UN Security Council Resolution 242

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

• Security Council resolution 242 (1967) — United Nations (UNISPAL)
• Resolution 242 (1967), 22 November 1967 — UN Digital Library
• Security Council Resolution 242: The Situation in the Middle East — UN Peacemaker