How Jimmy Carter Misread UN Resolution 242, to Israel’s Detriment

By Hugh Fitzgerald | Dec 30, 2024

The chief drafter of Resolution 242 was Lord Caradon (Hugh M. Foot), the permanent representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations from 1964 to 1970. At the time of the Resolution’s discussion and subsequent unanimous passage, and on many occasions since, Lord Caradon always insisted that the phrase “from the territories” quite deliberately did not mean “all the territories,” but merely some of the territories.

Here is Lord Caradon himself on UN Resolution 242:

Much play has been made of the fact that we didn’t say “the” territories or “all the” territories. But that was deliberate. I myself knew very well the 1967 boundaries and if we had put in the “the” or “all the” that could only have meant that we wished to see the 1967 boundaries perpetuated in the form of a permanent frontier. This I was certainly not prepared to recommend.

On another occasion, to an interviewer from the Journal of Palestine Studies (Spring-Summer 1976), Lord Caradon again insisted on the deliberateness of the wording. He was asked:

The basis for any settlement will be United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, of which you were the architect. Would you say there is a contradiction between the part of the resolution that stresses the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and that which calls for Israeli withdrawal from “occupied territories,” but not from “the occupied territories”?

Nota bene: “from territories occupied” is not the same thing as “from occupied territories” – the first is neutral, the second a loaded description.

Lord Caradon answered:

I defend the resolution as it stands. What it states, as you know, is first the general principle of inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war. That means that you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it. We could have said: well, you go back to the 1967 line. But I know the 1967 line, and it’s a rotten line. You couldn’t have a worse line for a permanent international boundary. It’s where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948. It’s got no relation to the needs of the situation.

Had we said that you must go back to the 1967 line, which would have resulted if we had specified a retreat from all the occupied territories, we would have been wrong….

Note how Lord Caradon says that “you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it,” with that “merely” applying to Jordan, but not to Israel, because of the Palestine Mandate’s provisions allocating the territory known now as the “West Bank” to the Jewish state. Note, too, the firmness of his dismissal of the 1967 lines as nothing more than “where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948,” that is, nothing more than armistice lines and not internationally recognized borders.

Jimmy Carter thus misread, in every important particular, UN Resolution 242. He misidentified a statement of principle in the non-binding preamble as among the “key words” of the Resolution itself. He twisted the meaning of the phrase “from territories” intended by its chief author, Lord Caradon, to ensure that there would be no retreat to the pre-1967 armistice lines, to “all the territories.” He failed to mention the record of Israeli withdrawals from 95% of the territories won in the Six-Day War and the great sacrifice Israel made in giving back to Egypt the entire Sinai peninsula, together with billions of dollars put into oilfields, three air bases, and the resort at Sharm el-Sheik. He failed to mention that that very Sinai had been the launching pad for Egyptian attacks in 1948, 1967, and 1973, and for thousands of attacks by Egyptian Fedayeen from 1949 until 1956, when the Sinai campaign put an end to them.

One wonders what Jimmy Carter actually understood of Resolution 242. It seems he never took the time to read Lord Caradon’s discussion of the meaning of Resolution 242, the very resolution that Caradon himself wrote. Carter had always been a self-satisfied and self-righteous preacher man, but not a student of either history, or of the law of nations. When it came to Israel and the Arabs, he was in way over his head, not waving, but drowning.

“Jimmy Carter: A Jewish tragedy – opinion,” by Michael Oren, Jerusalem Post, December 30, 2024:

While shunning meetings with Israeli leaders, he embraced Khaled Mashal, Isma’il Haniyeh, and other terror chiefs. He supported the Goldstone Report that condemned Israel for committing war crimes during the 2008-9 conflict with Gaza and accused Israel of systematically starving Gaza’s civilian population.[Goldstone himself later rejected his own report as based on false information]

The terrorists’ attempts to bore under Israel’s border were, in Carter’s telling, “defensive tunnel[s] being dug by Hamas inside the wall that encloses Gaza.”…

What Carter called “defensive tunnels” were meant to hide Hamas fighters and weapons, until such time as they would be brought to the surface to attack the Zionists. Many of those tunnels snaked underground from Gaza into southern Israel, and were intended to be used by Hamas fighters not “defensively,” but in sneak attacks on Israeli civilians.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, goes the famous Latin phrase. Speak only good of the dead. In Jimmy Carter’s case, however, we really must make an exception.