Livni Rejects Green Line as Final Boundary
Even the centrist opposition would keep some West Bank settlements
January 04, 2010
Livni in Paris last month.(Gerard Cerles/AFP/Getty Images)
The Wall Street Journal sat down with Tzipi Livni, the leader of Israel’s opposition Kadima Party, late last month (that is, before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked her to join his unity cabinet … and before she turned him down). Notably, even Livni—a centrist, appreciably to the left of Netanyahu’s Likud Party—rejects any settlement that would establish the pre-1967 Green Line as the final boundary between Israeli and Palestinian states, due to the Israeli settlements that lie just on the other side in the West Bank and East Jerusalem:
Regardless of what you think of settlement activity in the past—whether you think it’s Jews building in their ancient homeland or it is against international law. It’s not important. Because we have what we call ‘blocs of settlements,’ and most of them are very close to the Green Line. It takes only a few percentages [of the territory]. Whether we like it or not, we have to give an answer to these realities in any peace agreement.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has insisted that the Green Line be considered “sacrosanct.” On the other hand, Livni wryly uses her harder line on the final-boundary issue in order to take a softer line on another of Abbas’s demands: a full settlement freeze. As she puts it, “It’s not about building now, but to keep the blocs of settlements as part of Israel in the future.”
Earlier: The Road Map to Real Negotiations
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.
