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Fitzgerald: What would Israel get for the Golan Heights?

May 25, 2008 7:07 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald

What would Israel get for giving up the Golan Heights, a tangible and, many generals think, an indispensable asset?

Oh, it would get a promise, by the trustworthy Syrian government, to end its support of Hizballah. But how likely is it that that promise would be kept? Doesn’t the Syrian elite depend for its wellbeing on what it can milk from cash-cow Lebanon? And isn’t Hizballah the best, or by now the only way, that Syria can continue to hold onto its role, and that moo-cow milking, in Lebanon? Besides, given how Hizballah has managed to arm and re-arm again and again, and given that Hamas itself, without any Syria to trans-ship Iranian arms, is threat enough, why would one give up such a tangible asset for the sake of a promise when, if the Syrian Alawites are to stay in power, they must always try to placate the real Muslims by being plus royalists que le roi, and the currency of that is always, for Muslim Arabs, how fervent one is in anti-Israeli activities?
To suggest that the Alawites, who make up 12% of the population, and who have been collaborating so closely with Iran in supporting Hizballah partly because they feel they need the legitimacy as Muslims that Iranian approval and an Iranian cleric’s fatwa help to supply, why would they endanger this by leaving the camp of anti-Israel stalwarts?

It makes no sense. It would open the Alawites up to new charges. Now, they would not merely be seen as pseudo-Muslims, with their syncretistic cult of Mary. Now they would be seen, if they ceased to be part of the anti-Israel camp — and obviously that is what Olmert and Livni think they can achieve by handing over the Golan — not merely as quasi-Muslims, but clearly as enemies. And the fact that on Christmas and Good Friday government offices close in Syria would suggest that those Alawites are crypto-Christians. And the Ikhwan, supported by Saudi-financed television channels, could make life impossible for Syria.

And there is one more terrible thing. Israel did not, as it had every right to do under the laws of war, keep the Sinai. Rather, Israel gave to Saint Sadat territory that he, and much of the world, treated as “sacred Egyptian territory,” even though most of it did not become part of Egypt until the 1920s. (See, on this, the discussion in the Diary of Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, and his map of the Sinai.) Israel still acts as if it does not have a perfect right, under the Palestine Mandate and under Resolution 242, to hold onto all of the “West Bank” and, if it so wishes — but obviously it does not wish — Gaza. But about two places — the Golan Heights, and the Old City of Jerusalem — the Israeli government and people clearly decided, when they decided to annex, and never to give up, both the Old City and the Golan Heights.

In the death throes of his terrible tenure, in his awful administration, if Ehud Olmert were — in defiance of the overwhelming will of the people and of common sense — to suggest an Israeli willingness to give up what all former Israeli governments maintained would never be given up and was no longer subject to negotiation, once the annexation of the Golan had taken place, then what would happen with the Old City of Jerusalem? The Arabs are quick to focus on precedents. They took the surrender to Saint Sadat of the entire Sinai as a precedent, and in their view a conclusive one, for the future surrender of other territories won in the Six-Day War, a war of self-defense. And they will not drop it.

There may be, there sometimes is, an argument for assisted suicide. But that happens in the case of individuals, in physical torment. Israel is a state. It can survive, if it takes the long view, the very long view, and does not allow the most disreputable and shallow members of its political class to throw their own country to the wolves, to save themselves, if they can, or possibly just to save them from the pain of having to see things clearly, and steadily, and whole. For that would be, for these people, too taxing, and too painful.

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