Middle East peace progress?

[unixronin]

The BBC reports that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, after narrowly winning a no-confidence vote, is considering a redrawing of Israel's borders that would cede Arab Israeli towns to Palestine in exchange for parts of the West Bank.  His plan also calls for removing 17 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and relocating their 7,000 settlers back to Israel, along with a further 3 settlements in the West Bank.  Sharon's plan hearkens back to the land-for-peace plan originally proposed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated in November 1995 by a Jewish law student who hoped to halt the peace talks and who later declared that he wanted to "give our country to the Arabs."  At the time of his death, Rabin had reached accords with Jordan and the Palestinians, leaving Lebanon and Syria as the only immediate neighbors of Israel with which a peace accord had not been reached.  Current Palestinian premier Ahmed Qurie, currently involved in negotiations for a summit with Sharon, has voiced his approval of the plan.

Syria, meanwhile, wants to resume peace talks with Israel that broke off four years ago, but does not want to start over from scratch on the talks as Israel prefers.  Syria's primary demand for peace with Israel is the return of the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.  Israel has been lukewarm on resuming peace talks with Syria; Sharon has made it clear that he wants peace with Syria, but only under the condition that Syria breaks its links with the Hizballah, Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad terrorist groups¹, to all of which Syria supplies logistical support.  In particular, Syria has considerable control over Hizballah, and has used the group to further its political ends in Lebanon.

The Golan is a small area, only about the size of New York's borough of Queens, but is strategically important to both Israel and Syria -- to Syria, because a force in the Golan Heights is within striking range of Syria's capital, Damascus; and to Israel, because a force in possession of the Golan Heights can threaten villages in the Galilee region of northern Israel and Lake Kinneret, Israel's only lake, which is a significant source of water², food and energy for much of Israel.  After Israel's War of Independence in 1948-49, Syria built fortifications in the Golan, from which they repeatedly shelled Israeli civilian targets until Israel captured the Golan Heights in the Six Day War.  Currently, 14,000 Israelis and 17,000 to 18,000³ Druze live in the Golan.  While they are an Arabic culture, the Druze are friendly to Israel and have fought alongside the IDF to defend Israel since allying themselves with Israel in the War of Independence.

(The Druze are a subject worthy of study in their own right.  Just as Christianity grew out of Judaism and believes itself the True Faith, and Islam in turn grew out of Christianity and believes itself the only True Faith, the Druze grew out of Islam and believe in turn that Islam has fallen from the True Way.  They do not proselytize, as theirs is a closed faith due to some interesting ideas about reincarnation⁴, and deny the concept of holy war.  The central tenet of the Druze faith is refreshingly and interestingly different from most faiths -- they argue that those who believe their sins can be forgiven or atoned for through ritual, penance or prayer will continue to sin, in the expectation of forgiveness, so the Druze instead forswear all forms of prayer and ritual and emphasize acting rightly at all times.  Wow, what a concept, huh?  A lot of our evangelists could do with internalizing the idea that there is no "get out of Hell free" card.)

The Golan thus presents a significant political obstacle.  Both Israel and Syria want it, both for their own protection, though Syria has in the bast used it as a base from which to launch attacks against Israel.  It is not important to Syria other than militarily, offering no resources to Syria, while the watershed it controls is vital to Israel.  (In fact, Syria actually attempted in 1964 to divert the sources of the Jordan River and prevent them from reaching Israel, which would have had serious consequences for Israel.)  It can be strongly argued that it would be very much against Israel's best interests to give up the Golan, and there is a considerable population there who would neither want to give up their farms and businesses, nor to become Syrian-governed.  If Syria makes return of the Golan a non-negotiable point, this could be the rock upon which peace between Syria and Israel founders.  Yet with Syria and Israel at peace, the Golan would have essentially no value to Syria.

Hopefully, President Assad will realize that and, if he genuinely wants peace, be prepared to yield on the issue.  How much of his present desire to re-open negotiations with Israel is due to a genuine desire for peace and how much is due to his "feeling the pressure" from the presence of American forces next door in Iraq, with which Syria shares its longest border, is a subject for speculation.

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[1]  A condition recently also urged by Colin Powell.

[2]  The Lake Kinneret watershed supplies 30% of Israel's total fresh water supply.

[3]  Different sources give different numbers here.  According to the CIA World Factbook, there are 20,000 Jewish settlers, 18,000 Arabs, and 2,000 Alawites in the Golan.

[4]  Basically, the Druze allowed anyone to join their faith for one generation after its founding, after which time they closed off membership in the faith and allowed no new converts.  They believe that everyone alive today is a reincarnation of someone who was alive when the Druze faith was founded (the fact that world population is more than twenty times now what it was then doesn't seem to bother them).  From this they conclude that if you're not Druze now, it's because you chose not to become Druze then when you had the chance, and they see no reason why they should change their minds and give you a second chance.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

This is all your work? If so, you should consider writing as an adjucnt to your income.... (don't bother doing it as a career, it don't pay enough :( )...

C'mon ...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

... you really have to ask?

(Actually, I've got a partly-finished novel lying around that I can't seem to pick back up and finish writing. I keep trying to go back and finish it, and keep finding myself just revising and revising and revising the last sections of what I've already written.)

Re: C'mon ...

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

It's just so *polished*... even I don't go put in footnotes and stuff like that just for a morning post. (Are you using a tool that makes it easy? or doing it brute-force?)

Never did see myself doing a novel, either, but some way drawing together all the stories of my community into a non-fiction work is something I've been kicking around for a while....

P'raps one should consider taking the core outline of the book and rewriting from scratch? And post the chapters? :) (Friends-locked, natch, just for paranoia's sake)

Re: C'mon ...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Nope, I hand-code my HTML and always have. Some of the tweaking, I'm doing as a way of learning CSS by example on the fly. This, well ... I stumbled across the two recent BBC articles about 2200, and it just sorta grabbed me and said "Analyze and write." So I analyzed and wrote until 0430.

I've considered different ways of getting restarted on the novel myself, not least because if I could finish it ans sell it, we might get out of this hole. But I think a large part of the problem is I'm too stressed by our situation to be able to write creatively. I could probably pick it back up if I could get de-stressed, but we'd have to get out of the hole first. Catch-22.

[caged-admin.livejournal.com]

I'm deeply pessimistic about the chances of Middle Eastern peace in general and Israel<->Syria peace talks in particular. I see that on the one hand Israel wants Syria to stop funding a covert war against them, and on the other hand Syria wants Israel to give back a highly strategic chunk of territory gained during a war of genocide waged by Syria against them.

If I were Israel, I'd say "No deal." And if I were a less liberal and moral democracy in Israel's position, I'd be biting off and digesting chunks of Syrian territory, not considering deals with them.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I agree, giving up the Golan would be a strategically unsound move for Israel (the reasons for which I set out above), and for Israel to do so would require a degree of faith in Syria (and in the Baathist Syrian government) which Syria's past actions entirely fail to justify. This is the source of my comment that to an Israel and Syria at peace, the Golan has no real value, and that if his desire for peace is sincere, President Assad is hopefully smart enough to realize this. To the extent that Syria feels pressure from US forces next door in Iraq and the recent elimination of that neighboring Baathist regime, the depth of Assad's sincerity must be considered somewhat suspect, an impression reinforced by his stated determination to regain possession of the Golan, a piece of territory of value to Syria primarily as a staging area for attacks upon Israel.
Israel took the Golan from Syria in only 24 hours in 1967, but Israel had the luxury of being able to attack Syrian positions up the escarpment's reverse slope, rather than up its face. When Syria drove into the Golan in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the early gains faltered and stopped when Syrian forces hit the escarpment. I'm sure this lesson was not lost on Syria. While Israel holds the Golan, Syria cannot mount a credible land attack in Israel without passing through either Jordan or Lebanon.
Granted, Syria largely controls southern Lebanon by proxy through Hizballah, but any large-scale movement around the Golan through Lebanon would still give Israel precious warning time.
As for Israel biting off chunks of Syria, yes, that option is definitely there. Strategically speaking, the ideal time for Israel to strike Syria would have been during the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. A pincer movement from Lebanon and the Golan at that time could well have taken Damascus almost before Syria could react. With a pre-dawn strike, the Syrian government could have woken up to Israeli tanks in the streets of Damascus and Israeli troops breaking down their front doors.

Re:

[caged-admin.livejournal.com]

It sounds like that makes the job of Israeli negotiators (should there be any) fairly simple (if difficult): determine whether Syria is using the Golan issue to pry loose valuable concessions, or if Syria is dead set on having the Golan back in and of itself.