Though it was never formally adopted by the Israeli government, the Allon Plan and the defensible borders doctrine it represented became the guiding vision through successive Israeli governments between 1967 and 1993. In February 1969, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was asked if Israel would return to the pre-1967 lines. “The armistice agreements are dead and buried,” he answered. “We don’t want any part of the settled area of the West Bank—Nablus, Jenin, and so on. What we say is that the Jordan River must become a security border for Israel with all that that implies. Our army shall be stationed only on the strip along that border.”²⁰

Defensible borders would also become the strategic baseline for Prime Ministers Golda Meir and her successor Yitzhak Rabin. Meir emphasized the idea while presenting her government in March 1974, immediately following the Yom Kippur War. A peace agreement with its neighbors, she said, “should assure Israel of defensible borders.”²¹ Rabin, too, would continue the defensible borders tradition begun by Allon, who was Rabin’s commanding officer and mentor. Rabin, who upon becoming prime minister in June 1974 named Allon his foreign minister, would reassert the importance of defensible borders at every opportunity. In February 1975, Rabin was asked on Israeli radio about the idea of a U.S.-Israel defense treaty. Rabin dismissed the idea out of hand: “In our understanding we have always seen the necessity, the need, for the State of Israel to defend itself under its own power. Hence our demand for defensible borders.” Rabin then added: “I would on no account want a situation to be created, which those proposing the defense treaty intend: A substitute for defensible borders.”²² If anything, Rabin’s map for defensible borders was even more ambitious than Allon’s in establishing new settlements in western Samaria.

And as for Prime Minister Menachem Begin, there is reason to think that he, too, privately accepted the idea of defensible borders, despite his public insistence that Jewish history and tradition demand that no part of Judea and Samaria be given away. According to Begin’s foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, Begin was willing to consider shared sovereignty over the West Bank with neighboring Jordan. While Both Labor and Likud leaders recognized the strategic importance of the territories for Israel and agreed on Palestinian autonomy and not statehood in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, the nationalist Likud rejected any foreign sovereignty on West Bank soil, including Jordanian annexation. However, Dayan, who had served as foreign minister in the first Begin government, reported to the Knesset plenum toward the end of its term that Begin was not completely closed to compromise on that point.²³

While the idea of defensible borders was achieving unprecedented recognition during Rabin’s first government in the mid-1970s, its intellectual erosion in some Israeli circles was by then already beginning, largely because of the powerful impact which the near-disaster of the Yom Kippur War had had on the thinking of military planners. Israel had had extraordinary strategic depth when the 1973 Yom Kippur War began, it was now argued, but even the post-1967 defensible borders had not prevented the coordinated attack by Egypt and Syria. After the war, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin argued that Israel would have to settle for the status quo until the Arab states were ready to accept the concept of defensible borders. The new critics, however, argued that the status quo was too dangerous as it might well lead to yet another full-scale Arab-Israeli war. This logic led to an effort to seek an alternative to defensible borders, so that peace treaties with the Arab states would be easier to conclude.

Ironically, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, it was Begin’s “hard-line” Likud government that gave the new school of thought its greatest boost. Until Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, Israel’s concept of peace with Egypt had been based on retaining Sinai territory to create defensible borders to Israel’s south. The signing of the Camp David accords in 1978 represented a major turning point. According to the agreement, Egypt would conclude a peace treaty with Israel in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 boundary. Israel’s vital interests would be maintained through the use of security arrangements, including partial demilitarization of the Sinai and Negev, the restriction of airstrips in the Sinai to civilian use, and the deployment of international peace monitors there. But Yitzhak Rabin, then in opposition, was reluctant to turn away from defensible borders to embrace security arrangements, especially if this doctrine were applied to other fronts. Rabin said at the time, “Theoretically, Israel today has the possibility of reaching a full peace treaty on the basis of an overall withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 lines with minor modifications and perhaps a readiness for an Israeli military presence. If I were asked if we should sign an agreement of this sort, I would answer in the negative.”²⁴ Begin and his negotiating team, however, eventually dropped the demand for defensible borders in Sinai in view of the real possibility of peace with Egypt, which they realized would require an alternative security concept if they wanted to close a deal with the Egyptians quickly.

The architect of the security arrangements school for Sinai was Major-General Abraham “Abrasha” Tamir. Instead of new defensible borders, Tamir worked under the assumption of a full Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, but with the provision that security arrangements would make it difficult for the Egyptian army to pose a threat to southern Israel following an IDF pullout. Tamir created two limited-forces zones and a demilitarized zone across the 120 miles of Sinai territory, which severely reduced the number of forces the Egyptians could deploy. Yigal Allon, who was part of the Labor opposition in 1979 when the Egyptian-Israeli treaty was brought to the Knesset, actually voted against ratification of the treaty. He was unwilling to see Israel forgo its fundamental right to secure frontiers.

 

 

Within a few years of Israel’s final withdrawal from Sinai in 1982, it became clear that despite the lack of Allon-style defensible borders with Egypt, the peace treaty appeared to be holding, and even facilitating the significant scaling back of Israeli troops in the southern part of the country. It was not long before proposals were aired that would apply the security arrangements concept to the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well. These became increasingly popular after the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, in 1987. In this context, it is impossible to overstate the impact of the special report published in 1988 by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies’ Study Group, entitled The West Bank and Gaza: Israel’s Options for Peace, on the substitution of “security arrangements” for defensible borders in the Palestinian context.

Since its founding in 1977 at Tel Aviv University, the Jaffee Center had been perceived as a central fixture of the Israeli security establishment. It was directed by General Aharon Yariv, the head of Israeli military intelligence in the Six Day War. When it issued its report, the staff included another former head of military intelligence, General Shlomo Gazit, who had played a key role in negotiating the Israeli-Egyptian peace accords. Gazit, together with the Jaffee Center’s deputy director Joseph Alpher, would be involved in back channel contacts in 1993 with the PLO over security issues that ran parallel to political negotiations at Oslo.²⁵

The Jaffee study comprised two parts: A long study that analyzed six options for the future of the West Bank, and a short study examining a seventh option—a Palestinian state that would be established in virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Jaffee team determined that this seventh option was the only workable solution. “All of the six standing options on the Israeli political agenda that have been investigated,” they wrote, “either cannot be implemented or are undesirable. Therefore, to achieve political progress, Israelis and Palestinians will have to change their most basic conceptions.”²⁶

 Almost immediately, their proposal advocating a phased yet eventually full-fledged Palestinian state received major press coverage in Israel and internationally, including coverage in the New York Times and the Washington Post. And since the Jaffee team had an international partner—the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, headed by Martin Indyk—its overseas impact was assured.

The Jaffee study promoted the post-1973 idea of “security arrangements” in any final settlement over the West Bank. In the longer, six-option study, these arrangements included two types: First, there were limitations on Palestinian armed forces in the West Bank. Second, the study proposed “security arrangements” involving a long-term (20 to 25 years or longer) Israeli military presence inside a future Palestinian state, including: (i) Substantial IDF presence along the axes ascending from the Jordan Valley to the top of the West Bank mountain ridge; (ii) IDF surface-to-air missile systems; (iii) IDF early-warning and intelligence facilities along the mountain ridge itself; (iv) full Israeli control of the airspace over the West Bank; and (v) freedom of movement for Israeli military forces moving along agreed West Bank axes.²⁷ The Jaffee team argued that at the end of a negotiating process, these security arrangements would necessarily prevent a newly formed Palestinian state from either constituting a strategic threat to Israel or acting as a platform for terror assaults.²⁸