Yes as you also said that it is less than the offers made by Barack and Olmert but no one stated that that the 2% is all Israel will keep because there are other areas which are also right on the green line that are strategically important. The other few percent include very strategic high grounds such as Baal Hatzor which is the highest point in the WB and the site of the IAF early warning system and a large forward military base. The control of these high grounds that overlook Israels lower lying heartland, population centers and vital infrastructures is important for not only security from conventional attacks from which they have been attacked by neighboring Arab armies a few times but also from terrorist attacks and infiltration which was also a huge problem prior to 67 and even moreso today with the more sophisticated rockets and weapons at their disposal these days. This does not even take into account other factors such as Israel is at some points as thin as 9 miles along its long strategically undefendable borders.
Yes as you say the fence encloses much more than 2% but that is just another claim that tries to mislead from the fact that the settlements only occupy around 2% of the WB. The fence was put up to stop terror which it has done well and does not define the settlement area or final status borders. Some Palestinian towns were even in the area enclosed by the fence. As I said the fence was put up to stop terror which it has done very well at but it is not something that has permanence like a town or city and it can easily be moved when needed or required such as under a final status agreement. Unlike a fence, lives lost to terror are permanent but it seems that to some that those lives are not very important compared to Palestinians being inconvienianced or to demonizing Israel.
This all flies in the face of those who try to claim that a 2 state solution is no longer possible and make spurious and misleading claims to support that position like the sere ttlements occcupy too much land for a 2 state, false claims the settlements have cut the WB into bantustans , misleading that settlements have doubled/trippled ect ect in size neglecting to mention that it is in population not in area and a whole host of other BS. They ignore the fact 80% of the settlers live in settlements right on the green line.
242 clearly calls for Israel to withdraw from occupied territories; it's only through deliberate misinterpretation that one can pretend this was meant to allow not withdrawing from all of them.
That is a completly false misrepresentation that has been debunked ad nauseum.
According to you it seems the actual drafters of 242 are misinterpreting what they themselves wrote and pretend that they didnt mean what you say they meant. Are you claiming this about the Drafters of 242?
Resolution 242- The Drafters Clarify Its Meaning
While the wording and intent of Resolution 242 is often correctly described, at times it is misrepresented as requiring Israel to return to the pre-1967 lines — the armistice lines established after Israel’s War of Independence.
Such an interpretation was explicitly not the intention of the framers of 242, nor does the language of the resolution include any such requirement.
Below are statements by the main drafters of Resolution 242 — Lord Caradon, Eugene Rostow, Arthur Goldberg and Baron George-Brown — as well as others, in which the meaning and history of Resolution 242 are explained.
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Lord Caradon (Hugh M. Foot) was the permanent representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations, 1964-1970, and chief drafter of Resolution 242.
Journal of Palestine Studies, “An Interview with Lord Caradon,” Spring - Summer 1976, pgs 144-45:
Q. The basis for any settlement will be United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, of which you were the architect. Would you say there is a contradiction between the part of the resolution that stresses the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and that which calls for Israeli withdrawal from “occupied territories,” but not from “the occupied territories”?
A. I defend the resolution as it stands. What it states, as you know, is first the general principle of inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war. That means that you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it.
We could have said: well, you go back to the 1967 line. But I know the 1967 line, and it’s a rotten line. You couldn’t have a worse line for a permanent international boundary. It’s where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948. It’s got no relation to the needs of the situation.
Had we said that you must go back to the 1967 line, which would have resulted if we had specified a retreat from all the occupied territories, we would have been wrong. In New York, what did we know about Tayyibe and Qalqilya? If we had attempted in New York to draw a new line, we would have been rather vague. So what we stated was the principle that you couldn’t hold territory because you conquered it, therefore there must be a withdrawal to – let’s read the words carefully – “secure and recognized boundaries.” The can only be secure if they are recognized. The boundaries have to be agreed; it’s only when you get agreement that you get security. I think that now people begin to realize what we had in mind – that security doesn’t come from arms, it doesn’t come from territory, it doesn’t come from geography, it doesn’t come from one side domination the other, it can only come from agreement and mutual respect and understanding.
Therefore, what we did, I think, was right; what the resolution said was right and I would stand by it. It needs to be added to now, of course. ... We didn’t attempt to deal with
then, but merely to state the general principles of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war. We meant that the occupied territories could not be held merely because they were occupied, but we deliberately did not say that the old line, where the troops happened to be on that particular night many years ago, was an ideal demarcation line.
• MacNeil/Lehrer Report, March 30, 1978:
We didn't say there should be a withdrawal to the '67 line; we did not put the “the” in, we did not say “all the territories” deliberately. We all knew that the boundaries of '67 were not drawn as permanent frontiers, they were a cease-fire line of a couple of decades earlier... . We did not say that the '67 boundaries must be forever.
• Daily Star (Beirut), June 12, 1974. Qtd. in Myths and Facts, Leonard J. Davis, pg. 48:
It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of 4 June 1967 because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places the soldiers of each side happened to be the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them and I think we were right not to ...
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Eugene Rostow, a legal scholar and former dean of Yale Law School, was US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, 1966-1969. He helped draft Resolution 242.
• Telegram from the Department of State to the U.S. Interests Section of the Spanish Embassy in the United Arab Republic summarizing Rostow’s conversation with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin:
Rostow said ... resolution required agreement on "secure and recognized" boundaries, which, as practical matter, and as matter of interpreting resolution, had to precede withdrawals. Two principles were basic to Article I of resolution. Paragraph from which Dobrynin quoted was linked to others, and he did not see how anyone could seriously argue, in light of history of resolution in Security Council, withdrawal to borders of June 4th was contemplated. These words had been pressed on Council by Indians and others, and had not been accepted.
Jerusalem Post, “The truth about 242,” Nov. 5, 1990:
Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 ... rest on two principles, Israel may administer the territory until its Arab neighbors make peace; and when peace is made, Israel should withdraw to “secure and recognized borders,” which need not be the same as the Armistice Demarcation Lines of 1949. ...
The omission of the word “the” from the territorial clause of the Resolution was one of its most hotly-debated and fundamental features. The U.S., Great Britain, the Netherlands, and many other countries worked hard for five and a half months in 1967 to keep the word “the” and the idea it represents out of the resolution. Motions to require the withdrawal of Israel from “the” territories or “all the territories” occupied in the course of the Six Day War were put forward many times with great linguistic ingenuity. They were all defeated both in the General Assembly and in the Security Council. ...
Those who claim that Resolution 242 is ambiguous on the point are either ignorant of the history of its negotiation or simply taking a convenient tactical position.
The Wall Street Journal, “Peace still depends on the two Palestines,” April 27, 1988:
... Resolution 242 establishes three principles about the territorial aspect of the peace-making process:
1) Israel can occupy and administer the territories it occupied during the Six-Day War until the Arabs make peace.
2) When peace agreements are reached, they should delineate “secure and recognized” boundaries to which Israel would withdraw.
3) Those boundaries could differ from the Armistice Demarcation Lines of 1949.
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Arthur J. Goldberg was the United States representative to the United Nations, 1965-1968, and before that a U.S. Supreme Court justice. He helped draft Resolution 242.
American Foreign Policy Interests, 1988:
The resolution does not explicitly require that Israel withdraw to the lines that it occupied on June 5, 1967, before the outbreak of the war. The Arab states urged such language; the Soviet Union proposed such a resolution to the Security Council in June 1967, and Yugoslavia and other nations made a similar proposal to the special session of the General Assembly that followed the adjournment of the Security Council. But those views were rejected. Instead, Resolution 242 endorses the principle of the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and juxtaposes the principle that every state in the area is entitled to live in peace within “secure and recognized boundaries.” ...
The notable omissions in language used to refer to withdrawal are the words the, all, and the June 5, 1967, lines. I refer to the English text of the resolution. The French and Soviet texts differ from the English in this respect, but the English text was voted on by the Security Council, and thus it is determinative. 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, 1967. Instead, the resolution stipulates withdrawal from occupied territories without defining the extent of withdrawal. And it can be inferred from the incorporation of the words secure and recognized boundaries that the territorial adjustments to be made by the parties in their peace settlements could encompass less than a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territories.
U.S. Senate, The Arab-Israeli Dispute, 6, pgs 14-16, qtd. in Egypt’s Struggle for Peace: Continuity and Change, 1967-1977, Yoram Meital, pg. 50:
At no time in my meetings with Foreign Minister Riad did I give him such an assurance . It would have been foolish to make such an assurance, when the whole object of Resolution 242 was to allow flexibility in negotiations of territorial boundaries.
plenty more
http://www.sixdaywar.org/content/242drafters.asp
also
http://www.sixdaywar.co.uk/6_day_war_aftermath_prof_UN_Resolution_242_pt6.htm
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