The Sharon government has been hinting that, in the absence of any credible peace diplomacy toward the Palestinians, it might be prepared to resume the long-stalled talks with Syria.
What else is new? The tactic of “threatening” to turn away from one track of the so-called “peace process” (a.k.a. the peace-free process: all process and none of the peace) is an old, old one for Israeli leaders of both major parties.
And then, just as those hints about possible talks with Syria start going around, the Sharon government announces a massive new settlement-building project on the Golan.
Again, so what else is new?
If I seem slightly jaded by all these extremely repetitive shenanigans it’s because back in December 1999 I published a (pretty good) book about the Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations of the 1990s– and yes, I really do feel that I’ve seen all of this before.
The book, by the way, builds heavily on interviews I conducted with decisionmakers and analysts in Israel, Syria, and the United States. So it provides a pretty rounded picture that I don’t think is available anyplace else. Check it out!
The two sides actually did come pretty close to nailing down a very multi-dimensional peace agreement during “crash” talks they held under US auspices at the Wye Plantation, in early 1996…
But then, the Peres government launched a really nasty new escalation in Lebanon. (This, in response to earlier, very damaging suicide bombings carried out in Israel by Palestinians: go figure.) Peres’ chances in the election of that spring then really plummeted when Israel’s much-neglected ethnic-Palestinian voters, responding to his very intemperate and deadly violence in Lebanon, stayed home in droves– and he was replaced by Bibi Netanyahu…
Oh, what a tragic catalogue of errors– from many sides, not just his.
And then, we had a highly similar thing happen between Barak and the Palestinians four years later: Labor PM delays on vital peace-diplomacy task till very last minute; suddenly finds a very productive negotiating environment; gets hammered at the polls…
Anyway, back to the Golan.
The Golan is often thoughout of in the west as “merely” a strategically sensitive escarpment that overlooks Israel. Actually, it’s a broad, half-egg-shaped piece of Syria’s soverieign territory that spans roughly 70 kilometers north to south and 25 kilometers east to west at its broadest point. (my book, p.28.) Also, in addition to overlooking Israel, it also overlooks a great chunk of southern Syria, including the capital, Damascus.
Golan has been under Israeli military occupation since the war of June 1967. An attempt by Israel back in 1981 to effectively annex it has received no recognition or endorsement from any significant power or government in the world. (Remember that security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 quite rightly stresses, “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.”)
Golan’s huge agricultural potential had been well exploited by the Syrians prior to 1967. Then, it contained two Syrian towns, 107 villages, and 128 of what Syrian demographers describe as “farms and hamlets.” In 1967, nearly all the 140,000 residents of the main, plateau, part of the Golan fled the area in disarray after the collapse of the Syrian Army positions there. They have been living as refugees from their ancestral homes ever since.
The Syrian authorities haven’t traditionally ever talked much about the refugee aspect of the Golan question, but it’s very real. Those original 140,000 refugees have contibuously been refused permission by Israel to return to their homes and farms. Indeed, most of those homes have been destroyed and many of the fields and access roads have been mined to prevent the return of the Syrian farmers.
Only the residents of five, mainly Druze, villages in the mountainous north of the occupied area never left their homes.
In March 1998, when I was doing the research for my book on the negotiations, I traveled around the Golan a bit to check out the human dimension of the issue. I talked with some of the Syrian nationals still steadfastly hanging on there, trying to find a way to survive under Israeli occupation in the same way the residents of the (very nearby) Palestinian West Bank have done. I also talked with some interesting israeli settlers there. And then, later on, with Golani refugees in Damascus.
As a spin-off from my work on the book, I wrote five articles for Al Hayat about the the human issues around Golan. A couple of years ago, I put those pieces up on the web, on my University of Virginia website. But now, to make things easy, I’ve just also uploaded that file onto the JWN archive. So you can now read the pieces by clicking here.
Personally, I think the Golan issue is pretty interesting. But it’s too late to write any more about it now. And I have to get up early tomorrow to finish the current chapter of the book I have finally gotten around to writing as the culmination of my research project on “Violence and its Legacies (in Africa)”.
G’night, one and all. If you do go and read those Golan pieces, give me your feedback on the Comments board!
From your brief comments you are obviously ideologically inclined towards the victimized voices of the Syrians. I have not read your book so I readily concede if you do have a more balnced, academic approach to this conflict. However it is ludicrous to suggest a moral and factual equivilence of Syria’s actualized threat to sovereign Israeli territory and population and Israel’s unknown threat to Damascus. In 1973 Yom Kippur War Israel could have taken Damascus but chose not to even though they had been cynically attacked on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. There is not one word from you about the reason for Israel’s prescence on the Golan. If sovereign territory is used to invade a neighbour – twice, threatening annihilation, and the aggressor is not only defeated but maintains a state of war between the two states, then there is nothing in international law that gives the defeated aggressor rights of return of the territory used to wage invasion.. There are consequences to war and continuing state of hostilities. You should look to the Syrian government and not Israeli to think about the consequences to its citizens before embarking on its military adventures causing those citizens to flee.. When Syria says “oh all right then, just give it back” do you think Israel should meekly comply. Does Israel not have a right to sue Syria and other Arab League states in the International Court of Justice for the wars and terrorist incursions that have cost the lives of 30 000 Israelis and tens of thousands maimed. After all the state of Israel is the product of a Unted Nations Resolution that the Arabs did not accept so it works both ways. If Syria and the others had succeeded would you be advocating so loudly against their occupation and “ethnic cleansing” of Jewish Israeli refugees? It would be nice to hear in the affirmative.