Has Israel ever specified its own limits?

xtisme, that was in response to Dan’s observation about Israel regularly moving the de facto border. He didn’t, but could have, mentioned Israel’s policy of creating Jewish settlements, under Israeli protection, even in parts of Palestine to which they have not yet moved the border or the wall. So the question is legitimate - does Israel recognize Palestine’s right to exist? Although the factual question about its lack of a legal definition of its boundaries has been answered, the question about whether it would even be willing to do so is worth discussing, isn’t it?

I trend to agree. I think Ahmandinajad speaks for Iranis and Muslims like Rush Limberger speaks for America. They can make noise and rouse small groups or weirdos, but do not represent the people.

It seemed like an odd response to me. It’s fairly clear that Israel has acknowledged from the get go that Palestine had a ‘right to exist’. Circumstances have changed, but Israel granted Gaza to the PA unilaterally…so, I’d say that they freely acknowledge Palestine’s right to be a nation. What is in dispute is where the boundaries are set, and under what conditions. WRT the original borders agreed upon, I think that ship has sailed. The Palestinian’s fucked themselves (well, and were fucked by their friendly Arab neighbors). At this point they will have to settle for less than what they would have originally gotten…or, perhaps some of their Arab neighbors will slice off some of their own territories to give them a bit more land (I’m not holding my breath there).

That said, I’m fairly sure the Israeli’s would be willing to make some territorial concessions if the frigging Palestinian’s would stop tossing rockets and not so smart bombs at them.

-XT

If, as Alessan notes and recent Israeli policy implies, the boundary can be all the way east to the Jordan River, then where is Palestine? What “right to be a nation” is left to the Palestinian people? Even the cession of Gaza is reversible, and Israel’s military actions there since have gone far beyond any reasonable claim of defensive activity.

There’s some responsibility on both sides, you’ll have to admit. Perhaps removing the settlements, and moving the wall back, might make it clear that there is at least some of the West Bank that Israel does not covet for itself.

So, do you now agree that the question is legitimate?

Perhaps, but Zionism’s territorial claims are historical, i.e., based on identification with the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah – most of whose territory is now inhabited by an Arab majority, and presumably always will be. That’s a sticking point. Menachem Begin, IIRC, always made a point of referring to the West Bank as “Judaea and Samaria.”

And the entire region from the Med to the Jordan as “Eretz Israel”.

I think Alessan was just saying that would be the maximum, theoretical limit. Alessan also pointed out that Israel hasn’t added any additional territories since 1967…so, they don’t seem to be itching to grab more land or wipe out the Palestinian’s.

Of course, anything is reversible, and I suppose it’s possible that if the Palestinian’s keep up this stupid, hopeless conflict that eventually the Israeli’s might get so sick of it that they do something permanent. But I doubt it.

Sure, I think that concessions have to come from both sides. The problem has always been that concessions by Israel have been followed up with violence by the Palestinian’s. This isn’t to say that Palestine and the Palestinian’s don’t have a side too…they do, and they deeply resent their situation, with some justification IMHO. However, until they can be trusted not to stab Israel in the back, it’s rather difficult for Israel, which is a democracy and answerable to their own citizens, to make major territorial concessions, especially when such concessions might leave Israel strategically weaker. In addition there is the problem of those same citizens having to give up their homes if such concessions are made. While you CAN force citizens to do so (Israel has already done so, and caused a negative backlash among said citizens), it’s difficult for a politician to do so…especially when the party you are doing this for turns around and launches rockets at you, or gets some nutball to strap on explosives and take a stroll through a local mall.

Certainly I think it’s a legitimate question. That’s why I joined in the debate. :slight_smile:

-XT

Then where did all those armed “settlements” come from? What do they mean?

More than a bit oversimplistic there, even wrong, but that’s a different debate.

Is it a “concession” to return what isn’t yours?

Any good-faith negotiation addresses the real interests of both sides. That one got resolved over the Sinai, for instance. While details will differ, the process can be the same elsewhere. All it takes is statesmanship.

Many, many people in the region have had to give up their own homes, sometimes by border shifts, sometimes by construction of a wall, sometimes by bulldozing:dubious:. Government-sponsored settlements in foreign, occupied territory have less claim than most homes to be sacrosanct.

  1. By most reasonable definitions, most of the settlements are not on annexed Israeli territory. The vast majority of the settlements’ land, in fact, is not on land that was every privately owned by Palestinians, in the first place. Conflating settlements with annexation is a particularly silly red herring.

  2. The claim that every Israeli concession has been met with violence is not only not an oversimplification, it is 100% fact. You may (or, apparently, do) want to obfuscate the issue by talking about turning over land that isn’t “theirs”, but that ignores that the vast majority was never privately owned either and was state land of one flavor or another, and was never owned by any sovereign PA. “Giving it back to its owners” would entail giving it back to, tenuously, Jordan, or more properly the Ottoman Empire… which hasn’t existed for about a century.

Wanting to pretend that concessions weren’t concessions due to semantic gamesmanship on your part is less than savory.

  1. Sloppy analogies are not the hallmark of a well developed logical train of thought. The Sinai is markedly difference in many particulars than Gaza or the West Bank, and the Egyptians are not fungible with the Palestinians, let alone with all the factions amongst the Palestinians. Arguing that if it worked between Egypt and Israel over the Sinai than it must, also, work between Israel and Hamas over the disputed territories is sloppy in the extreme. Requests for statesmanship are simply a bromide when dealing with groups like Hamas whose goals include the ethnic cleansing of the region.

  2. Arguing that all of the settlements, in toto, are somehow placed in a “foreign” land shows either that one is ignorant of the facts or unconcerned with them. Some of the ‘settlements’ are, in fact, Jews who returned to areas that Jews were ethnically cleansed from circa 1948. As everything in the region goes, nuance and an attention to detail are far more important than false-to-facts sloppy rhetoric that sounds good but on exposure to sunlight, dissolves.

Didn’t the partition plan also significantly expand Israel’s borders at the time?

And yes, I do find it interesting that you don’t hear too much from Israel about the rights of a Palestinian state, or doing much to make it happen.

Every time it seems to me that Israel expects the other guy to act first

So all the “settlements” since 1967 are figments of our imagination are they?

That Israeli’s have moved into the territory they had occupied since then (1967), obviously. They didn’t need to capture more territory…they simply moved into territory they already had under their jurisdiction (winning wars tends to make such things easier). You do realize that not all of those settlements were encouraged by the Israeli government, right?

Simplistic? Certainly. If you wish to get into more detail we can. Wrong? I doubt it…again, I’m perfectly willing to thrash that out if you so wish.

I suppose it depends on one’s definition of what is or isn’t ‘yours’. Conversely, you seemingly are asserting the Palestinian’s rights to something that wasn’t originally theirs. From a possession standpoint though I’d have to say that, having won several major wars fought over that land, that the victor has more rights to decide it’s disposition than the vanquished…especially since neither side really owned the land in question in the first place.

Disregarding the Sinai thingy, which doesn’t seem applicable, I’d agree…in theory both sides need to negotiate in good faith and both need to address the real issues. And I’ll further concede that Israel sometimes doesn’t do either. However, the Palestinian’s make it easy for Israel to do so, since any gesture by Israel toward peace is generally met with violence in one form or the other. At this point I’d have to say that it’s going to be on the Palestinian’s to bend over backwards to convince Israel and the rest of the world that they are serious.

It’s a shame that it had to come to this, as I actually think the Palestinian’s have gotten a very raw deal (especially from their Arab friends)…but, you know, when you allow crazy folks to live among you and take pot shots at your supposed enemies then there are some serious trust issues involved.

That’s true. Ironically, some of those people were Israeli citizens living in these various settlements, and it was the Israeli government doing the bulldozing. As I said, not all of the various settlements have been encouraged by the Israeli government…and, with the shift in politics sometimes even settlements that were encouraged have to be abandoned…forcefully and bitterly in some cases.

But you were speaking of the plight of the Palestinian’s, no doubt. And you are right…it’s certainly happened to them. Sometimes with justification, sometimes without. As I said, I think the Palestinian’s have gotten a rather raw deal…especially in the early days when they were encouraged to leave their homes and join the ever victorious Arab armies, poised to wipe Israel from the map. Additionally, many otherwise peaceful Palestinian’s have been inconvenienced and worse because of the behavior of their nutball, fanatic brethren, and have been painted with the same broad brush. They have to endure long waits in check points, be searched, and as you say, even lose their homes and places of work to make way for even more checkpoints and walls.

I feel for them…I truly do. And it’s unlikely to substantially change at this point, unless there is a major effort on their part to get rid of the crazy among them and to prove to the Israeli’s and the world that they are actually capable of being trusted, of being serious about peaceful co-existence with Israel and the Israeli’s. Until then…nothing substantial will ever change.

Horseshit. Even if we assume that all of the settlements were ‘Government-sponsored’ (which they aren’t), the Israeli’s have every right to settle there…because they DID occupy it by conquest during a war of aggression they didn’t launch. If the Palestinian’s had settled for the UN partition originally, had their Arab neighbors not decided to contest it by force of arms, then everything would be hunky dory and the Palestinian’s would have their land. Even leaving the whole winning of the war thingy though, much of that land was never privately owned. There is and was nothing ‘sacrosanct’ about it.

-XT

Are you talking about the UN partition plan for Palestine? If so, then no…how could it? There WAS no Israel to expand. That was the point of the partition…to divide part of the Mandate of Palestine into two separate provisional states.

You mean like unilaterally giving the PA large swaths of land? That kind of thing? Yeah, I haven’t heard much about that either…

Oh, I think the Israeli’s generally do expect the Palestinian’s to act first…generally with things like car bombs, suicide idiots, rocket attacks, ambushes…

Oh…did you mean something else?

-XT

They’re constructed on land which may in the future be handed over to the Palestinians in the framework of a Palestinian state, if and when such a thing comes into existence.

Seems to me – and to most of the world – they were constructed for the express purpose of preventing a Palestinian state from ever coming into existence.

Where the fuck is your head?

Do you think there’s a “Death to Israel: YES/NO?” right next to “Religious Affiliation” question on the the U.S. Census?

I’m sorry, if I see a full sports arena on game day, in an arena that seat, say, 30,000 people, I can reasonably assume that there are approximately tens-of-thousands of people present and who enjoy sports.

If multiple middle-eastern countries who are predominantly Muslim claim “Death to Israel,” it is not unreasonable to assume that yes, millions of Muslims want to wipe Israel off the map for the crime of being not-Muslim.

It occurs to me that I should clarify that this is the fact WRT Israel/Palestinian society, not all of Arab society as a whole.

In B 4 Gotchaya.

A discussion I had with Yemenis I work with in Yemen around whether Spain should be returned to Muslim rule would lead me to believe that the hope of Israel surviving if they had the power to eliminate it is pretty much nil. What once belonged to Islam will always belong to Islam is pretty much the mantra.
Purely anecdotal, of course. But if talking to a half dozen, well traveled, foreign educated workers means anything at all, I wonder what those who don’t travel and only know what their local imam tells them think.

Obama seems to realize that, too.

Netanyahu has the chance (again) to be another Begin, but he obviously doesn’t want to, and after all he’s who the Israeli people have chosen to be in charge based on knowledge of his position.

So, for now and for the near future, the answer would be “No”. The ramifications are, of course, entirely predictable.
xtisme, why did you dismiss the Sinai analogy so abruptly? There are differences, certainly, there are always differences, but aren’t there some useful lessons there too?

After a war, the nations involved do normally tend to realize they’re stuck living side by side no matter how friendly their relations are, and make some sort of accommodation as neighbor to neighbor. If the victor doesn’t expel or exterminate or permanently subjugate the loser’s population, that is. But for decades Israel has chosen that last course of action, and the reaction they get is the inevitable one.

Sure, but many have, and based on that example the others have had every reason to believe they were following the government’s intentions, and would have the government’s protection. Haven’t those expectations been borne out?

Yah, they’re good lessons if Israel wanted to deal further with Egypt.
Not so much for other completely different situations.
But you already knew that.

I see we’re at the “making stuff up as you go along” portion of the discussion. Israel has never sought to “exterminate” anybody, nor to “permanently” do anything, as proven by the fact that they’ve made numerous agreements to ensure Palestinian sovereignty which were then violated by the previously mentioned campaigns of armed violence/civilian targeted violence. Further, Israel hasn’t expelled the Palestinian population who lived in Jordan/Egypt… or else there wouldn’t be any Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza. Kind of a hard mistake for you to make there, do you even really believe that Israel expelled the Palestinans from Gaza and the West Bank, or was it just fun to say?

Further, If you’re claiming that the Palestinians really were “their” (eg. Jordan and Egypt’s populations) then both Egypt and Jordan have rejected regaining sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza, so their citizens couldn’t claim that right, either. Of course, by calling them Jordan and Egypt’s citizens you’re claiming that territory won in a war of aggression and seized against the Palestinian people’s will by external governments is, in fact, a legitimate territorial possession of those governments. One would have to wonder why Egypt and Jordan invading and denying the right of Palestine to exist was hunky dorey and acceptable to you.

So you’re wrong on every single factual particular.
Funny, that.

Of course, still no retraction on your numerous previous factual errors. Shall I assume that you are, then, passing on from the “making stuff up as you go along” phase onto the “having made stuff up, trying to change the subject once you’re called on the carpet and making up fresh stuff” phase?