Chapter 10. The Armistice Agreements, January to July 1949
Talks with Egypt
"Entering the talks, Israel’s negotiating position was based on the military realities on the ground and the fact of Egyptian defeat; the Egyptian position, on the pre-Yoav and pre-Horev front lines and on the UN Security Council resolutions, which had called on Israel to withdraw to the 14 October lines. The withdrawal-promoting Security Council resolution of 4 November was buttressed by a memorandum by Bunche defining and endorsing the truce lines of 14 October.6
Israel initially demanded that Egypt withdraw from the areas its troops still occupied in Palestine—that is, the Gaza Strip and the Bethlehem area—and that the future armistice boundary between the two countries be based on the old international Egypt-Palestine frontier, agreed between the British Empire (effectively governing Egypt) and the Ottomans (ruling Palestine) in 1906. The Egyptians initially sought what amounted to sovereignty over the central and southern Negev—partly in order to restore the historic territorial contiguity of the Arab and Islamic worlds—and demanded that Israel withdraw from the areas of Beersheba, Bir Asluj, and gAuja. The southern Negev and Beersheba, they said, could be demilitarized. The Egyptians also demanded that Israel allow the evacuation of the Faluja Pocket—“which weighed on them most heavily of all,” as one Israeli delegation member put it7—before anything else was discussed or settled. Israel refused."
Talks with Lebanon
"The Israeli-Lebanese armistice talks, held in no-man’s-land on the border near Rosh Haniqra (Ras al-Naqurah) on the Mediterranean coast, were a shorter and less disputatious affair. From the start, there was a friendly atmosphere. Indeed, as the Israelis reported, “the Lebanese [delegates] pretend/ say that they are not Arabs and that they were dragged into the adventure [that is, the war] against their will. They maintain that, for internal reasons, they cannot openly admit their hatred for the Syrians.”11"
Importance of the Negev to the Israeli's
"Ben-Gurion—and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the Zionist movement as a whole—had for decades been obsessed with the Negev and its southern maritime outlet, the coastline of the Gulf of gAqaba. The empty wasteland was seen as the country’s only relatively large stretch of land available for the absorption of a mass of immigrants, and many suspected that it harbored mineral riches. Ben-Gurion had visited what the Bible (occasionally) and he called “Eilat” (or “gEtzion-Gaver”) at least three times in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1935 he had written to the pro-Zionist US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis of Eilat’s “great significance,” quoting the relevant biblical passage (1 Kings 9:26). “It is of the greatest economic and political importance that a Jewish settlement be established there as soon as possible, in order to create a political fait accompli.”17"
Talks with Jordan
"In the background, throughout, hovered the threat and possibility, in the absence of an agreement, of unilateral Israeli military action to alter the front lines—already roughly hinted at by gUvda, launched three days after the start of the formal negotiations, and by the Israeli occupation in mid-March of a series of positions in the foothills of western Judea.28 In mid-March the IDF had been poised to conquer part of the West Bank but had been halted by Ben-Gurion in part because of warnings by Abba Eban about Washington’s possible reaction.29 Israel threatened to conquer the western foothills of Samaria if Jordan did not agree to cede them through diplomacy. At one point, Israel presented a twenty-four-hour ultimatum.30 gAbdullah feared that if the IDF reopened hostilities, Israel would take the whole of the West Bank, not merely the strip of territory on its northwestern periphery. He made a last-minute effort to mobilize British and American support. But neither power was willing to guarantee the existing lines as international frontiers or, indeed, Jordanian control of the West Bank.31 Britain was unwilling to extend its defense pact guarantee beyond the East Bank."
"Officers such as Allon, OC Southern Command, felt that the IDF during the war had missed the opportunity to establish a secure, natural frontier along the Jordan River. Allon, bypassing channels, took the unusual step, a moment before the conclusion of the Israeli-Jordanian armistice agreement, of urging Ben-Gurion to order the conquest of the West Bank. He wrote (saying he was conveying the thinking of “most of the army’s senior officers”): “There is no need for a perfect military education to understand the permanent danger to the peace of Israel from the presence of large hostile forces in the western Land of Israel—in the [Jenin-Nablus-Tulkarm] Triangle and the Hebron Hills.” The area could be conquered easily and “relatively quickly,” given the balance of forces. And gaining the first line of foothills peacefully, through the prospective armistice agreement, “cannot be seen as a solution to the problem.” Israel needed territorial “depth,” argued Allon. He feared the long-term possibility of a Jordanian-Iraqi lunge, perhaps assisted by British troops stationed in the West Bank, across Israel’s narrow waist to the sea, which would cut the state in half. Israel’s strategic border should be along the Jordan River. Such a line, he argued, would also give Israel the added benefit of hydroelectric power, which could be derived from the river, and additional water for the development of the Negev. Britain, he assured Ben-Gurion, would not intervene to safeguard any area west of the river. “Time is working against us,” he cautioned. Allon expected that “a large part” of the West Bank’s population, refugee and permanent, would flee eastward across the river in the event of such an onslaught.35"