Whoa there, AP! The generally well-regarded US newswire is putting out an extremely tendentious little “fact-box” today, on the situation in the Israeli-occupied Golan. Tendentious and, need I add, one-sided.
For example, here:
- • LOCATION: Plateau at southwestern corner of Syria overlooking Sea of Galilee and northern Israel.
Note to AP: The occupied Golan also overlooks a huge stretch of Syria, including the national capital, Damascus. And from the top of Jebel al-Sheikh, the area’s highest mountain– known by the Israelis as Mount Hermon– Israel’s military is also currently able to dominate a large chunk of Lebanon, too.
Guess it depends on whether we have an Israelo-centric view of the Middle East, or not?
Then, the AP has this:
- • HISTORY: Syrian soldiers shelled northern Israel from the Golan Heights between 1948 and 1967. Israel captured the territory in 1967 Mideast war. Israel annexed it in 1981, though no country recognized that.
The last two sentences there are correct. The rest of the graf is unbelievably one-sided. Yes, Syrian soldiers used Golan between 1948 to shell Israeli forces– but those forces were busy consolidating Israel’s military control over areas to the north of the Sea of Galilee that were supposed to have been completely demilitarized under the Armistice Agreement of 1949. UN records from the 1949-1967 period make clear there were infractions from both sides of the Israel-Syria Armistice Line– but more from the Israeli side than from the Syrian side.
Finally, the AP box gives us this:
- • DISPUTE: In 2000, Israel-Syria peace talks broke down. Israel offered to withdraw from all the Golan Heights down to the international border in exchange for full peace. Syria insisted on recovering land across the border that it captured in 1948, including the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.
This is simply not true. At Geneva, Ehud Barak notably did not agree to withdraw to the international border, which according to the maps drawn between Syria and Mandate Palestine ran either along the water-line along the northeast quadrant of the Sea of Galilee, (as in this recent BBC map or this CIA map), or in some versions through the Sea of Galilee roughly at the twelve o’clock and three o’clock lines. Anyway, in those days Syria had certain valuable rights as a littoral (coast-line) power on the SoG, including rights to fish, undertake water-borne transport on it, maintain small ports, etc.
In 1994, during the heart of the negotiations that Syria and Israel maintained from 1991 thru 1996, Israeli PM Rabin told the American mediators that in return for an array of other security measures, demilitarization, normalization of relations, economic links etc, he would be prepared to withdraw Israel’s forces to the international border; and in the negotiations that continued between then and the defeat of his successor, Shimon Peres, at the Israeli polls in spring 1996, that was the basis on which the negotiations continued. (In Israel, it became known as the “Rabin deposit.”) During marathon sessions at the Wye Plantation in Maryland in January 1996, the two sides came very close to concluding all the elements of a final peace agreement.
Peres’s success, Bibi Netanyahu, was not interested in proceeding with those talks. The talks resumed only some months after Ehud Barak was elected in 1999. But when he inveigled Bill Clinton into presenting his “final, final offer” to Syrian president Hafez al-Asad in May 2000, the extent of the promised Israeli withdrawal had mysteriously (or not) shrunk from the Rabin Deposit. Now, Barak insisted on Israel maintaining control off a strip some 100 or so metres wide around the whole of the SoG coast-line. Not surprisingly, Asad demurred. Less than a month later he had died of a heart attack…. and a few months after that, as we know, the Palestinians’ second intifada started, and then Barak lost at the polls to Ariel Sharon.
So, friends at AP: Please let’s not keep that very tendentious, and indeed inaccurate, listing of “facts” up on your newswire. The way you present this material matters. It matters both to the way you are viewed around the world– whether as fair-minded and accurate, or neither of those things. And it matters because your material affects the way many Americans (and perhaps other people elsewhere) think about these issues. If you want to make it look like the Syrians have always been wrong and the Israelis blameless, that matters.
By the way, since the Golan issue is now going to be discussed at Annapolis, people might want to take a look at this series of articles I published in Al-Hayat in 1998, on the human geography of the area.
Also, since I see that my 2000 book on the Israeli-Syrian negotiations of 1991-96 is now listed by the publisher, the US Institute of Peace, as out-of-print, you might want to get a used one from Amazon.
I think I’ll contact USIP and see if we can maybe have them put the final chapter of the book up on the web… (Note to certain carping commenters here: I have never had a royalty agreement with USIP for sales of this book, since they had helped fund some of the research for it. So when I mention the book here, it is certainly not from a desire to increase my earnings.)
More on Lebanon, Syria, the Golan, and the Presidential deadlock…an excellent piece from the Managing Editor of the Daily Star, Marc Siriois.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=87020
The AP got it correct. Helena’s slanted interpretation of history and selective perspectives of negotiations are not historical fact.
Stop trying to pretend that you have any journalistic integrity. You are a hateful propagandist for anyone that is hostile to Israel.
Evidence, Joshua? Sources? Have you even read my book, which includes lots of material from interviews I conducted with S. Peres, I. Rabinovitch, and other authoritative Israeli sources?
No, I guess you really don’t have any familiarity with my book or any of the other relevant sources. Engaging in childish name-calling is so much easier than doing the hard work of engaging with the historical record, I suppose.
Helena, do you have any comments as to the Israeli assertion that the loss of the Golan Heights would put Israel at a security disadvantage? That’s the assertion I always hear repeated.
Does the possession of the Golan by Israel put Syria at a security disadvantage? If it really does, then
why hasn’t Israel overrun Syria if it can by controlling the Golan? Syria is a regional power. I think that’s a different situation from the Palestinians, a stateless and defenseless people, or Lebanon, a weak state that can’t defend itself from Israeli aggression. I find it difficult to imagine Syria as vulnerable without the Golan.
Inkan, Israel uses “security” as the excuse to hold onto all of its ill-gotten gains. It even made the ludicrous claim that it began colonizing (illegally) the territories it occupied in 1967 for security reasons.
What part of the inadmissibility of increasing a state’s territory by war is not clear, Inkan? The security excuse changes nothing.
Shirin, I was not talking about the territories in general. I was talking specifically about the Golan. I asked if the security assertions about the Golan are valid or not.
Inkan, it is true that, if you stand in some parts of northern Israel, Golan and Mount Hermon (Jebel al-Sheikh) loom high above you. Back in the days when artillery was the biggest thing to worry about, that was a concern. Though that didn’t prevent Israeli farmers and the IDF from continuing to make incursions into what was supposed to be a DMZ at the north of the Sea of Galilee.
For many years now, though, it has been clear that surface-to-surface missiles can come at any country– including Syria, or Israel, or anyone– from any altitude and from a great distance. Israelis experienced that in particular in 1991. Therefore, hanging onto the high ground is no longer a decisive advantage for anyone.
Meanwhile if you go as I hope you do to the record of the Israeli-Syrian negotiations of 1991-96, you’ll see they reached preliminary agreement on wide-ranging demilitarization on the Syrian side of the eventual international border, along with a host of other security measures as well as economic and other measures to tie the interests of the two countries together. Like France and Germany after WW2. In the modern age, that’s a far better guarantor of the security of Israelis than sitting up on high ground that belongs to someone else.
Syrians do feel vulnerable by having the IDF sitting on top of the Jebel. In 1973, the Israelis bombed downtown Damascus. And of course they’ve done many military things in Lebanon that have scared the bejeesus out of the Syrians, given that one of Israel’s main potential invasion routes to Damascus lies through the Bekaa Valley. Also, the most recent air strike against N. Syria.) But you’re right to note that Syria’s status as a state gives it a crucially different status in regional and world politics from the Palestinians.
Actually, resolving the Israeli-Syrian strand of the conflict is very straightforward, a nearly classic case of state-to-state diplomacy, compared with the challenge of finding an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
I remember reading an IDF security assessment a couple of years ago (can’t remember where, unfortunately) which concluded that the Golan is no longer necessary as a security buffer in light of the improvements in aerial and satellite surveillance since 1967. Also, as Helena points out, artillery is no longer the main threat (although ground invasion may still be one) and territorial depth isn’t really significant in defending against surface-to-surface missiles. If they can negotiate a neutrally-operated early warning station on Mount Hermon that provides information to both countries, then security shouldn’t be an issue.
Inkan, my point is that whether or not security assertions are valid, security is not an acceptable justification, either legally or morally for ethnically cleansing and colonizing occupied territory, for using its natural resources (water, agricultural land) to benefit the occupying power, and certainly not for annexing it.
Friends:
Discussing the Middle East is fascinating, intellectually invigorating, depressing, anger making, etc. My favorite TAing that I did was for a course called War and Peace in the Middle East-the premise, and what I use now, in my Human Geography courses is a. All students have the right to feel comfortable b. All perspectives matter-INSULTS and SMEARING DO NOT. Why can’t we be mature and do that here? Otherwise, what is the point of being here? Is there not something better to do with one’s day?
DISCOURSE/DISCUSS/CRITIQUE. No whining/insulting.
What have polemics ever advanced?
Well, then, if the security issue regarding the Golan has now been rendered moot by changes in the technology and tactics of warfare, then Israel no longer has a reason to retain the Heights. I do hope, then, that a Sinai-like settlement to return the Golan can be reached.
Inkan, security might have been at least a quasi-legitimate reason to occupy the Golan Heights with troops (although ceasing the deliberate provocations would have been cheaper, and probably overall as effective, if not moreso). But surely you would not maintain that security is a credible pretext for systematically ethnically cleansing the Golan Heights of 95% of its population, systematically demolishing 95+% of its towns and villages, colonizing it, and taking its natural resources for the profit of Israel.
Would you?
Another thing, Inkan. Even if Israel does have a residual, non-artillery-related security concern about Golan– or even if, actually it still had a pressing artillery-related concern– those concerns can all be met through the implementation of (negotiated) demilitarization regimes and other forms of security regimes. After all, the goal for Israel is to deny Syria the right to place its artillery or whatever else up there… and meanwhile, guess what, one evident goal of the Syrians is to remove the Israeli artillery and whatever that is already up on Golan and pointing toward Damascus.
And indeed, it was just such a demilitarization regime that was nearly completely negotiated (along with other elements of a robust peace agreement) during the negotiations the two governments held in the Wye Plantation in January 1996– all done, in the context of an understanding that Israel would withdraw completely.
Bottom lines here: security concerns can be met in ways other than hanging onto another country’s land; and also, you can’t actually assure your own country’s security in a lasting way if you are meanwhile increasing the insecurity of your neighbor. (This latter is an example of what’s known as “the security dilemma.”)