Northern Border Secured, Says Israeli Envoy

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“…vehemently denied. ‘The primary objective was to secure peace for the Galilee. It is intolerable for people to live underground for fear of Katuysha (rocket) attacks,’ Netanyahu said, despite rather widespread agreement that the PLO had for a year prior to the 1982 invasion abided by a cease-fire.

‘The invasion smashed the PLO infrastructure even though we had underestimated it. Lebanon’s political polity was never a consideration or a primary objective. The PLO is today divided and scattered. Syria is at odds with the (Yassir) Arafat faction and both the PLO’s political strength and its strength on the ground have been smashed.

It is a defeated, though not extinct, force in the region,’ Netanyahu said. Reminded that in the past two weeks there have been several Katuysha attacks launched from Jordan on Galilean settlements, Netanyahu chuckled. ‘Yes, King Hussein is doing a minuet with the PLO. He gives them public support.

And he may make an occasional concession and allow them to use Jordan as a base for some minor terrorist operations, but privately he does not support them.’… On the issue of the Israeli-occupied West Bank — Netanyahu vehemently decries the use of any terms other than Judea and Samaria for the area — the ambassador takes a hard line.

There will be no Arab sovereignty on the West Bank. Period. Netanyahu insists there is the broadest possible consensus in Israel in this regard. Making all the usual historical Jewish claims to the area and rejecting any Palestinian national rights on the West Bank, Netanyahu supports the current government policy: Jordan is Palestine.

Jews have every historical, political and legal right to settle the West Bank, said Netanyahu, a native of Tel Aviv who grew up in Jerusalem. While Arab states quibble over Palestinian rights, the Israeli settlements are carrying out a fait accompli on the West Bank. And with the PLO smashed in Lebanon, the issue of who controls the area is all but moot.

‘Jordan is Palestine, and Palestine is Jordan,’ Netanyahu insists, although Hussein, a minority Hashemite ruler who hardly needs 750,000 West Bank Palestinians pouring across the Jordan River, would undoubtedly disagree. ‘The Arabs already have 80 percent of old Palestine and we hold 17 percent (within the pre-1967 borders).

There is no reason to create a 22nd Arab state at the expense of the one Jewish state. What we are arguing about are borders between the Jewish and an Arab state. There is no reason why justice should demand the border be on either the east or west bank of the Jordan,’ he said. On the basis of security alone, Netanyahu said Israel can never give up the West Bank.

Israel’s eastern front will remain in IDF hands. That is not negotiable. ‘We simply can’t survive giving up Judea and Samaria. The real challenge to peace is not our occupation, but would be our giving up the region. We didn’t occupy the area before 1967 and there was no peace.

Since 1967, however, King Hussein has not been tempted to invade and has remained out of the subsequent wars.’ Netanyahu said Israel’s far left wants to solve the problem of trying to assimilate three-quarters of a million Arabs by giving up control of the territory. On the other hand, the far right wants to keep the territory but drive the people off the land.

Neither is acceptable to the ambassador, though he was unwilling to speculate on a permanent political solution beyond the status quo, except to say the two peoples will have to live together on the West Bank as they do in the rest of the country.

Netanyahu said the key to peace rests not in illusory visions of a Palestinian state, but in the Arab realization that Israel is on the West Bank to stay. Only when that realization dawns can a peace plan can be negotiated. ‘Is the so-called Palestinian problem the key to peace in the Mideast? In the Arab world comprising 21 nations, there is almost continual warfare.

Virtually every year since the establishment of the state of Israel, there has been at least one conflict between Arab states — conflicts that have nothing whatever to do with Israel or the Palestinians. Lebanon is a microcosm of the Arab world — an almost permanent state of war with family, tribal, religious, sectarian and national conflicts.

There simply is no tradition of the non-violent settlement of conflict,’ Netanyahu said. ‘The key to peace? When do the Arabs make peace with each other?’… ‘Israel’s real crime has nothing to do with the Palestinians.

What we are guilty of is being the only non-Arab, non-Moslem people who have succeeded in defying the Arab dominance of the southern Mediterranean in creating a non-Arab national entity.’”

Context added by this archive

Netanyahu as ambassador to the U.N., interviewed at length in 1985, setting out the Jordan-is-Palestine position and refusing the term West Bank. The reporter notes in his own voice where the claims are disputed.

Cite this clipping

"Northern Border Secured, Says Israeli Envoy," The Arizona Republic, 3 February 1985, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1985-001. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1985-001

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One man, and the position he never changed