Impossible Borders

The position on the likely future borders of Israel offered by our colleague R. R. Reno in his “On the Square” article yesterday is, argues David Goldman in his “On the Square” article today, “very different from the position of the present Israeli government, or indeed any Israeli government that might come to power in the foreseeable future.”

In Something Israel Cannot Do , he argues that ““Both sides recognize that the future outlines of a Palestinian state will roughly follow the 1967 boundaries, with a few square miles (perhaps fewer) in East Jerusalem as the (admittedly very) wild card,” as Reno had written,

might be read, however unintentionally, as an endorsement of the Arab position—endorsed by the October Synod of Middle Eastern bishops—which simply demands an Israeli withdrawal to the so-called 1967 boundaries, which were not borders at all, but simply the armistice line at which fighting stopped in 1949.

These are not borders Israel can conceive of accepting, he writes.

Update: Should have included links to this week’s previous entries:

• R. R. Reno’s Bad Dreams .
• David Lasher’s A Propensity for Mutual Respect .
• Joe Carter’s Prepositions, Prejudice, and Religiously-based Explanations .
• George Weigel’s Countercultural Time .
• Elizabeth Scalia’s Why Marxism Always Fails .
• Rabbi Ben Greenberg’s Moving Beyond Ritual .
• David Mills’ Secularist Cheating .