Dershowitz is still not Israel’s defense attorney

By Ted Belman

ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ, writes Obama explains – and makes it worse. He said that when Obama called on Israel to accept the ‘ 67 lines with swaps as the basis for negotiations, he should also have said the Palestinians must at the same time give up their “right of return”.

This recent statement clearly reveals the underlying flaw in Obama’s thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is no way that Israel can agree to borders without the Palestinians also agreeing to give up any claim to a “right of return.”

President Obama’s formulation requires Israel to give up its card and to make a “wrenching compromise” by dismantling most of the West Bank settlements and ending its occupation of the West Bank. But it does not require the Palestinians to give up their card and to compromise on the right of return. That “extraordinarily emotional” issue is to be left to further negotiations only after the borders have been agreed to.

This temporal ordering – requiring Israel to give up the “territorial” card before the Palestinians even have to negotiate about the “return” card – is a non-starter for Israel and it is more than the Palestinians have privately asked for. Once again, President Obama, by giving the Palestinians more than they asked for, has made it difficult, if not impossible, for the Palestinians to compromise. Earlier in his administration, Obama insisted that Israel freeze all settlement building, despite the fact that the Palestinians had not demanded such action as a precondition to negotiating. He forced the Palestinians to impose that as a precondition, because no Palestinian leader could be seen as less pro-Palestinian than the American President. Now he’s done it again, by not demanding that the Palestinians give up their right of return as a quid for Israel’s quo of returning to the 1967 borders with agreed-upon land swaps.

Dershowitz is in effect equating the non existing right of return with Israel’s legal right to secure and recognized borders.

To be fair, Res 242 stipulated the necessity “For achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem”. The Road map expanded on this to say the solution “includes an agreed, to the refugee issue,”.

The Arabs don’t have a right of return by virtue of this document. They just have a claim for ” just, fair, and realistic solution” but that has to be negotiated.

The Roadmap was silent on what happens if the parties fail to come to an agreement. This is underscored by the fact that the EU is treatening to bypass the Roadmap and go to the UN to recognize a Palestinian state. That that won’t change things legally. The Parties will still have to negotiate everything. Israel is in the driver’s seat and will not agree to anything that is not in their interests.