Daniel Lubetzky

This video is very well done, regardless if one thinks that Israel should return to her 1967 borders. As the video describes, some Israelis are very concerned about returning to their previous borders from a defense perspective, and it is important to understand their viewpoint.

Others feel that Israel would be able to adequately defend herself (as seen in the 1967 war), and that the West Bank is not crucial to doing so.  As Mr. van Creveld, an Israeli military historian said in an article in the New York Times: “Strategically speaking . . . the risk of giving up the West Bank “is negligible.” He continued: “What is not negligible is the demographic, social, cultural and political challenge that ruling over 2.5 million — nobody knows exactly how many — occupied Palestinians in the West Bank poses. Should Israeli rule over them continue, then the country will definitely turn into what it is already fast becoming: namely, an apartheid state that can only maintain its control by means of repressive secret police actions.”

Spotted by Daniel Lubetzky, by Adeena Schlussel

May 27, 2011, 4:19 pm

Israelis Differ on ‘Defensible Borders’

By ROBERT MACKEY

The ongoing dispute about whether or not it is permissible for supporters of Israel to even refer to the country’s 1967 borders as one element in future negotiations with the Palestinians obscures the fact that some Israelis disagree strongly with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view that a country with those frontiers would be “indefensible.”

Following Mr. Netanyahu’s speech in Washington this week, several commentators in Israel and the United States pointed out that Israel’s crushing military victory in the 1967 war suggested that the country would be able to defend itself just fine even if (as President Obama has not proposed) there were a complete withdrawal from all the territory Israel has occupied since then.

On 67 point: Not to say 67 border was ideal; far from it, but it’s silly to call an already-defended border indefensible.Thu May 26 03:03:15 via webJeffrey Goldberg
Goldberg3000

As Lisa Goldman, an Israeli-Canadian journalist, noted, the same point was made in much greater detail five months before the prime minister’s speech by Martin van Creveld, a leading Israeli military historian, in an essay headlined, “Israel Doesn’t Need the West Bank to Be Secure.” At the start of a detailed reply to the argument — popular with Israeli settlers who live on the occupied West Bank land they call Judea and Samaria — that the settlers’ presence ensures Israel’s security, Mr. van Creveld wrote:

When everything is said and done, how important is the West Bank to Israel’s defense?

To answer the question, our best starting point is the situation before the 1967 war. At that time, the Arab armed forces surrounding Israel outnumbered the Jewish state’s army by a ratio of 3-to-1. Not only was the high ground in Judea and Samaria in Jordanian hands, but Israel’s capital in West Jerusalem was bordered on three sides by hostile territory. Arab armies even stood within 14 miles of Tel Aviv. Still, nobody back then engaged in the sort of fretting we hear today about “defensible borders,” let alone Abba Eban’s famous formulation, “Auschwitz borders.” When the time came, it took the Israel Defense Forces just six days to crush all its enemies combined.

The rest of Mr. van Creveld’s essay is a point by point rebuttal of each of the arguments routinely made by Israelis like Mr. Netanyahu, who insist that the starting point for negotiations should not be the land Israel controlled before the war in 1967, but what the prime minister referred to in his speech on Tuesday as “the Land of Israel,” as it was in biblical times, before four thousand years of history intervened.

(In a post to his blog on Thursday, Jeffrey Goldberg argued that the Israeli settler movement’s current political power in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition government has obscured the fact that their ideological conviction that Israel should hold on to all of the territory it seized in 1967 is not supported by most Israelis.)

As Roi Maor, a human rights activist in Tel Aviv, explained on the Israeli news blog +972, those arguments are outlined in a video produced for the Web site Defensibleborders.org with input from five former leaders of the Israeli Defense Forces.

In his post, Mr. Maor argues that the video’s history of the 1967 war is misleading or inaccurate in several ways. To start with, there is no mention of the fact that Israel was attacked that year only after it first launched a pre-emptive military strike. Also, the assertion that the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, adopted on Nov. 22, 1967, “stated that Israel was entitled to new, defensible borders,” is hard to square with any reading of a text that began by “emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and called in plain language for the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”

More to the point, though, is the fact that, as Mr. van Creveld explained in painstaking detail in his rebuttal of these security arguments, even though a nuclear-armed Israel is now in an incomparably stronger military position than it was in 1967, the threats to its security have changed quite a bit since then.

One of the main threats that Israel faces today is from ballistic missiles. Yet everybody knows that holding on to the West Bank won’t help Israel defend itself against missiles coming from Syria or Iran. Even the most extreme hawk would concede this point. …

And how about terrorism? As experience in Gaza has shown, a fence (or preferably a wall) can stop suicide bombers from entering. As experience in Gaza has also shown, it cannot stop mortar rounds and rockets. Mortar and rocket fire from the West Bank could be very unpleasant. On the other hand, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran already have missiles capable of reaching every point in Israel, Tel Aviv included. Many of those missiles are large and powerful. Compared to the damage they can cause, anything the Palestinians are ever likely to do would amount to mere pinpricks.

Furthermore, in recent years Israel has shown it can deal with that kind of threat if it really wants to. Since 2006, when the Second Lebanon War killed perhaps 2,000 Lebanese, many of them civilians, and led to the destruction of an entire section of Beirut, the northern border has been absolutely quiet. Since Operation Cast Lead, which killed perhaps 1,200 Gazans, many of them civilians, and led to the destruction of much of the city of Gaza, not one Israeli has been killed by a mortar round or rocket coming from the Gaza Strip. Since mortar rounds and rockets continue to be fired from time to time, that is hardly accidental. Obviously Hamas, while reluctant to give up what it calls “resistance,” is taking care not to provoke Israel too much.

The historian’s essay concluded with the argument that it was hawkish Israelis — intent on keeping so much of the West Bank that it would be impossible to draw the borders of a viable Palestinian state — who represent the gravest danger to the security of a Jewish and democratic Israel.

“Strategically speaking,” Mr. van Creveld concluded, the risk of giving up the West Bank “is negligible.” He continued: “What is not negligible is the demographic, social, cultural and political challenge that ruling over 2.5 million — nobody knows exactly how many — occupied Palestinians in the West Bank poses. Should Israeli rule over them continue, then the country will definitely turn into what it is already fast becoming: namely, an apartheid state that can only maintain its control by means of repressive secret police actions.”