Red line (phrase)

The Red line, or "to cross the red line", is a phrase used worldwide to mean a figurative point of no return or line in the sand, or "a limit past which safety can no longer be guaranteed."

The origin of the phrase in English traces back to the "Red Line Agreement" in 1928 between largest oil companies of Britain, the USA and France at the time of the end of the Ottoman Empire. At the time of signature, the borders of the empire were not clear and to remedy the problem an Armenian businessman named Calouste Gulbenkian, took a red pencil to draw in an arbitrary manner the borders of the divided empire.

The expression remained significant to global diplomacy and was reused during the UN's founding after the WWII, especially in the Anglophone world. France, is unique to refer to it as the "yellow line" (franchir la ligne jaune).

In Israel, the phrase was notably used as a political metaphor by Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, in 1975, when said that Washington "has managed to draw a red line which all the Arab countries know they must not cross - that America is not going to sacrifice Israel for the sake of Arab support."Yitzhak Rabin later used the phrase to refer to the line past which the Syrian army should not be allowed to cross after the 1976 occupation of Lebanon. On September 27, 2012 at the 67th United Nations General Assembly at the U.N. Headquarters in New York in a speech addressing Iran's nuclear program Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly added a red line to a prepared bomb cartoon.

According to Ben Yagoda, a professor of English and journalism at the University of Delaware, in 1987, there are references to "red lines" in conflicts between Chad and Libya, and in a 1999 New York Times article, Muslim clerics in Iran are reported to draw a "'red line for the revolution' that no one should cross." These references occurred earlier as well, appearing a Milwaukee Sentinel article of 26 January 1984 regarding French intervention in Chad and a "red line" held by French forces in southern Chad.

...
Wikipedia