The Myth of Security

The American President, Donald Trump, recently signed a declaration recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a territory captured by Israel from Syria in the course of the Six-Day War of 1967 and officially occupied by the Jewish state in 1981. The decision has evoked strong reactions from certain sections of the media and Palestinians as a whole, with statements describing the decision as “a precedent that powerful countries can actually overtake land over international law”[i] and “one part of a much-wider strategy to implement the Jared Kushner championed ‘deal of the century’,an Israeli-American stratagem aimed at fundamentally altering U.S. foreign policy by removing any obstacles before the Netanyahu government’s colonial project in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.”[ii] Connected to these statements were two implied messages, one to the Palestinians, apprising them that they had been erased from the “U.S. radar”completely, and the other to the Israelis, to elect Netanyahu and in return acquire extensive and unqualified U.S. support. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, entrapped in allegations of corruption leveled against him as he fights yet another election to become the longest serving Israeli premier, termed it as a “historic decision” and as “invaluable” for Israel’s survival, with profound connotations for him and all Israelis. This in turn instigated a general apprehension that If Netanyahu is elected, and with Trump still in command, recognition of the Israeli occupation of West Bank could be the next in line.

The decision has induced extensive global response. The United Nations reacted to the move by way of a terse reminder that the UN Security Council in a December 1981 resolution had termed Israel’s appropriation of the Golan Heights “null and void and without international legal effect” and that it continues to uphold this stance. Till date three vital resolutions have been endorsed by the UN Security Council in this context. They are the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 OF 1967, which in its first clause, explicitly stresses on the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces” from the territories occupied in the Six-Day War, alluding to the Sinai Peninsula, West Bank and the Golan Heights. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 338, approved during the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War, (1973) requests all parties to the dispute to execute the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 “in all its parts”. However, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 497 (1981) adopts a tougher stance, as it unequivocally points out the impropriety of the Israeli annexation, “The Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect.” Though spurned by Israel, the resolutions have constituted the core of multiple peace initiatives.

The European states, in general, proclaimed their opposition to the move, Russia articulated her apprehension regarding the “negative repercussions” of the decision. Turkey, looking for opportunity spaces to prove its leadership capabilities, adopted a more forceful stance of condemnation, requesting an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The American decision met with disapproval from the Arab world, albeit the tone of disapproval appearing more like a “shrug” to what perhaps personifies “a seismic shift in regional politics,giving the impression that Golan Heights no longer symbolizes a rallying point for the Arab world. The decision in itself is also indicative of a fundamental departure from the hitherto American political strategy in the region, which thus far had been intertwined with the“peace process” and the “two-state solution.”With a metaphorical rather than tangible stake in the Golan Heights, the Israeli annexation has since long fed the Iranian rhetoric against the Jewish state, its connection with the territory being primarily through its purported emissaries such as the  Hezbollah and the Syrian armed forces. Therefore, Iran, quite expectedly, also added its voice to the chorus of declarations condemning the move, though the reaction was a rather delayed one and the tone was surprisingly restrained, which could be attributed to its preoccupation with the domestic crisis arising out of calamitous floods in north and west Iran. Probably, more significantly, the real cause behind the non-aggressive stance being that given the criticism of the move by America’s Arab allies, an intimidating response from Iran had the innate possibility of transmuting the distinct  “Arab/Muslim/Israeli dichotomy over the Golan Heights to an Iranian-Israeli one.”

The Golan Heights is a stretch of territory, of a seven hundred square miles, looking on to Israel in its west, Lebanon in its north, Syria in its east, and Jordan in its south, which at the moment is predominantly occupied by Israel. However, prior to June 1967, the territory was under Syrian control and it was in the aftermath of the Six-Day War (June 1967), waged with Egypt, Jordan and Syria that Israel assumed control over approximately two-thirds of the Golan, as well as it’s most critical  points. Two primary reasons have been attributed to Israel’s appropriation of the Golan Heights; extension of its borders and the creation of a security barrier vis-à-vis Syria. The Israeli rhetoric of justification ever since has been woven around the imperatives of security and not bellicosity. Post 1967, Golan Heights under Israeli dominance, has been witness to intermittent border scuffles with the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, referred to as the Ramadan/ Yom Kippur War, being the only exception as it qualified the criterion for a full-fledged conflict wherein Israel had to contend with Egypt on the Sinai Peninsula and Syria in the Golan Heights, furnished with military succor from the erstwhile Soviet Union. Israel was able to fend off what seemed to be an uphill challenge with American military support, going on to formally seizing the Golan Heights in 1981, though border scuffles continued to be an intrinsic part of everyday existence in the territory.

The battle for Golan Heights continued to be a part of the national discourse in both nations over a considerable period of time, at times, bringing out in the open, much concealed perspectives, contrary to national interest. One such instance was an interview of Moshe Dayan, who was the Minister of Defense at the time of the Six-Day War,which was published in April 1997.  Dayan regretted the decision to annex Syria in so many words, “[Th e capture of the Golan Heights] was unnecessary. Look, we can speak in terms of the Syrians are scoundrels, they should be screwed, now’s the time’ and so forth, but this is not policy. You don’t screw the enemy because he’s a scoundrel but because he threatens you, and the Syrians on the fourth day of the war were no threat to us.” [iii] Dayan went on to apportion the blame for the military attack on the yearning of the settlers from the Jordan Valley, and on the then prime minister, Levi Eshkol, who belonged to kibbutz Degania (located south of the Sea of Galilee). “The delegation (of settlers) that came to convince Eshkol to attack the Heights . . . thought about the land on the Heights. . .

They did not even try to hide their greed for that land. That’s what guided them.”[iv]

The Israeli occupied territory, today, has a population of around fifty-thousand people, with approximately half of them being Druze, fragments of the Syrian population who were coercively exiled in 1967 or their progenies. Human rights organizations and activists have routinely demanded that Israel should follow International humanitarian law pertaining to territories under martial rule. The Israeli government has been accused of imposing restrictions upon the Syrians dwelling in Golan, preventing them from constructing and using their own properties, forcibly wiping out indigenous culture and identity as well as quelling unhindered movements of people and commodities.  Advocates of a branch of Isma’ilis, the Druze are by and large located in Lebanon and Syria. Those residing in the Golan Heights continue to be committed to their Syrian identity though the protracted civil war in Syria has unsettled their links with their kin in the southwest region of Syria. Though some have acquired Israeli citizenship, mostly as a consequence of the lingering Syrian civil war, most of them retain their status as permanent residents and not Israeli citizens and continue to derecognize the Israeli occupation, unlike the Druze residing inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders, who have acquired Israeli citizenship and are also recruited in the Israeli defense forces. Thus a divided community of Druze and an equal number of Israeli Jewish settlers occupy the Golan Heights today, the latter having reconstructed the “contested” space into a territory of vineyards, a site for tourism.

The chronicle of the Golan Heights in contemporary times unfolds the schism“between history and memory.” The schism is typical of subjects pertaining to contemporary times and contemporary problems. The rupture usually emanates from complications in contending with the conclusions arrived at by historical readings of the recent past, or in acquiescing to the outcomes, as individual as well as collective recollections of the occurrences have been already constructed, and both the individual and the collective are unwilling to revise/re-envisage them. Occasionally, historical inquiries encounter with myths, which have their own peculiar rationale, and resist conversion/adaption. Often, due to multiple factors, the narrative of a small cluster, succeeds in hegemonzing the historical explanation of a particular subject/matter and projects it in a manner that is not in harmony with the role of the bigger collective in the narrative.  The chronicle of the Golan Heights and its location between Syria and Israel is not confined to the past. It continues to be interlaced with the political extant of both nations. Public rhetoric and dialogues in Israel on the political prospects of the Golan Heights and the overt and covert political deliberations between Israel and Syria hinge on to a considerable degree upon individual and shared recollections, and these are intrinsically grounded on what constitutes the past. The opinion of the Israeli public was fabricated upon the idea of a “mountain” that in course of time turned into a “monster.”[v] What awaits the West Bank, which unlike the Golan Heights, was very much an indelible component of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s (the Likud party’s intellectual founder) geographical ideology,“Eretz Israel on both sides of the Jordan”, is for time to tell.

Priya Singh

March 31, 2019.

Notes

[i]See US Department of Press, Remarks to the Press, March 26, 2019.  https://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2019/03/290669.htm

[ii] Statement given by Ramzy Baroud, American-Palestinian intellectual and activist to National Interest.

[iii]EyalZiser, “June 1967: Israel’s Capture of the Golan Heights.” Israel Studies, vol. 7 no. 1, 2002, p168.

[iv] Ibid, pp.168-169.

[v]YigalKipnis, The Golan Heights: Political History, Settlement and Geography since 1949, London and New York, Routledge, 2013, pp.17-18.