What are defensible borders for Israel?
Paul Pillar parses the dust-up between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu:
The United States has an interest in assuring the security of Israel. In his AIPAC speech, President Obama properly referred to this aspect of U.S.-Israeli relations as â??ironclad.â? But the United States has no positive interest in either party to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict acquiring title to land not because it is needed for security but instead for historical or religious reasons, or simply to acquire living space. The only U.S. interest is the negative one of being associated in the minds of much of the rest of the world with the Israeli occupation. So Netanyahu couched his denunciation of the 1967 boundary in security terms, saying (again ignoring what President Obama said about land swaps) that the boundary was â??indefensible.â?
Pillar goes on to insist that these borders are indeed defensible:
Let's seeâ??even if we ignore, as Netanyahu has, what would be needed for the Palestinians' securityâ??how has that boundary figured into Israeli security in the past? In the one war that was fought across the boundaryâ??the one in 1967â??the Israeli Defense Forces conquered the entire West Bank in less than a week (while they also were taking the Golan Heights away from Syria and the Sinai away from Egypt). Since that war, the differential between Israel's military capability and that of its Arab neighbors has become if anything even greater (even just at the conventional level, without considering Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons beginning in the 1970s). Who would threaten Israel across that 1967 border? A demilitarized Palestinian â??stateâ?? Some rusty post-Cold War army from some other Arab country that somehow made it into the West Bank? For many years the biggest threat to Israelis' security has come not across a border beyond which Israel lacked control but instead from angry Palestinians in land that Israel does control. The idea of the 1967 border as indefensible isâ??given military realities in the Middle Eastâ??itself indefensible.
I think the concern today is not Arab armies but rocket fire from groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. The closer these groups can get to Israel, the easier it will be to accurately guide rockets at civilian targets. Unfortunately, the ranges these rockets can travel will improve over time, no matter where a final borderline is drawn, so what constitutes a "defensible" border is something of a moving target.
(AP Photo)
