Thirty-two years ago today — December 21, 1973 — the first Peace Conference on the Middle East opened at Geneva . The complete texts of the opening statements are here. Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban spoke of the “particular complexity of our task”:
There is nothing in any degree similar to the Arab-Israel conflict. The crisis of the Middle East has many consequences, but only one cause. Israel’s right to peace, security, sovereignty, commerce, international friendship, economic development, maritime freedom, indeed its very right to live, has been forcibly denied and constantly attacked.
All the other elements of the conflict are consequences of this single cause. In no other dispute has there ever been such a total denial, not only of the sovereign rights of a State but even of its legitimate personality.
And the emotional assault on Israel has gone much beyond the political context. It sweeps all human solidarities aside. It is nourished by a copious literature with official endorsement that gives support to Nazi anti-Jewish myths. It nourishes a conspiratorial theory of Jewish history. It explodes into the mutilation of Israeli soldiers in the field, the murder and torture of Israeli prisoners, and it has culminated most recently in Syria‘s sadistic refusal to carry out the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.
Out of this kind of ferocious hatred springs the kind of assault on humane values that was enacted in Munich last year, in Rome airport five days ago and with weary regularity in other places between, before and since. When sportsmen in the shelter of the Olympic flag are bound hand and foot and calmly shot in the head, one by one, when passengers in a civil aircraft are methodically blown up and burned, to fragments, do we not come face to face with the mentality and ideology which produced the gas chambers and the gallows of Auschwitz?
Thirty-two years later, we know the answer to Abba Eban’s question. Had the world responded differently when the new assault on humane values began, we might not live today in a world in which terror has already spread to New York, Istanbul, Madrid, Breslan, Bali, London, and other cities.
Two other aspects of Eban’s speech are noteworthy in terms of the present. The first was his statement about the issue of refugees:
We find it astonishing that States whose revenues from oil exports surpass 15,000 million dollars a year were not able to solve this problem in a spirit of kinship and human solidarity. In the very years when the Arab refugee problem was created by the assault on Israel in 1947 and 1948, 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab and Moslem lands and from the debris of Hitler’s Europe were received by Israel and integrated in full citizenship and economic dignity.
There have been other such solutions in Europe, in the Indian sub-continent, in Africa. The Arab refugee problem is not basically intractable: it has been perpetuated by a conscious decision to perpetuate it.
The second was his discussion of defensible borders:
The decisive test for Israel will be the defensibility of its new boundaries against the contingency of attacks and blockades, such as those threatened and carried out in 1967 and 1973.
The experience of October 1973 confirmed our view that the permanent boundaries must be negotiated with the utmost precision and care. If those armoured thrusts had begun from EI Arish or northern Gaza, or from the Golan Heights itself, then the first assault might well have been the last.
Peace-makers do not reconstruct vulnerable, inflammatory situations. They try to correct them. Therefore there cannot be a return to the former armistice lines of 1949-1967, which proved to be inherently fragile and which served as a temptation to an aggressive design of encirclement and blockade, from which Israel broke out in 1967 after weeks of solitude and peril.
A commitment to defensible borders is the second of the three explicit promises that the United States made to Israel in the April 14, 2004 Disengagement Deal.