Thursday, May 22, 2008
There are lots of rumors floating around about new peace overtures between Israel and Syria with Israel ceding the strategic Golan Heights back to the Syrian Arab Republic. Real peace would be nice, of course, but the trouble with a terror state is they always figure they can say one thing with their public face and still sponsor terror with their private face. There's too much blood under the bridge of those highlands to take any chances on a regime whose nature you already know. If Syria wants in from the cold, let them make the proofs.
David Bedein talks to a guy who remembers what it was like to live under the Syrian guns: The Man Who Convinced Eshkol to Take the Golan
...As [Yaakov (Yankela)] Eshkoli tells it, by the fourth day of the 1967 war, it was clear that Israel had delivered a solid defeat to Jordan and Egypt.
That left Syria, which had been raining a steady stream of rockets into the Hula Valley below, leaving the residents of 31 settlements in the Upper Galilee region in Eshkoli's jurisdiction to spend those glorious days of 1967 in deep underground bunkers, glued to their transistor radios.
Eshkoli recalls how he placed constant calls into Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon from his underground bunker on the Kibbutz to ask to see Levi Eshkol, then Israel's prime minister, to demand action on the Syrian front...
A question that interests me most about the ‘peace’ initiatives being undertaken by Israel is what will be the end state? Quantitatively or even practically, how will Israel’s existential situation be improved, and for how long? Will the situation revert to something similar to that which existed pre-67? Will it be better, and if so, how? With rising antisemitism in the rest of the world, how is it that Israel’s most virulent antagonists will renounce their antisemitism and suddenly give up their dreams of a Judenrein ‘greater’ Palestine? Will a Jew free lesser Palestine and a ‘reconstituted’ Syria be more likely to ally themselves with their Muslim brothers or with their new friend and vastly more vulnerable Israel? By undertaking these initiatives, can the government give estimates about how much less likely conflicts will be with not only the new neighbors but the old ones? In the event that an old antagonist like the Hezbos or like Iran decides to attack Israel, will Syria and Palestine be what - neutral? What exactly will Israel be getting in return for all of these concessions? Has the government bothered to answer any of these questions, or has it even considered them?
Expect to hear a lot of blather about difficult choices, tough decisions, real sacrifices for peace, yada-yada. (As usual, don't bother asking whether the "peace" is real.)
On a practical level, in the beautiful town of Katzrin alone, there are more Jews than were in uprooted from all the communities in Gush Qatif, many of whose lives are still in limbo nearly three years later. So, apart from any consideration of the strategic folly of pulling out of the Golan, how will the residents be taken care of?
What will happen to the Jewish antiquities discovered in the Golan since '67 -- Gamla, Mishnaic period synagogues, remains of ancient cities destroyed in an earthquake 1,300 years ago. How do we know it won't all be trashed like Joseph's Tomb, or Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter in the Old City after 1949.
Without the claim of resistance, however specious, it's harder for Syria (by arming Hezbollah) to get its nose under the Lebanese tent, which lately has been going well for them. I have a hard time believing they'll sacrifice Lebanon for the Golan. I just don't see it happening.