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UN Resolution 242

UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted unanimously on 22 November 1967, is the founding document of the “land for peace” framework that has anchored every serious Israeli-Arab negotiation since. It was passed five months after the Six-Day War, in which Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria after those states massed forces on Israel’s borders (see who attacked first in the Six-Day War).

The number 242 is simply the resolution’s place in the Security Council’s sequential numbering: it carries no symbolic meaning of its own, unlike terms such as Nakba or intifada that describe the events they name. It is cited by number alone in English, Hebrew and Arabic media alike, because the disputed text itself, not a translated label, is what negotiators argue over.

Drafting and the missing article. British ambassador Lord Caradon wrote the operative language after weeks of failed compromise between the US and Soviet-aligned blocs on the Security Council. The resolution calls for Israeli “withdrawal of armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” not “the territories” and not “all the territories.” Caradon and Arthur Goldberg, the US ambassador who helped negotiate the final wording, stated publicly, both before and after the vote, that the missing definite article was deliberate: Israel was not required to return to the pre-1967 Green Line, which both sides understood to be an armistice line and not a recognized border, fixed by the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement. The same paragraph obligates every state in the region, including Israel’s neighbors, to recognize “secure and recognised boundaries free from threats or acts of force,” and calls for “termination of all claims or states of belligerency.”

How it was used. For six years the resolution sat unimplemented. Arab states rejected any negotiation with Israel outright at the September 1967 Khartoum Resolutions, the “three noes”: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation. Resolution 338, passed at the close of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, revived 242 by ordering its parties to begin negotiations on its terms “immediately.” It became the explicit legal basis for the 1978 Camp David Accords with Egypt, the 1993 Oslo Accords, and the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, all of which cite it as the framework for negotiating final, secure borders. The Security Council has reaffirmed its language repeatedly since, most recently in Resolution 2334 of December 2016.

Misuse today. Activists and some governments cite 242 as though it mandates a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines, the reading its own drafters explicitly and repeatedly rejected. Others invoke it to argue the West Bank and Golan are simply occupied, stolen territory rather than land whose final status the resolution itself left open to negotiation (see occupation since 1967 or 1948 and are the settlements legal, and are they wise). The accurate reading is narrower and more honest: 242 sets a framework, land for peace in exchange for negotiated, secure and recognized boundaries, not a map. It does not draw a final line anywhere. Every negotiation since, from the 2000 Camp David summit to the Clinton Parameters, has been an attempt to fill in that map, and none has yet succeeded.

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