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UN Resolution 242 (1967)

UN Security Council Resolution 242 is the founding text of Middle East peace diplomacy: a unanimous, non-binding call adopted in New York on 22 November 1967, five months after the Six-Day War, that traded the principle of Israeli withdrawal from land captured in the war for Arab recognition of Israel’s right to exist within secure borders. It is the single most cited, and single most misquoted, document in the conflict. Every peace treaty Israel has signed, with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994, and every negotiation since, from Oslo to Camp David 2000, has been built on its “land for peace” framework.

What it is and where it was made

Section titled “What it is and where it was made”

Resolution 242 was adopted by the 15-member UN Security Council at UN Headquarters in New York on 22 November 1967, unanimously, with no votes against and no abstentions among the members present. It is a Chapter VI resolution, meaning it is a recommendation for a framework of peace, not a Chapter VII enforcement order; it carries no binding legal force of its own and creates no self-executing borders. Its language was hammered out over months of competing American, Soviet, and Arab-backed drafts before the British delegation’s version, sponsored by the UK’s ambassador Lord Caradon, won consensus as the only text all five permanent members and the Arab states’ patrons could accept.

Why it came about: the Six-Day War

Section titled “Why it came about: the Six-Day War”

The resolution exists because of the Six-Day War of 5 to 10 June 1967. Egypt’s President Nasser expelled the UN peacekeeping force (UNEF) that had buffered the Sinai border since 1957, moved tens of thousands of troops into the peninsula, and on 22 May 1967 announced a blockade of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, an act the United States itself had committed in 1957 to treat as a cause for war. Jordan and Syria then signed on to Egypt’s mobilization. Israel struck first against Egypt’s air force on 5 June and, within six days, had taken the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Three months later the Arab League met in Sudan and issued the Khartoum Resolutions, the “three no’s”: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. Resolution 242 was the Security Council’s answer to that deadlock, an attempt to force a diplomatic track where the defeated Arab states had just ruled one out.

Who wrote it, and the missing word

Section titled “Who wrote it, and the missing word”

The decisive sentence sits in the first operative paragraph. Resolution 242 affirms that a just and lasting peace requires the application of two principles: first, “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” and second, “termination of all claims or states of belligerency” alongside recognition of “the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area” living “within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” Read the first clause again: it does not say “the territories,” and it does not say “all territories.” That omission was not sloppy drafting. Lord Caradon and the United States’ ambassador Arthur Goldberg both negotiated it deliberately, over Soviet and Arab objections, because the sponsors did not intend to require Israel back to the fragile 1949 armistice lines, the line that had just failed to prevent invasion. US Secretary of State Dean Rusk confirmed it in his memoir: “There was much bickering over whether that resolution should say from ‘the’ territories or from ‘all’ territories… We wanted that to be left a little vague and subject to future negotiation,” adding that the drafters “never contemplated any significant grant of territory to Israel” but expected “certain anomalies could easily be straightened out with some exchanges of territory,” land swaps, three decades before Camp David put them on the table. The honest wrinkle: the French text reads “des territoires,” which francophone readers take as carrying the article, and Arab delegations have leaned on it ever since; but the resolution was negotiated in English, and every drafter who spoke to the point, Caradon, Goldberg, Rusk, said the English ambiguity was the deal. The resolution’s preamble does declare “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” but its operative text pairs withdrawal with negotiated, secure boundaries rather than an automatic return to the pre-war map. Arab governments and, later, much of international commentary have quoted the resolution as if the definite article were there. It is not, in English or in the resolution as passed.

The resolution’s third paragraph also created a diplomatic mechanism: it asked the UN Secretary-General to appoint a Special Representative to shuttle among the parties and “promote agreement.” Gunnar Jarring, Sweden’s ambassador to Moscow, took the post; the Jarring Mission ran for years without securing a breakthrough, as Egypt and Israel instead slid into the War of Attrition along the Suez Canal.

What happened as a result

Section titled “What happened as a result”

242 did not end the conflict it addressed. Egypt and Syria launched the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 specifically to break the diplomatic stalemate 242 had failed to resolve. That war’s ceasefire, Security Council Resolution 338, explicitly incorporated 242 by reference and called for negotiations “aimed at establishing a just and durable peace,” finally forcing the parties to the table. The land-for-peace logic of 242 became real for the first time at Camp David in 1978 and the Egypt-Israel treaty of 1979, which returned the entire Sinai Peninsula, captured in 1967, in exchange for full peace and recognition, the resolution’s formula executed almost to the letter. It shaped the 1994 Israel-Jordan treaty and sat behind the Oslo framework of the 1990s. 242 also carries the conflict’s other perennial flashpoint in a single clause calling for “a just settlement of the refugee problem,” language far vaguer than the conditional, individual-choice framework of the earlier General Assembly Resolution 194, and one 242 leaves entirely undefined.

Section titled “Its legal status and how it is misused today”

As a Chapter VI text, 242 remains a recommendation, not a boundary drawn in international law; no map is attached to it, and it does not by itself determine where a border between Israel and a Palestinian entity should run, an argument still live in debates over whether settlements are legal. Its most common misuse is the phantom “the”: activists, some governments, and international bodies routinely paraphrase 242 as requiring withdrawal from “the occupied territories” or “all the territories,” treating an explicitly negotiated ambiguity as an unconditional command. The resolution’s own drafters rejected that reading at the time, precisely because Israel’s pre-1967 lines had just proven indefensible. What 242 actually requires is what it says: negotiated, secure, recognized boundaries, reached through the mutual recognition the Arab states at Khartoum had, that same year, refused to give.

Section titled “Related pages”

Khartoum Resolutions, 1967 · UN Resolution 194 · Camp David Accords, 1978 · Oslo Accords, 1993-1995 · Who attacked first in the Six-Day War · Who attacked first in the Yom Kippur War

Sources

Section titled “Sources”