The revolution and pacts (49). ‘The dirty border war'(I). Background. General Armistice Agreements (GAAs) (I). Between February and July 1949, General Armistice Agreements (GAAs) were signed between the state of Israel and four Arab states: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Iraq, which had participated in the war with an expeditionary force, did not conclude an agreement since it did not have a common border with Israel; its forces just left the arena. All negotiations were mediated on behalf of the United Nations (UN) by Ralph Bunche, whose achievement earned him the 1949 Nobel Peace Prize. These agreements put a temporary end to hostilities as failure of the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine to achieve more comprehensive peace treaties created a situation that made the General Armistice Agreements into quasi-permanent arrangements that regulated the relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours until the 1967 war. The first was signed by Col. Mohamed Ibrahim Sayf el-Din for Egypt, and Walter Eytan for Israel on the Greek island of Rhodes on February 24, 1949. It provided, among other stipulations, for large demilitarised zones in the Nitzana-Abu Agayla sector. On the other hand, it did not specify the rights of Israeli shipping through the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran. Israel considered the blocking of these waterways incompatible with international law and the armistice provisions and brought the Suez blockade to the attention of the UN Security Council on several occasions. But neither the support received in the form of UN Security Council resolution 95 (1951) nor the military achievements of the Sinai campaign of 1956 were successful in changing Egypt's view, and the blockade in the Canal persisted for thirty years. Lebanon The Israel-Lebanon GAA was signed by Lt. Col. Mordekhai Makleff for Israel and Lt. Col. Tawfiq Salim for Lebanon in Ras Naqura on March 23, 1949. Israel's forces, having retreated from parts of southern Lebanon that they had occupied in the summer of 1948, agreed to fix the armistice demarcation lines along the old international borders and thus introduced greater stability to Israeli-Lebanese relations for more than twenty years. Jordan The Israel-Jordan GAA left a number of issues, such as the access of Jews to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem's Old City and the access of Jordanians to the south through the Bethlehem road, to be resolved in later negotiations. But the failure of the secret peace negotiations between Israeli officials and King Abdullah of Jordan during 1949 and 1951, the assassination of the king in July 1951, and the ensuing rapid deterioration of Israeli-Jordanian relations served to block the resolution of those outstanding issues. (Continued next week) [email protected]
