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April 22, 2011

The '1967 border' -- the lie that won't die

By Leo Rennert

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post, in their April 22 editions, report that a group of prominent Israeli leftist intellectuals demonstrated in Tel Aviv in support of a Palestinian state based on the "1967 borders."

Except that there was no "border" on Israel's eastern flank from 1948 until 1967 -- only a 1949 armistice line that marked the farthest westward military penetration by Jordan during Israel's War of Independence when half a dozen Arab armies unsuccessfully tried to exterminate the nascent Jewish state.

The 1949 armistice line was never recognized internationally as a "border."  Neither of course were Jordan's aggression and illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem since  they occurred in flagrant violation of the 1947 UN partition plan to divide British Mandate Palestine between a Jewish state and an Arab state.

But since the Times and the Post espouse the media myth of prior existence of a formal "border" that Israel  somehow transgressed in the 1967 Six-Day War, their correspondents keep repeating it, evidently hoping to transmute a historical lie into acceptable contemporary parlance.

Yet, however many times it gets repeated, existence of a 1967 "border" remains an unvarnished lie.

Compounding this lie, the Times and the Post also erase from actual history the fact that during Jordan's illegal 1949-67 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the entire Old City of Jerusalem, Jews were barred from Judaism's holiest sites -- the Western Wall, Temple Mount and Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs.   A return to the 1967 line would deal Jews a similar fate. 

The truth, so lacking in the Times and the Post, is that Israel still awaits an eastern "border" that can and will be fixed only as part of a final resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict , as mandated by the UN Security Council in Resolution 242.  In the meantime, history and Arab aggression  have  swept away the 1949 armistice line and, notwithstanding the lie perpetuated by the Times' Isabel Kershner and the Post's Joel Greenberg, a "border" still remains an elusive quest that has yet to reach its  final destination.

It is bad enough that Kershner and Greenberg use the news pages of the Times and the Post to beat the drums for a Palestinian state on Palestinian terms; it makes a complete mockery of responsible, objective journalism to inject a demonstrable lie -- a non-existent 1967 "border" to further their agenda.
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