The Allon Plan also served as a point of reference for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who took office in 1996. Netanyahu used the term “Allon Plus” in 1997 to outline his vision for permanent status.³⁸ Despite Rabin’s and Netanyahu’s firm commitment to Allon’s vision of defensible borders, Oslo’s unprecedented focus on Palestinian claims in Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and Jerusalem sent a disconcerting message to Israel’s supporters. It also reinforced the belief among Israel’s detractors that its traditional security demands, which had always guided its peace policies, were far less significant than the growing international consensus that Israel needed to end its role as a “foreign occupier of Palestinian land.”³⁹ This claim, aggressively marketed by the Palestinians, despite lacking any grounding in Resolution 242, gained currency in the media and would further undermine Israel’s international case for defensible borders.

Ironically, prior to Oslo, because of the awareness of the Palestinian covenant’s call for the destruction of the Jewish state, Israel had enjoyed greater world sympathy for its requirements for defensible borders. But Israel’s failure to advance its own security first, its active promotion of the Palestinian Authority, particularly between 1993 and 1996, and its failure to protest effectively the PA’s continued incitement to violence and delegitimization of Israel—a violation of one of Oslo’s founding principles—undermined Israel’s case to the world, even before negotiations collapsed at Camp David, and especially once the Palestinian violence began in September 2000.

 

Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s determination to reach an “end ofconflict” agreement with Arafat at Camp David in July 2000 and then at Taba in early 2001 was the driving force behind his idea of creating security arrangements on the territory of a future Palestinian state. Barak’s security arrangements proposals, an heir to the legacy of the Jaffee Center report, reflected the final abandonment by the Israeli government of the notion of defensible borders in the West Bank. Barak believed it would be possible to secure Israel by settling for 12 percent or less⁴⁰ of the West Bank, as opposed to the approximately 33 to 45 percent required by a classic defensible borders strategy.⁴¹

Like the Jaffee Center recommendations twelve years earlier, Barak also proposed a sovereign Palestinian state with the proviso that it be based on a demilitarized West Bank and the placement of Israeli early-warning stations and IDF troops on Palestinian soil. And following United States president Bill Clinton’s own “bridging proposals” at Taba, which reflected, in part, many of Barak’s concessions to the Palestinians, Israeli control of the Jordan Valley was finally conceded and replaced with the more politically flexible counterproposal of an international force.

Despite Barak’s unprecedented offer, Palestinian security chief Mohammed Dahlan categorically refused to accept the idea of such Israeli security arrangements. As former U.S. special Middle East envoy Dennis Ross writes, “Mohammed Dahlan was dead set against any Israeli or foreign presence in the border crossing and rejected the idea that the Israelis should have guaranteed access routes into the West Bank.”⁴² In fact, the main security issues were not resolved at Camp David, including early-warning stations, control of airspace, demilitarization, Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley, and management of border crossings. Even on the issue of Israeli emergency access to the West Bank, Ross writes that the parties faced “basic disagreements.”⁴³ During the Taba talks, Israeli chief negotiator Gilad Sher noted that on security issues, “the main disputes remained.”⁴⁴ The security arrangements school was tested at Camp David and Taba and found to be completely unacceptable to the Palestinians.

Barak’s final abandonment of the defensible borders doctrine, and the advancement of security arrangements in its stead, whittled down and even delegitimized Israel’s longstanding demands to retain the Jordan Valley and other vital areas in Judea and Samaria in any future negotiation. Moreover, even Israel’s desire to maintain the status quo in the West Bank would be severely compromised by Barak’s far-reaching concessions. Under such conditions, the international community, particularly the Europeans, would feel more empowered to impose a solution on Israel on the basis of the problematic 1949 armistice lines. Israel therefore would be in a much compromised position if it decided to pursue a unilateral option or demand defensible borders in future diplomacy over the West Bank. Barak’s last-ditch effort to secure an end-of-conflict agreement with Arafat led Israel’s most decorated military man to concede the very hawkish security principles that he had embodied as a protégé of Rabin and a student of Allon, and that had characterized his opposition to Oslo both as IDF chief of staff in 1993 and as interior minister in 1995, when he abstained in the Oslo II Knesset vote.⁴⁵ As recently as March 2005, Barak explained to this author that his abandonment of defensible borders was based on his feeling that “Allon is a wonderful plan, but it can’t be implemented due to Palestinian opposition.”⁴⁶

In any event, it does not appear that Israel’s abandonment of the defensible borders doctrine in the early 1990s succeeded in moving the region any closer to ending a century of bloodshed. On the contrary, it may have caused significant damage to Israel. It encouraged Israel’s enemies who long for the day when Israel gives up all rights to land; it obfuscated Israel’s minimal needs for any final-status agreement; and it fostered the sense that the 1949 armistice lines constitute the final sovereign borders of the Jewish state.

It is time, therefore, for a return to the idea of defensible borders for Israel. Like any state under international law, Israel has a right to a sovereign reality that will ensure that it can defend itself against external aggressors. And this requires borders which are indeed “secure and recognized,” which can be defended by Israel’s troops without dependence on foreign armies, stationing troops on foreign soil, or technological means that can be derailed at the whim of a foreign power. This is a right that is sanctioned in international law, a right enshrined in Israel’s case in UN Security Council resolutions, and an imperative inherent in the basic idea of the State of Israel—the provision for the fundamental security needs of the Jewish people, in its own sovereign state, without dependence on others.

 

Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip planned for this coming fall has raised uncertainties among senior defense officials regarding Israel’s future security. Ariel Sharon is the first Israeli prime minister to recognize the goal of a sovereign Palestinian state, and the first since the evacuation of the Sinai to decide to dismantle Jewish settlements. At the same time, both in his explicit statements and in the actions of his government, there is reason to think that his plan contains a second plank: The combination of contiguous Palestinian statehood in the most populous West Bank areas with a return to the idea of Israeli sovereignty in the Jordan Valley and other strategic areas. In a pre-Passover interview in Haaretz last April, Sharon said, “The Jordan Rift Valley is very important and it’s not just the Rift Valley. We’re talking about up to the Allon Road and a step above the Allon Road. In my view, this area is of supreme importance.”⁴⁷ Sharon and his senior advisers have also expressed the goal of reaching a long-term interim solution with the Palestinians that would guarantee defensible borders for Israel.⁴⁸

But we should not underestimate the forces militating towards a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines. While the Bush administration made clear to Israeli diplomats in 2001 that the Barak-Clinton proposals were off the table, the expectation among European countries was that Israel would continue to pull back, after Gaza, from the entire West Bank or close to it in line with the Clinton parameters of 2000. EU representative Javier Solana, for instance, has backed Israel’s return to the 1949 borders as part of an overall political settlement.⁴⁹

Moreover, Israel faces a string of precedents that involve a full Israeli withdrawal to a recognized international boundary: The 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, the withdrawal from Lebanon in the summer of 2000, and Sharon’s own 2005 disengagement plan from the Gaza Strip. Adopting a defensible borders position will entail rejecting such precedents where the West Bank is concerned. It is a position that will be supported by a significant majority of Israelis, but will require strength of heart on the part of Israel’s leaders in the face of major international and Palestinian opposition.

Israel needs defensible borders, particularly in the West Bank, to guarantee a political settlement that will not be undermined by the combination of Israeli vulnerabilities and the hostile intent that is still expressed by several of Israel’s neighbors, including the Palestinians.⁵⁰ If Israel is to arrive at a solution to the conflict that will end its military presence in Palestinian population centers, provide for the country’s long-term security, and maintain its deterrent capability against aggression from both the future Palestinians state and its Arab neighbors, it will have to take a firm stand with regard to its frontiers. If it does so, Israel will contribute more to the long-term stability of the region than any set of agreements based on security arrangements. Indeed, defensible borders are a vital guarantor of a peace that will be lasting and durable.

 

 

1. Yigal Allon, “Israel: The Case for Defensible Borders,” Foreign Affairs vol. 55 (October 1976), pp. 41-42.

2. The Soviet Union received large territories from Poland, Rumania, and Finland in the period 1945-1947. Germany ceded huge territories to Poland at the same time. Many of these decisions on boundary changes were finalized between the Big Three Powers at Potsdam in 1945. Elsewhere in Europe, Italy ceded territories to Yugoslavia after World War II.

3. Stephen Schwebel, “What Weight to Conquest,” in Justice in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1994), pp. 521-525.

4. Schwebel, “What Weight to Conquest.” As cited in Eli E. Hertz, Reply: Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (New York: Myths and Facts, 2005), p. 95.

5. As cited in Dore Gold, Jerusalem in International Diplomacy (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2001), p. 24. See also Dore Gold, Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos (New York: Crown Forum, 2004), p. 103.

6. Eugene V. Rostow, “The Future of Palestine,” Institute of National Strategic Studies, November 1993, cited in Hertz, Reply, p. 94.

7. See Dore Gold, “From Occupied Territories to Disputed Territories,” Jerusalem Viewpoints, 470 (January 16, 2002), p. 3. Former U.S. under secretary of state Eugene Rostow also went on record in 1991 to clarify this point, saying: “Resolution 242, which, as under secretary of state of political affairs between 1966 and 1969, I helped to produce, calls on the parties to make peace and allows Israel to administer the territories it occupied in 1967 until ‘a just and lasting peace in the Middle East’ is achieved…. Speaker after speaker made it explicit that Israel was not to be forced back to the ‘fragile’ and ‘vulnerable’ Armistice Demarcation Lines [of 1949], but should retire once peace was made to what Resolution 242 called ‘secure and recognized’ boundaries, agreed upon by the parties.” See the citation in Hertz, Reply, p. 94.  

8. Dore Gold, “Defensible Borders for Israel,” Jerusalem Viewpoints no. 500 (June 15-July 1, 2003), p. 2. See also Eugene V. Rostow, “Resolved,” The New Republic (October 21, 1991), www.tzemachdovid.org/Facts/islegal1.shtml. Professor Ruth Lapidot confirmed these points in a meeting with the author on February 23, 2004.  

9. Allon, “The Case for Defensible Borders,” p. 41.

10. Gold, “Defensible Borders for Israel,” p. 3.

11.Allon, “The Case for Defensible Borders.” See also Gold, “Defensible Borders for Israel.”

12. Gold, “Defensible Borders for Israel.”

13. See Chaim Gwirtizman, “Maps of Israeli Interests in Judea and Samaria: Determining the Extent of Future Israeli Withdrawals,” www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/publications/maps/oslo2map.htm.

14. As recently as April 2005, Sharon underscored in interviews with Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post the critical importance of Israel’s retaining the entire area of the Jordan Rift Valley. See Aluf Benn and Yossi Verter, “Even King Solomon Ceded Territories,” Haaretz, April 22, 2005. 

15. Allon, “The Case for Defensible Borders,” p. 42.

16. Michael Widlanski, ed., Can Israel Survive a Palestinian State? (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Advanced Strategic Studies, 1990), p. 139.

17. Widlanski, ed., Can Israel Survive a Palestinian State?, p. 135.

18. It is important to note that the demographic argument embraced by Allon and other leaders of the Labor camp at the time stemmed only from the possibility of Israel’s annexation of all of Judea and Samaria, a move that would cause the necessary assignment of democratic rights to the territories’ Arab residents. In contrast, today’s opponents of Israel’s presence in the territories after the Oslo peace process, in which 98 percent of Palestinians live under PA administrative authority, misleadingly claim that any Israeli settlement presence in the disputed territories today requiring Israeli military protection automatically creates the same demographic problem as pre-1993 discussions of Israeli annexation, likening Israel to apartheid South Africa. This false comparison is particularly misleading in view of the fact that Israel initiated the Oslo accords to rid itself of the widely undesirable situation of Israel’s military administration of the West Bank and Gaza that existed between 1967 and implementation of the Oslo II accords in September 1995.

19. Allon, “The Case for Defensible Borders.”

20. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, in an interview with Newsweek (February 17, 1969), as included in a study for the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, Lee Hamilton, chairman, Congressional Research Service (December 19, 1979), p. 186. See also Michael Oren, “Levi Eshkol, Forgotten Hero” (Azure 14, Winter 2003), pp. 25-72.

21. Prime Minister Golda Meir in a speech to the Knesset, March 10, 1974.

22. Interview with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Israeli radio, February 21, 1975.

23. According to Dayan, Begin even indicated that he was prepared to “consider seriously any reasonable peace proposal from Jordan on the basis of territorial compromise in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.” Moshe Dayan, On the Peace Process and the Future of Israel (Tel Aviv: Israel Ministry of Defense and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 1988), p. 257. [Hebrew]

24. Dayan, On the Peace Process, p. 94. It should also be noted that according to some IDF assessments, the 1973 Yom Kippur War resulted in part from the overdependence of the IDF on approval from Golda Meir’s government to launch a preemptive strike against Egypt, a strike that would have required Israel to violate Egyptian sovereignty.

After the war, former IDF intelligence assessment chief, General Yaakov Amidror, then a young intelligence officer, developed a new assessment model that measured the military’s dependence on Israel’s political echelon for approval in advance of military action. Amidror’s model, which has not previously been published, concludes that the least problematic actions by the IDF are those that involve no Israeli violation of the sovereignty of Israel’s neighborsand are therefore least dependent on government approval.

According to Amidror, the following four-level model has influenced Israeli military planners since the 1973 debacle, and has resulted in a much stronger IDF regular force structure than Israel had maintained before 1973:

1. Deployment of IDF regular forces along Israel’s borders. This is the least problematic decision, since it involves a minimal intervention on the political level and has minimal diplomatic repercussions in that it involves no violations of foreign territorial sovereignty.

2. Call-up of reserve forces. This decision requires a greater political involvement as it implies a more serious state of alert, but does not involve international diplomatic consequences.

3. Launch of a pre-emptive air strike. This requires a high level of domestic political intervention, which Israeli leaders would be reluctant to approve, since it involves a violation of the sovereignty of a neighboring country and risks international diplomatic implications.

4. Launch of a pre-emptive ground strike. IDF actions requiring violations of foreign sovereignty are the least desirable because they require the highest level of dependence on prior political approval, which according to Amidror is unlikely in cases of this category.

According to this model, Israel is most secure when it is able to defend itself from territories under its control. This is precisely the model of defensible borders. The Yom Kippur War proved not that defensible borders had failed Israel, but that for a successful national defense system, Israel requires the highest level of accurate intelligence—which it had not had prior to the 1973 attacks—so that counter measures can be taken on the basis of the political will of civilian leadership to take military action in cases of clear and present threat. By occupying the expanses of the Sinai Peninsula, Israel was nonetheless able to hold back the Egyptian offensive with regular and reserve forces (steps 1 and 2) and eventually win the war. But by surrendering its defensible borders in the future, Israel would become more dependent on a future civilian leadership ready to take action outside of Israel’s borders (in accordance with steps 3 and 4), which is extremely unlikely.

25. See David Makovsky, Making Peace with the PLO: The Rabin Government’s Road to the Oslo Accord (Colorado: Westview, 1996), p. 17: “Even as Beilin and the Norwegians were trying to negotiate indirectly with the PLO through Husseini, senior Israeli security and political officials were receiving reports from another secret back channel to the organization: meetings in London and later Rome on the security aspects of peace that were being conducted between former PLO and Israeli security officials. Participating in the meetings were Nizar Amar, at one time a senior member of the PLO’s Force 17 commando group; Ahmed Khalidi and Yazid Sayegh, two UK-based Palestinian academics with PLO affiliations; Shlomo Gazit, former head of Israeli military intelligence; Joseph Alpher, deputy head of Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies; Aryeh Shalev, a senior research associate at the Jaffee Center; and Haaretz military commentator Ze’ev Schiff, who eventually replaced Shalev.”

26. Report of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies Study Group, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza: Towards a Solution (Tel Aviv: Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, 1989), p. 17. The six standing options as analyzed by the Jaffee Center were as follows: Option I: Maintaining the status quo of Israeli military administration of the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Option II: Palestinian autonomy. Option III: Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. Option IV: Immediate establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Option V: Unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Option VI: Palestinian-Jordanian federation in the West Bank and Gaza. For the longer study see “Judea, Samaria and Gaza, Ways to a Peace Process,” Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv, 1989. [Hebrew] The seventh option as outlined in the shorter Jaffee study proposed a staged Palestinian state based on mutual confidence building measures.  

27. See appendix of the longer Jaffee Center Study in: The West Bank and Gaza: Israel’s Options for Peace, Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, p. 151.

28. Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, p. 18.

29. Dore Gold, “Security and Sovereignty,” Jerusalem Post, March 17, 1989. Gold wrote, “In short there is every reason to believe that a Palestinian state stripped of its airspace, with most of the attributes of military sovereignty highly constricted, and suffering with continuing long-term deployments of the Israeli army on its sovereign soil will not be much more attractive to the Palestinians than some of the [six other] options they are viewed as finding unacceptable in [the longer Jaffee study,] Israel’s Options for Peace. There is a fundamental gap between the attributes of Palestinian Arab sovereignty and the requirements of Israeli national security that cannot be bridged by an extended period of mutual confidence-building….”

30. Gold, “Security and Sovereignty,” p. 3.

31. Shimon Peres with Arye Naor, The New Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), chs. 6 and 7.

32. Peres, The New Middle East, pp. 77-78.

33. Peres, The New Middle East, pp. 80-81.

34. Yossi Beilin, Touching Peace, trans. Philip Simpson (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), p. 137. Beilin called Rabin the hero of Oslo because he ultimately took responsibility for it, even though he noted that Rabin neither initiated the process nor was enthusiastic about it. Beilin added that Peres steered the process, playing an irreplaceable role.

35. See full text of Rabin’s speech to the Knesset on the ratification of the Israel-Palestinian Interim Agreement (October 5, 1995) at www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/1990_1999/1995/10/PM+Rabin+in+Knesset-+Ratification+of+Interim+Agree.htm.

36. Gold, “Defensible Borders for Israel.”

37. Rabin, in his speech to the Knesset on the ratification of an interim agreement, listed the following as components of a permanent solution with the Palestinians: “i) First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev—as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, while preserving the rights of the members of the other  faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and freedom of worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths. ii) The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term. iii) Changes which will include the addition of Gush Etzion, Efrat, Beitar and other communities, most of which are in the area east of what was the ‘Green Line,’ prior to the Six Day War. iv) The establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria, like the one in Gush Katif.”

38. Gold, “Defensible Borders for Israel,” p. 3. “In tha t sense,” observed Dore Gold (Netanyahu’s foreign policy adviser at the time), “an updated Allon Plan became the basis of an Israeli national consensus regarding the contours of a permanent status solution.”

39. Dan Diker, “Why Are Israel’s Public Relations So Poor?” Jerusalem Viewpoints, no. 487, October 15-November 1, 2002, pp. 7-8.

40. Barak was reported to have approved an offer of between 93 percent and 95 percent at Camp David and 97 percent at Taba. He also was believed to have offered the Palestinians a compensatory 3-percent land swap from pre-1967 Israel at Taba, although this was denied by MK Danny Yatom, Barak’s national security adviser, during a Knesset conference on defensible borders on October 19, 2004, sponsored by the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

41. The Allon Plan was based primarily on Israel retaining the Jordan Valley, a full third of the West Bank. The Allon-plus doctrine adopted by prime ministers Rabin and Netanyahu would also include other strategically vital settlements that would constitute approximately 45 to 49 percent of West Bank lands. This assessment is based exclusively on Israel’s defense needs and does not include other national security interests such as the West Bank aquifers from which Israel draws a third of its potable water.

42. Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), p. 703, cited in Dore Gold and David Keyes, “What If Bush Invited Sharon and Abu Mazen to Camp David?” Jerusalem Viewpoints 526 (January 2-16, 2005), p. 10.

43. Ross, The Missing Peace, pp. 702-703, as cited in Gold and Keyes, “What If?” p. 10.

44. Gilad Sher, Just Beyond Reach: The Israeli Palestinian Negotiations, 1999-2001 (Tel Aviv: Yediot Achronot, 2001), p. 406. [Hebrew]

45. Yoav Peled, “Was Barak Telling the Truth?” Guardian, May 24, 2002, p. 2.

46. Ehud Barak, interview by author, Jerusalem, March, 2005.

47. Benn and Verter, “Even King Solomon Ceded Territories.”

48. Several conversations with senior Sharon adviser Raanan Gissin, most recently on May 25, 2005. This point was also confirmed by a very senior Likud official who is also close to Prime Minister Sharon on May 30, 2005. Gold noted that Sharon believes the Israeli retention of security zones and defensible borders would be more acceptable in the context of a long-term interim agreement. Gold, “Defensible Borders for Israel,” p. 5.

49. Javier Solana, cited in “A stronger EU is a better partner,” Der Speigel, October 25, 2004. [German] Solana called for Israel to leave all “occupied territories” conquered in 1967, including eastern Jerusalem.

50. Yuval Steinitz, “Introduction: Defensible Borders for Peace,” in Defensible Borders for a Lasting Peace (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2005), p. 15.