JERUSALEM.
THE Israeli prime minister-elect, Ehud Barak, will try to succeed where his three predecessors – Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu – failed: to reach a peace agreement with Syria.
Knowing this, the thousands of settlers on the Golan Heights are very worried because they would pay the painful price if Barak achieves his goal.
They would be forced to evacuate the homes and land in which they’ve flourished for 32 years.
It was in the Six-Day War of June 1967 that Israel took control of the area from which the Syrian military was able to dominate the northern Galilee and the Valley of the Jordan.
Yehuda Harel, founding father of the Golan settlers, told an Israeli newspaper last week: “Withdrawal from the Golan means the ethnic cleansing of the region’s 18,000 residents.”
Harel moved to the Golan in July 1967, raised five children and built a kibbutz, Meron Golan, out of basalt rock.
Later he formed a political party, The Third Way, to foil the Israeli politicians who competed with one another to see who could make the most concessions to reach a peace accord with the dictatorship in Damascus.
Harel formed the party after he was shocked to learn that Rabin, his political mentor – who had fought the Syrians in 1967 – was ready as prime minister in 1993 to retreat from most of the Heights in return for a full peace agreement.
The trouble then was Syrian President Hafez al-Assad’s insistence on getting back everything, including the right to have his troops march again on the eastern shore of the Lake of Galilee.
That was what Assad told then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who relayed the Syrian position to Rabin at a secret meeting in Jerusalem in August 1993.
Rabin understood he couldn’t accept that. So, in a stunning change of direction, he arrived on the South Lawn of the White House a month later to sign a peace agreement – with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians – leaving the Syrians in the dust.
But now Barak, who has vowed to “fulfill the legacy of Rabin,” is expected to seek a complete peace agreement with Syria based on these territorial concerns.
First, Israel will be ready to retreat from the Golan except for a strip east of the Jordan River one to four kilometers wide, between the Banias and Yarmuk rivers.
This will leave Israel in control of the low slopes of the strategic Heights.
In exchange, Israel would concede to Syria control of the al-Hama region, even though it has been within Israel’s border since 1948.
If Assad accepts this, the towns and settlements would be evacuated over a five- to 10-year period.
Barak has discussed a possible pullback – in fact he and Netanyahu engaged in secret talks last summer about Syria as Netanyahu tried to bring Barak and his Labor Party into a coalition government.