The Golan Disinformation Campaign

http://www.cni.mynet.net/old/lebanon.html

The Golan Disinformation Campaign
From the Council of National Interest, Paul Findley, founder and Chairman of the Board

Former Congressman Paul Findley, chairman of the Council for the National Interest, has denied U.S. media claims that Israel ever offered Syria unconditional control of the Golan Heights. A recent barrage of disinformation in the American media, which has claimed that Israel offered Syrian President Hafez Assad all of the Golan Heights, has gone unrefuted by well known think-tanks and U.S. officials. Findley calls the reports a "distortion of the facts, intended to make Israel look like a fair and just negotiatior in the eyes of the world. No offer was ever made in accordance with U.N Security Council Resolution 242 which outlines the land-for-peace formula."
In actuality, according to Middle East International and CNI President Eugene Bird, Israel offered to withdraw from the Golan only if Syria severed its ties with Iran, single-handedly disarmed Hizbollah, persuaded Lebanon to accept Israeli terms for a peace agreement, limited the size of the Syrian army, and restricted where this army could be deployed. Moreover, in this arrangement the U.S. was to provide Israel with roughly $12 billion in benefits. Bird commented, "this was hardly an unconditional offer."
Since 1970 President Assad has stated that only an unconditional Israeli return of the Golan Heights will satisfy the security needs of the Syrian people. In Assad's eyes Syrian control of the Golan is the cornerstone of a balance of power in the Levant. According to Middle East International writer Andrew Rathmell, "he [Assad] recognizes Israel's desire and ability to dominate Jordan and a Palestinian entity by diplomatic and economic means and has no wish to let Syria, or Lebanon, be ensared in the new Israeli-led regional order." Israel's demand that it be able to circumscribe the maneuvers of the Syrian army clearly does not serve Syrian security needs. If President Assad accepted this deal, he would merely be replacing one security imbalance (an Israeli-controlled Golan) with another (an Israel that would seek to dominate Syria and the entire Levant).
Every government in the world has an obligation to maximize the security of its people. President Assad, in negotiations over the Golan, was not being either politically infantile or petulant, as Israel and some newspaper reporters argued. He rejected an agreement that basically required Syrian domination by Israel.
One could argue that the real blame for the current deadlock on the Syria- Israel track of the peace process appears to rest with outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. He lacked the courage to make a reasonable offer to Damascus in the momentous aftermath of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. If the peace process had moved quicker, the mobilization of suicide bombers and rejectionist groups might have been substantially weaker, and Peres might still be in control today.
Under two successive Israeli governments no reasonable peace has been offered to Syria. All of the lopsided Israeli propositions for peace, sponsored by America, skirted the core issue of Israel's occupation of the Golan, and were subsequently rejected by President Assad. According to Findley, "It just goes to show that an Israeli-dominated peace process is unworkable."

The Prize That Is Lebanon
Even before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the European Jewish community had begun, as early as the turn of the century, its campaign to create a Jewish National Home. Indeed, Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, declared in his Memoirs that "the Palestine we want is the Palestine of Solomon and David," which for a brief period in the pre-Christian era stretched from the Sinai in the southwest, to the Euphrates in the northeast. (From Memoirs, page 342.)
Israel's latest aggression into southern Lebanon is but one in a string of such territorial incursions the objective of which is the take-over of the region, along with its natural resources and strategic waterways, by the State of Israel. What follows is the history of Jewish, and later Israeli designs on Lebanon's southern territory.
1917 -- Chaim Weizmann, later to become Israel's first President, said: "We did not know that France had designs on the Levant [Lebanon and Syria] and thought we could include the whole of that area in the Jewish National Home," which the Balfour Declaration limited to Mandated Palestine. (From Frontiers of a Nation, page 78.)
1918 -- Ben Zvi, later to become Israel's second President, and David Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister, in an article appearing in London's Palestine magazine, set the borders of the Jewish State as:
Mount Lebanon, to the north (about fifteen or twenty kilometers south of Beirut);

The Syrian desert, to the east;
The Sinai Peninsula, to the south; and
The Mediterranean Sea, to the west.

1919 -- The importance of the northern border is underscored by a joint declaration issued by Lord Balfour, Lord Percy, and Louis Brandeis, then a Justice of the US Supreme Court, stating, among other things, that "Palestine must be economically viable, therefore it must control the water sources in the north (Lebanon and Syria)." (From the British Government Documents for 1919, Volume IV, page 1276.)
1943 -- After twenty-three years under the French Mandate, Lebanon's independence was recognized by the French and British.
1948 -- The State of Israel was created, and promptly gained the political legitimization to carry out its territorial aspirations. Though Israeli forces did occupy southern Lebanon, and the Litani River, they were forced to withdraw under international pressure.
1954 -- Israel threatens to use force against Lebanon to prevent it from using its own water from the Litani River to develop its southern region. These threats were made to President Eisenhower's envoy, Eric Johnson, during a meeting on water issues.
Moshe Sharett, who for a brief period in the early 1950's shared the Prime-Ministership with Ben Gurion, was forced out of office because he refused to go along with the latter's "diabolic plans" for the creation of an inter-Lebanese conflict which would guarantee the partition of the country, and from which Israel can only gain. In his diaries, he gives detailed descriptions of these plans.
1955 -- At a secret cabinet meeting, Sharett quotes Moshe Dayan as saying that the "only thing necessary is to find an officer, even just a major. We should either win his heart, or buy him with money, to make him agree to declare himself the savior of the maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel, and everything will be all right." Dayan also admitted that "much anxiety had to be generated... the lives of Jewish victims also had to be sacrificed to create provocations justifying subsequent reprisals..."
For the next ten years, Israel's concerns would center around Egypt and the perceived threat of Nasser's calls for Pan-Arab unity. It was not until after the Six Day War of June 1967 that Israel resumed its plans for Lebanon.
1969 -- Israeli planes bombed and destroyed Beirut's new international airport in another attempt at destroying that country's commercial and economic infrastructure.
1978 -- Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon, calling it Operation Litani, supposedly in response to Palestinian guerrilla activity. As a result of this invasion, and just as Ben Gurion's "diabolic" plan had called for in the mid-1950's, Major Saad Haddad declared a Maronite State in southern Lebanon in 1979, and became Israel's puppet in the region, leading the South Lebanon Army, an army of mercenaries responsible for rampant murder and torture of innocent civilians. Israel now had the access she had coveted for sixty years (since 1918), the irrigation waters of the Litani. Major Haddad's SLA became an extension of the Israel Defense Forces. In response to this invasion, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 425 calling on Israel's immediate withdrawal from Lebanese territory. Israel continues to ignore and defy this international body's directives. It continues its illegal occupation of Lebanese territory under the guise of a "security zone."
1981 -- Israel bombarded Lebanon, again...
1982 -- Ariel Sharon's Operation Peace for Galilee, this fifth Arab-Israeli war, and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, Palestinian refugee camps outside Beirut, carried out under Israeli illumination. The Hizbulla, a group of southern Lebanese Muslims, came into existence as a result of this latest Israeli campaign, and in response to Israel's illegal occupation of their territory, as a liberating force.
1993 -- Israel again bombarded southern Lebanon in response to rocket attacks launched by Hizbulla, fighting only for the liberation of Lebanon from Israel's illegal occupation.
1996 -- Israel's latest attacks have thus far killed more than one hundred innocent Lebanese men, women and children...
Lebanon's only crime is its people's determination to live in liberty, untethered by any external force, free to pursue their national dreams, unhindered by a neighbor's territorial aspirations...Lebanon's only crime is its desire to reclaim its right to its territory as an independent sovereign nation. Would anyone settle for any less than the internationally recognized basic rights to freedom and self-determination?

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