http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-12/24/044l-122499-idx.html
Israel and Syria: Correcting the Record
By Stephen S. Rosenfeld
Friday, December 24, 1999; Page A15
The Syrian foreign minister came off as the skunk
at the picnic for using the reopening of talks
with Israel to speak harshly of his would-be peace
partner. But at least some of what he
said--calling Israel's fabled Gen. Moshe Dayan as
a witness in Syria's favor, for instance--was fair
and to the point and needs to be absorbed on all
sides to help propel the negotiations forward.
Minister Farouk Charaa addressed a core cause of
more than 1,000 armed clashes between Israel and
Syria in 1948-67: the Israeli contention that the
Syrians, sitting on the Golan Heights, repeatedly
shelled Israel's farms and settlements below in
the Galilee and its water projects in the Huleh
valley. This shelling--in the common Israeli and
American view--is what gave Israel its rationale
for capturing the Golan Heights in the 1967 war.
The disposition of this land is what the current
peace talks are about.
Except, to cite Moshe Dayan, it didn't happen just
that way. In 1976 Dayan gave an extraordinary
interview to Israeli journalist Rami Tal but
embargoed it. He died in 1981. Only on April 27,
1997, did his daughter Yael, a Labor
parliamentarian, release it. It was not new news
in Israel, but it made a stir. It made practically
no stir in this country; I missed it at the time.
Said Dayan: "I made a mistake in allowing the
[Israeli] conquest of the Golan Heights. As
defense minister I should have stopped it because
the Syrians were not threatening us at the time."
The attack proceeded, he went on, not because
Israel was threatened but because of pressure from
land-hungry farmers and army commanders in
northern Israel. "Of course [war with Syria] was
not necessary. You can say the Syrians are
bastards and attack when you want. But this is not
policy. You don't open aggression against an enemy
because he's a bastard but because he's a threat."
About those shellings: Syria shelled and otherwise
emanated cold hostility. But, Dayan told his
interviewer, "at least 80 percent" of two decades
of border clashes were initiated by Israel. "We
would send a tractor to plow some [disputed] area
. . . and we knew in advance that the Syrians
would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we
would tell the tractor to advance further, until
in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and
shoot. And then we would use artillery and later
the air force also, and that's how it was."
So, on the authority of what you could call an
impeccable Israeli source, the situation is very
different from what is commonly portrayed. Israel,
with an appetite for land, for political profit
and for strategic depth, was in the Golan
instance--not in all instances--an aggressor, not
the victim of aggression. In turn, the Dayan
testimony largely supports the Syrian foreign
minister's assertion the other day, and earlier,
that "it was the other [Israeli] side who insisted
on provoking the Syrians until they clashed
together and then claimed that the Syrians are the
aggressors."
Well, you may say, this is the way the game was
played in the mean years of the Arab-Israeli
conflict. It was hardball. Land, pride, strategic
advantage: These were the stakes. Countries were
prepared to fight repeatedly for them. Their
public opinion congealed around the expectation of
war. Peace was simply not seen as a realistic
option.
Fortunately, things are different now, thanks to
25 years of American-sponsored diplomacy and much
else. People remember, though, and peoples
remember. As Israel has its own occasions to know,
to be a victim of aggression burns deeply, the
more so when your pain is generally unacknowledged
and politically all but invisible.
In Israel's case, Arab threats to its viability
and its very existence kindled an intense
combativeness only now tentatively yielding to the
proposition that security can be served by
accommodation as well as power. In Syria's case,
its own inability to put on a civil public face
has deprived it of the appreciation it might
otherwise have expected as a sometime offended
state; it is also, of course, a sometime offending
state as well.
It can be no surprise that Syria demands back all
of its territory--territory it lost not to a
failure of its own aggression but to a success of
Israel's. Given the corrected record, it can
hardly be without concern for its own ultimate
security. Syria and Israel are entitled to have a
mutual interest in security measures and in the
political and economic initiatives that may by
degrees shrink their hostility and make peace
possible.
(c) Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
