Natural border
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A natural border is a border between states which is composed of natural formations such as rivers, mountain ranges, or deserts.
Having a natural border is strategically very useful, as invading armies can have a hard time crossing such a border. They may also be easily defended.
Expanding until natural borders are reached, and maintaining those borders once conquered, have long been a major focus of foreign policy and war goals in the past. For example, the Roman Republic, and later, the Roman Empire expanded continuously until it reached its natural borders: first the Alps, later the Rhine river, the Danube river, the Sahara desert, and others. From the Middle Ages onwards until the Industrial Revolution, France sought to expand its borders towards the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Rhine River, while gradually releasing any territories held on the far side of those borders, because they were difficult to hold successfully in the long run.
In more recent times, a primary goal of Israeli foreign and security policy since its establishment in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The territory originally assigned to the State of Israel in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 was based on the demographics of the British Mandate of Palestine. These borders, which sought to ensure that the Mandate's territory was divided fairly between the Jews and Palestinian Arabs, were utterly unrelated to the physical geography of the country and had two "kissing points" (where the territory was such that neither state was continuous) in the desert near Isdud and Nazareth, making the borders of both the proposed Jewish state that became Israel and the proposed Arab state that never came into being nearly impossible to defend. A major objective of Israel in 1948, as well as in 1956 and in 1967 was to take over the West Bank, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, and Sinai Peninsula, which would give Israel the Suez Canal and the Jordan River as borders. Israel gave up its designs on the Sinai after the Camp David Accords gave it a security assurance with respect to Egypt, and it is possible that the Golan (taken in 1967 as a buffer zone against Syrian shelling of settlements in northern Israel) will similarly be returned should Israel receive a similar security assurance from Syria. However, the West Bank and Gaza Strip are in the uncomfortable situation of being both well within Israel's natural borders (from a purely geographic standpoint) and being the only possible land for a Palestinian state.
