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For the first time in years, the possibility of Israel returning the Golan Heights to its arch-enemy, Syria, has made an unexpected comeback. Syrian President Bashar Assad announced last week that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had assured him that Israel was willing to withdraw from the occupied plateau, in exchange for a peace treaty. Coming after Israel's military assault on an apparent nuclear reactor in northeastern Syria in September and the assassination of a leading Hezbollah figure in the streets of Damascus in February, many were surprised that the confrontational attitude of the two countries had so quickly changed.
They shouldn't have been. The makings of a deal have been in place for more than a decade.
When Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, few people knew just how close he was to a peace treaty with Syria. Even his successor, foreign minister Shimon Peres, is said not to have known quite how far the Israeli leader had been prepared to move to achieve a breakthrough.
And move is the operative word.
A sign points out the distances to different Mideast cities from an observation point on Mount Bental in the Golan Heights. (Reuters)
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As Mr. Peres learned when he read the files on the day of Mr. Rabin's funeral, the late prime minister had been willing to withdraw Israeli forces and civilians from the entire Golan Heights, the towering ridge and plateau captured in the 1967 Six Day War, and home to thousands of Israeli settlers. Such a move had long been Syria's sine qua non for any peace negotiations.
"Unthinkable" was the common reaction in Israel. After all, Israelis had been taught since elementary school that this strategically important ridge could never be returned.
But that wasn't always the way the map of the Middle East had been drawn. When the state of Israel was born, 60 years ago this month, the boundaries between the Jewish and Arab communities inside Palestine were unclear and would be settled by fighting that raged for the next year. However, the boundary between the French mandate of Syria and the British mandate of Palestine, had been decided in 1923 when the League of Nations carved up Ottoman territory. The Golan Heights fell entirely within Syria, and the Sea of Galilee, at their foot, fell entirely within Palestine.
While Syria rushed in troops to assist the Palestinian Arabs, the line between Syria and what became Israel was not in doubt, and the 1949 armistice largely confirmed it. And so it remained, until 1967. In the war that broke out that year between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Israel, in short order, conquered the Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, the west bank of the Jordan River from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria.
Egypt's and Syria's attempt to regain their territories in the 1973 war failed. And though Egypt's Anwar Sadat later recognized Israel's legitimacy and recovered the Sinai, Syria refused to do likewise.
But Israel and Syria did not remain in open conflict. The ceasefire line drawn at the eastern edge of the Golan has been the very quietest of Israel's frontiers since Henry Kissinger negotiated an agreement in 1974. The issue of territory did not, however, fade from view.
THE PLATEAU AND THE LAKE
There's an enormous raised-relief wall map in the office of the director of Syria's Ministry of Information, on the top floor of Baath Party headquarters in Damascus. The area of Israel's occupation is painted in bright red. Since 1967, Syria has never wavered on its demand for the return of the territory Israel conquered.
For its part, Israel has always insisted on Syria's agreeing to full peace as a condition for even talking about any return.
But despite the popular mantra about never yielding the strategic heights, Israel has pretty well always been willing to return the Golan to Syria under certain terms.
As Itamar Rabinovich, Israel's chief negotiator with Syria from 1992 to 1996, noted in his book The Brink of Peace, Moshe Dayan, the defence minister during the 1967 war, hadn't wanted to capture the heights. In The Story of My Life, Mr. Dayan expressed his worry about the "long-term consequences. The Syrians would not accept our permanent presence on the Golan Heights and we would be in a state of war with three Arab states."
Persuaded to take the heights, Mr. Dayan saw them as a bargaining chip to be traded for peace and a secure, recognized border.
But while Egypt and Jordan negotiated peace with Israel, and the Palestinians attempted to reach an agreement of their own, little movement has taken place between Israel and Syria, at least on the surface.
