The international community has given almost blanket endorsement to the Arab interpretation of "international legitimacy" as it pertains to the West Bank, meaning that the 1967 lines should be the border of Palestine...giving it, as I say, the aura of "revealed truth."In fact, most world leaders have spent the past generation building up and inflating Palestinian expectations. Consequently, Palestinian demands have not been modified or moderated since the advent of the Oslo process; in fact, they have hardened.Even Washington has sinned in this regard. President Barack Obama began talking about the 1967 lines (with some itsy-bitsy land swaps) as something sacrosanct five years ago, and Secretary of State John Kerry may have assured the Palestinians of America's support for the 1967 lines "as the basis of a Palestinian state" too...By adhering to this fraudulent "revealed truth" and robing it in ardent legalism, the West unhelpfully encourages Palestinian obduracy, and strips the peace process of any realism.As a result, the Palestinian Authority has no need to compromise..Israeli governments over the last 20 years share some of the blame for this sad state of international opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel chose not to engage in exhausting yet essential debates on the legal rights conferred upon the Zionist endeavor by the League of Nations, or on the unsanctioned amputation of Transjordan in 1922 from the Mandate, or on the transient nature of the 1949 armistice lines (which the Arabs never recognized as borders -- until they lost control of the territories), or on the accurate meaning of Resolution 242, or the legal status of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank before 1967 as "Res Nullius" ("no one's property")...
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