UN Security Council Resolution 242
Adopted unanimously on 22 November 1967, resolution 242 emphasised the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and called for withdrawal from territories occupied in the recent conflict. It mentioned Palestinians only once, as a refugee problem.
Five months after the June war left Israel in occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan, the Security Council adopted resolution 242 unanimously at its 1382nd meeting, on 22 November 1967. It is the shortest and most consequential document in the diplomacy of the conflict: every negotiating framework from the Rogers Plan to Madrid to Oslo has been built on it.
The resolution emphasises the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every state in the area can live in security. It affirms that such a peace should include the application of two principles: withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict; and termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognised boundaries. It further affirms the necessity of guaranteeing freedom of navigation, of achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem, and of guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political independence of every state in the area.
The withdrawal clause has been argued over ever since. The English text says “from territories occupied,” without a definite article; the equally authentic French text says des territoires occupés, which reads as “the territories.” Israel has relied on the English ambiguity to argue that the resolution requires withdrawal from some, not all, of the occupied territory; the Arab states, most UN members and the International Court of Justice have read it together with the preambular principle that territory may not be acquired by war.
For Palestinians the deeper problem is not the article but the omission. Resolution 242 is addressed to states. It speaks of every state in the area and of secure boundaries between them; the Palestinian people appear in it only as “the refugee problem,” a humanitarian question to be settled justly, without reference to national rights, self-determination or a state of their own. The PLO rejected 242 on precisely that ground for two decades, accepting it only in 1988 as part of the political programme that accompanied the declaration of independence — by which point the framework it established had already defined what could be negotiated and what could not.
Sources
Cited works
3- un.org — auto insert 184858(opens in a new tab)https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-184858/
- digitallibrary.un.org(opens in a new tab)https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/90717
- peacemaker.un.org(opens in a new tab)https://peacemaker.un.org/en/node/9422
Connected in the archive
6 connected records6 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
names this record — 6 records
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- Edward Said on Oslo: The Morning After
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Said wrote as an insider who had left: he discloses in the essay that in the late 1970s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had asked him to persuade Arafat to accept Resolution 242 with a reservation on Palestinian national rights, in exchange for immediate US recognition of the PLO, and that Arafat refused.
- Green Line
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: UN Security Council Resolution 242 and nearly all subsequent diplomacy took the Green Line as the baseline: the 'pre-1967 lines' of two-state negotiations are the 1949 armistice line.
- Naksa
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: In November 1967 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, calling for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the conflict in exchange for peace; its implementation has remained contested ever since.
- The October War and Resolution 338
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Resolution 242 had set out principles; 338 required direct negotiation to apply them, and the pairing "242 and 338" has been the standard formula for the terms of reference of Middle East diplomacy ever since — invoked at the Geneva conference of December 1973, in the disengagement agreements of 1974 and 1975, at Camp David in 1978, at Madrid in 1991 and in the Oslo letters of 1993.
- The Six-Day War
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: In November 1967, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, calling for the "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" and enshrining the principle of land for peace.
- The Ten Point Program
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: …armed struggle remained "first and foremost"; the authority would be "combatant," not a state at peace; and the program elsewhere restated the refusal of Resolution 242, which "obliterates the national right of our people and deals with the cause of our people as a problem of refugees," and rejected any settlement whose price was "recognition, peace, secure…
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- Chicago
“UN Security Council Resolution 242.” Timeline, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/timeline/un-resolution-242.- MLA
“UN Security Council Resolution 242.” Timeline, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/timeline/un-resolution-242. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-un-resolution-242, title = {UN Security Council Resolution 242}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/timeline/un-resolution-242}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }