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Al-Ahram Weekly 5 - 11 August 1999 Issue No. 441 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 5 - 11 August 1999 Issue No. 441
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Focus Interview Features Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Dusting off their suitcases
By Graham UsherA drive along the east shore of the Sea of Galilee attests to the old adage that geography is politics, and nowhere more so than in the Middle East. For this seemingly ordinary coastal road with beach huts on one kerb and banana plantations on the other roughly marks the "line" that separated the Israeli and Syrian forces on 4 June 1967 -- before the Israeli army went on to conquer the Syrian Golan Heights in the Six-Day War. "There is virtually no support in Israel for a withdrawal to this line," says enthusiastically the spokesperson for the Golan Settlers Council (GSC), Ramona Bar-Lev.
A swing up the cliff that overlooks the sea takes us to the 1949 armistice line between Israel and Syria. "There is more support in Israel for a withdrawal to this line," admits Bar-Lev, gloomily. The road then turns inland past green fields and olive groves to the mini-metropolis of Qazrin. The largest of the Golan's 33 Jewish settlements, Qazrin is the self-proclaimed "capital" of the 17,000 Jewish settlers who now live on the Heights. And all are uneasily aware that a peace treaty with Syria will mean the repatriation of each and every one back to Israel proper.
It is an outcome Bar-Lev and the GSC are organising to resist. But the "struggle" looks like being as uphill as the face of Jabal Al-Sheikh on the northern-most tip of the Heights.
Last May, Ehud Barak was elected Israeli prime minister on the vow to withdraw "within one year of my government being formed" Israeli troops from occupied south Lebanon "on the basis of resumed negotiations with Syria". Barak's government is now a month old, the clock has been primed and Syria has spelled out what the basis of any resumption of negotiations must be. This is an Israeli commitment to withdraw from the Golan Heights to the 4 June 1967 "borders", in line with a pledge Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad says he received from Barak's predecessor and mentor, Yitzhak Rabin, in July 1994.
The most Barak has said about this demand is that it can be "an item on the agenda" of any negotiations, although it is known that the majority of his government -- including, in all probability, Barak himself -- would only countenance a withdrawal to the 1949 (and not the 1967) "lines". Such are the gaps US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will try to bridge or fudge as she shuttles between Damascus and Jerusalem in mid-August in search of a formula to enable Israel-Syria talks to resume "from the point they left off" in February 1996.
As far as Ramona Bar-Lev is concerned, Albright can shuttle to the moon. Anyway, she says with ill-disguised contempt, "Barak has already chosen the Syrian track of the peace process over the Palestinian one." Her mission is now not to convince Barak of the folly of his ways, but rather the Israeli public who will be asked to approve any Golan withdrawal in a nation-wide referendum. And this is a battle she thinks the GSC has a "fair chance" of winning.
"We must mobilise the Israeli people to confront Barak with the message that the Golan is Israel's," she says. In her well-furnished office in Qazrin, she warns darkly that peace is impossible "with a dictator like Assad". She reels off statistics that show how the Golan supplies Israel with 50 per cent of its fresh meat produce, one sixth of its water needs and how the local winery has won "the global Golden Trophy award for wine three years in a row!" Finally -- and almost in desperation -- she states that the uprooting of Jewish communities is a "betrayal of Zionism itself".
Bar-Lev's problem is that fewer and fewer "Zionists" are listening, including in her own backyard. 57 per cent of Golan's settlers voted for Barak in the May elections fully cognisant that "peace with Syria" would involve "painful compromises on the Golan". A recent poll in Israel's premier Yediot Aharonot newspaper showed that 34 per cent of Golan's settlers believed that returning the Heights will be necessary for an agreement with Syria, a surprisingly high rating given that there has been no "land for peace" campaign on the Golan. Should there be one -- another settler from Qazrin told the Jerusalem Post newspaper on 30 July -- it would find fertile soil. "We [the Golan settlers] have no moral right to tell the Israeli public that their sons have to pay the price in Lebanon so that we can keep our homes," he said.
Others on the Golan paid the price long ago. North of Qazrin rests the ruined Syrian village of Banyus, today a "nature reserve" which thousands of Israelis visit each year to picnic and frolic in its mountain waterfall. Banyus was one of the scores of Syrian villages Israel razed in 1967 when it occupied Golan and drove some 100,000 Syrians from their homes to a life of internal exile in camps and suburbs in Damascus.
Due East lies Magdal Shams, one of the six Syrian villages that remained after 1967 and is home today to around 10,000 of the Golan's 18,000 Syrian Druze community. Ask Magdal Shams' Ahmed Khater about the "price" of withdrawal and he will tell you about the price of the Israeli occupation: "I have been imprisoned twice, administratively detained once and once put under town arrest -- and all in the space of 20 years!" He will also tell you that the settlers must go "because I and the Golan Heights are Syrian". Given the international consensus and growing Israeli support for withdrawal, Khater also believes that the end of the occupation is now less "a question of if than when".
For the Israelis, such attitudes reveal that withdrawal from the Golan has now become an internalised fact, if not yet an external event. For Palestinians the sight of a large Jewish settler implantation readying to "dust off their suitcases" (as one resident of Qazrin put it) should serve as a precedent. For if the settlers can be removed from the Golan, then why can they not be removed from those other occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank?
