-paragraph rejection of the Soviet resolution which embodied just about everything the defeated Arabs were demanding: 1) condemnation of Israel as the aggressor...
...Some would hold the west bank as a satellite area, protected militarily by Israel and dependent upon her economically, but a separate state...
...What miscalculations might have occurred...
...For Christians it is the Holy City in which Jesus prayed, preached, and was tried and crucified...
...By comparison, dark shading shows Israeli territory before the fighting...
...There are a few boundary kinks that need to be straightened out, not for territorial aggrandizement but solely to provide a reasonable measure of security for encircled Israel, especially at its narrow waist...
...There has been much too much scoffing and sneering at the United Nations by Israeli officials in the recent past...
...For example, Bernard Cherrick, executive vice president of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told the St...
...But Jerusalem has a powerful hold on Christians and Moslems as well...
...He created a worldwide stir when he told a news conference in Gaza that "the Gaza Strip is Israel" and that steps would soon be taken to make it a part of his country...
...have the courage to tell the Arab states that the United Nations Charter obligates them, just as it obligates every other member state, to dissolve disputes by peaceful means...
...Louis Post-Dispatch recently that the issue of the settlement of territorial rights concerning the hills of Syria that overlook the Israeli border might well be reconciled by U.N...
...On the last point, for example, Israel at first decreed that all Arabs who had lived on the west bank of the Jordan and who had fled, with their pitifully few possessions, across the tangled wreckage of the Allenby Bridge, were to be denied the right to return to their homes...
...2) the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israeli troops from positions taken during the war, and 3) the imposition of reparations on Israel for damage done to the Arab nations...
...Then the barbed wire and concrete barriers went up, and for nineteen years the Jewish people were illegally prohibited by Jordan from visiting the Old City...
...Many plans to harness the resources and skills of the region for the enrichment of the lives of all its inhabitants have been gathering dust in the archives these many years, awaiting the moment when political agreement would make economic cooperation feasible...
...the significant point is that there was a United Nations to which it could confess defeat...
...Having said all this, however, we hasten to emphasize our conviction that when negotiations do become possible, Israel must be prepared to return to the Arab nations all, or nearly all, of the lands seized in war...
...The insistence by some Israeli officials that the unification of Jerusalem under Israeli control is "irrevocable" will hardly strengthen her cause in world opinion nor will harsh assertion of some of her officials that it is "none of the United Nations' business" to meddle in the matter of Jerusalem...
...It is the city to which they have remained dedicated throughout the centuries of dispersal...
...The prospect for peace, in our judgment, would be much enhanced if U.N.'s peacekeeping forces were established on both sides of the border in such strategic areas as the west bank of the Jordan, the Gaza Strip, Sinai, Sharm el-Sheik at the gateway to the Gulf of Aqaba, and along the Syrian hills overlooking Galilee...
...The United Nations has a creative and decisive role to play in the peacekeeping process in the Middle East...
...But Israel has squandered some of this good will in her world bank by the tough talk of her hawks, by her unilateral decision to annex the Old City of Jerusalem to the portions held by Israel for the past two decades, and by the counsel of confusion that has marked her conduct in dealing with the problem of the Arab refugees...
...Abandoning this territory without a peace settlement is one of them...
...A Paris dispatch to The Washington Post reported that the King had made the "rather astonishing" statement in private that the Arab summit conference at the end of July might discuss "the question of Israel's right to live"—the first indication that some Arab leaders believe the subject is even open to discussion...
...Settlement of the final status of the Holy City, like every other problem in the Middle East, awaits political agreement, at the heart of which is, as it has been for nearly two decades, the indispensable requirement that the Arab world accept the national personality of Israel as a sovereign, independent state...
...None of the three paragraphs in this Soviet resolution commanded even a majority vote, although two-thirds approval was required...
...There are other plans designed to cope with problems that fairly cry out for an all-region approach...
...2) provides for demilitarized zones in the frontier areas of tension, with an effective U.N...
...Moreover, Hussein hinted that bilateral talks between Israel and Jordan "were not unthinkable...
...of any overall general settlement, Israel, as we suggested last month, must make a generous and comprehensive settlement, with the help of the wealthier nations, on the million or more Palestinian refugees who fled or were uprooted from their homes and farms when Israel became a sovereign state nearly two decades ago...
...But in mid-July there was a brief flutter of hope that where reason had failed, desperate economic pressure might crack the solid wall of Arab intransigence...
...He was on sound ground, too, when he insisted that "justice, logic, and morality" now demand that the Great Powers "should "How far into our fiscal year do we carry our spontaneous outburst of anti-Western feeling...
...There can be no controversy, of course, about the first of the two resolutions...
...On the issue of the conquered lands, it seems clear to us that when peace talks become possible, Israel must consent to the establishment of demilitarized zones to be supervised by a stronger and more effective United Nations force than has been possible in the past—a United Nations presence approved by the Security Council which would provide the kind of workable supervision that was not possible under the loose arrangements concluded after the hostilities in 1956...
...We believe that the best all-around solution—and one which would enable Israel to play a magnanimous role in peacemaking—would be to internationalize the Old City as an enclave between Israel and Jordan...
...Israel should consent to such an arrangement not only because it is morally and legally the correct approach, but also, from her self-interest point of view, because 1) such agreement would relieve her of the dangerous strain of administering so much Arab land and policing so many hostile Arabs, and 2) because it would do much to enhance her stature, politically and psychologically, among the peoples of the world who admire her courage but are concerned about the possibility that she may now overplay her hand...
...But they will remain no more than sources of scholarly research until Israel and the Arabs sit down together, perhaps under the watchful eye of the United Nations, to conclude an agreement that 1) recognizes Israel as the nation she is...
...The first, submitted by Sweden on behalf of twenty-three delegations, throws the weight of the United Nations behind efforts to alleviate the suffering of civilians and prisoners of war as a result of the brief conflict in June...
...control of the area...
...delegation and, indeed, by Dayan's own Ministry of Defense...
...These seem to us indispensable conditions to Israeli withdrawal from the conquered lands of the Arab nations...
...General Dayan, however, has gone much further...
...As for the resolution declaring Israel's annexation of the Old City of Jerusalem illegal, we confess to mixed feelings...
...Others would settle for international policing of the heights and the waters that flow from Syria into the Jordan River...
...So strong is the emotional involvement that some correspondents reporting from the Middle East have suggested that no Israeli government could survive if it failed to unify Jerusalem under Israel's control...
...And, even more significantly, a few weeks ago Eliav Simon, reporting from Jerusalem for the UPI, wrote: "Those who counsel that the 'long-winded and sterile talk at the United Nations be ignored and let's rely on ourselves,' are gradually becoming the minority in Israel...
...When the United Nations voted the partition of Palestine in 1948, to replace the British mandate of earlier years, a major provision was the internationalization of the entire city of Jerusalem, old and new...
...As Murray Kempton expressed it in The New York Post: "To find no agreement at all was to achieve the true consensus beneath the rhetoric, which is that the matter must be returned to the parties for negotiation...
...For Moslems, Jerusalem ranks only behind Mecca and Medina as the holiest city...
Vol. 31 • August 1967 • No. 8
