The Armistice Agreements

The UN mediator Ralph Bunche — successor to Count Folke Bernadotte, assassinated in Jerusalem in September 1948 by the Zionist Lehi group — negotiated with each of the belligerents separately. Egypt signed on the island of Rhodes on 24 February 1949, and Jordan signed there on 3 April; Lebanon signed at Ras al-Naqoura on the two countries’ frontier on 23 March, and Syria at Hill 232 near Mahanayim on 20 July. Iraq never signed; it simply withdrew its forces and handed its positions to Jordan.

The lines the agreements drew were the lines the armies happened to hold, adjusted by negotiation. Israel ended the war in possession of roughly seventy-eight percent of Mandatory Palestine, well beyond the fifty-five percent allotted to it by the partition plan. Jordan held the hill country that became known as the West Bank, along with East Jerusalem, and annexed it in 1950; Egypt administered the Gaza Strip without annexing it. Under the Jordanian agreement Israel also acquired the “Little Triangle” — a belt of Arab villages running from the Baqa–Jaljulia road and Kafr Qasim in the south to Wadi Ara in the north — when Iraqi forces withdrew from it, adding a substantial Palestinian population to the new state by treaty rather than by conquest. Article VI of that agreement moved the line in stages over fifteen weeks, offset by a deviation in Jordan’s favour in the Hebron–Dead Sea sector, and promised that the inhabitants of the affected villages “shall be entitled to maintain, and shall be protected in, their full rights of residence, property and freedom,” with full compensation without delay for any land left behind. Little of that survived contact with the Israeli land regime that followed.

Every one of the four agreements contains a clause insisting that the demarcation line is dictated exclusively by military considerations and prejudices no future territorial claim or political settlement. That reservation is the legal origin of the Green Line: a ceasefire line that has functioned ever since as the reference point for what is Israel and what is occupied territory, precisely because it was never agreed to be a border.

What the armistices did not do was end the conflict. The Conciliation Commission’s Lausanne conference, running from April to September 1949, failed to produce agreement on refugees, territory or Jerusalem. The refugees were not permitted to return; those who tried were classed as “infiltrators” and shot at or expelled. The Palestinians themselves were party to none of the four agreements — their country had been partitioned among Israel, Jordan and Egypt without a Palestinian signature on any document.

Sources

• Egypt–Israel General Armistice Agreement, 24 February 1949 — PalQuest
• Jordan–Israel General Armistice Agreement, 3 April 1949 — PalQuest
• Lebanese–Israeli General Armistice Agreement, Ras al-Naqoura, 23 March 1949 — Avalon Project, Yale Law School
• Israeli–Syrian General Armistice Agreement, Hill 232 near Mahanayim, 20 July 1949 — Avalon Project, Yale Law School
• IV. The Palestine War and the Nakba — PalQuest