Sunday, May 22, 2011

Indefensible

Obama argued that a peace agreement would be based on the 1967 borders, with mutually agreed land swaps from that starting point.

Netanyahu responded that that was crazy talk. The 1967 borders were entirely indefensible. Israel defended them pretty well in in 1956 and 1967, but those were just lucky flukes.

Instead, Israel needs better borders. What kind of borders does Netanyahu's government want? Look at the West Bank Fence.

Here's a clearly Pro-Israeli source:

It's striking how unimportant military defense was to the route of the fence. Instead, the priorities seem to have been:

1}Any deviations from the 1967 borders must increase territory under Israeli control.

2} Any deviations from the 1967 borders must increase the number of Jews inside the new boundary.

Making the new border longer was not really an important concern. Creating vulnerable salients outside the 1967 borders was not a significant concern either, at least compared to satisfing the first two priorities.

1 comment:

andrewjameslowry said...

Thank-you for that link. I vastly increased my knowledge about the fence, admittedly from a particular POV.