Creating Confusion, Pt II
Here’s how we think it happened. In a long analysis, one Washington think tank said the letter “merely offered an observation, an analytical comment that refuted a hypothetical. It had no prescriptive content and … did not specifically state a U.S. position on final-status issues. Conversely, in his comments to Abbas, President Bush specifically committed the United States to a certain final-status position: the 1949 armistice lines are the starting point, from which any change must be mutually agreed.”
Here’s how we think it happened. In a long analysis, one Washington think tank said the letter “merely offered an observation, an analytical comment that refuted a hypothetical. It had no prescriptive content and … did not specifically state a U.S. position on final-status issues. Conversely, in his comments to Abbas, President Bush specifically committed the United States to a certain final-status position: the 1949 armistice lines are the starting point, from which any change must be mutually agreed.”
The President of the United States doesn’t “merely offer an observation” in writing to foreign leaders. He makes American policy. Perhaps the oral remark was “merely an observation.”
The think tank called it “a huge advance for the Palestinians… In the arcane lexicon of Middle East diplomacy, by positing the 1949 lines as the reference point, Bush … effectively made the Palestinians a successor to the signatories of the armistice (and) inadvertently eroded the special status of UN Security Council Res. 242, which makes no reference to the armistice lines.”
Sorry, they ARE the reference point. They are where the fighting stopped and where it started again. While, in fact, Res. 242 doesn’t mention the 1949 Armistice Line, to what “territories occupied in the recent conflict” does it refer if not to territories east of the armistice line? And, unless the writer wants to posit a return of territory to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which illegally annexed it in 1949 and renounced it in 1988, the Palestinians ARE the successors to the Arab signatories of the armistice.
An Israeli analyst opined, “It changes the default position.” Previously, if things aren’t going well in the final status talks, Israel would have pointed to the letter and assumed the U.S. position would be “it is unrealistic to expect … a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” After the Rose Garden speech, the Palestinians could claim the U.S. default position would be, “changes to the 1949 armistice lines must be mutually agreed to,” meaning the line will become the border by default.
If you stretch that thought further, the implication of the second is that the President can and/or will “force” Israel to withdraw to the armistice line. But since both versions require mutual agreement at the end of the day, it is hard to understand the circumstance under which President Bush would suddenly declare that HE is the arbiter of the line and HE chooses 1949, ignoring those pesky “major population centers.” More likely, if there is no agreement in the final status talks, they will remain deadlocked and Israel will remain where it is, or where it chooses to go.
JINSA believes that the two statements are parts of one another – the letter being the formal and deeper statement of policy, the Rose Garden being shorthand. Friends of Israel might usefully ask for clarification of the letter as U.S. policy, but leave it to others to claim that the oral remark is policy and the letter is a mistake.