The Myth of the Golan Heights
By David Hirst, Excerpts from his book: The Gun
and the Olive Branch, 1977, Futura Publications. (Note:
errors due to scanning might exist in this page.)
The seeds of the Six-Day War were sown on the Syrian front.
This is universally accepted. It is also more or less taken for
granted that the Syrians sowed those seeds. The Golan Heights
appear to sum up, in a peculiarly stark and affecting way, the
image of David versus Goliath. But it would be nearer the truth
to say that the Golan Heights represent one of the most
successful of Zionist myths. A post-war visit to the wind swept,
battle-scarred plateau was a moving experience --at least it was
for those of this writer's fellow-tourists, probably all of them,
who accepted what our guide told us. He told us, of course, about
the Syrian guns which used to rain destruction on the farmers
peacefully tilling their fields in the valley below and how finally,
on the last day of the war, some of Israel's finest troops had
given their lives scaling those mine-infested heights to silence the
guns for ever. It was a partisan account. That was to be expected.
It also included one or two untruths, not unexpected either, like
the allegation that the Arabs, in trying to divert the head-waters of
the Jordan, intended to send them to waste in the Mediterranean.
However, the guide did, with an air of complicity, tell
one unexpected truth. 'We are now entering what used to be
the demilitarized zone,' he said, 'regular' soldiers were forbidden
to enter it. Of course, we got round that by sending them in disguised
as police. But that's another story.' It is another story, a long one,
and naturally he did not tell it.
Among the many complications of the 1949-armistice agreements were the
demilitarized zones. They were sources of conflict everywhere, but
particularly on the Syrian frontier, where, strips of fertile soil
ranging from a few hundred to a few kilometres wide, they ran nearly
half its length. They represented bits of Palestinian territory which
the Syrian army managed to hold during the fighting of 1948 and from
which it only agreed to withdraw, behind the old frontier, under the
provisions of the armistice agreements. These laid down that neither
side should send military forces into any part of them; Arab and
Israeli villages and settlements in the zones should each recruit
their own police forces on a local basis. Neither side showed a
scrupulous regard for these provisions, but it was the Israelis who,
from the outset, showed less. They began by staking an illegal claim
to sovereignty over the zone and then proceeded, as opportunity
offered, to encroach on all the specific provisions against
introducing armed forces and fortifications. They repeatedly
obstructed the operations of the UN observers, on one occasion even
threatening to kill them.[15] They refused to cooperate with the
Mixed Armistice Commission, and when it suited them they simply
rejected the rulings and requests of the observers.[16] They expelled,
or otherwise forced out, Arab inhabitants, and razed their villages
to the ground.[17] They transplanted trees as a stratagem to advance the
frontier to their own advantage.[18] They built roads against the
advice of the UN.[19] They carried out excavations on Arab land for
their own drainage schemes.[20] But most serious of all was what
General von Horn described as 'part of a premeditated Israeli policy
to edge east through the Demilitarized Zone towards the old Palestine
border (as shown on their maps) and to get all the Arabs out of the
way by fair means or foul.' 'The Jews', he explained, 'developed a
habit of irrigating and ploughing in stretches of Arab-owned land
nearby, for the ground was so fertile that every square foot was a
gold mine in grain. Gradually, beneath the glowering eyes of the
Syrians, who held the high ground overlooking the Zone, the area
had become
a network of Israeli canals and irrigation channels edging up against
and always encroaching on Arab-owned property.'[21] It is unlikely, in
his opinion, that those Syrian guns on the Golan Heights would ever
have gone into action but for Israeli provocations.[22]
There was always tension on the frontier, and incidents without number,
but it flared into the dimensions of a 'little war' only when the
Israelis, apparently for reasons of higher strategy, decided to visit
upon the Syrians their familiar technique of massive punishment to
fit a menial crime. They did that in the build-up to the Suez War.
In December 1955, as part of the aggressive strategy which had begun
with the Gaza raid ten months before, they attacked positions on the
north-eastern shore of Lake Tiberias, killing more than fifty soldiers
and civilians. The alleged pretext --that the Syrians had opened fire
on fishing and police boats-- was a singularly inadequate one, even if
it had been an authentic one. But in the opinion of two UN observers
who subsequently recorded their experience it was not even that. The
most charitable interpretation was that, although the Syrians may have
opened fire, the Israelis had done their best to provoke them into
doing so. 'It was', said one of them, 'a premeditated raid of
intimidation motivated by Israel's desire ... to bait the Arab
states into some overt act of aggression that would offer them the
opportunity to overrun additional territory without censor . . .'[23].
Eleven months later Israel did overrun the whole of Sinai, but not,
as we have seen, without censure. They were to be more successful
next time.
Every year brought its shooting season; naturally enough, it began,
in a fertile valley like this, with the ploughing, and went on
through the sowing and harvesting.[24] It was then that the Israeli
farmers ventured forth with their armour-plated tractors to plough
a few more furrows of Arab-owned land. On 3 April 1967 it was reported
in the Israeli press that the government had decided to cultivate
all areas of the demilitarized zone, specifically lots 51 and 52,
which, the Syrians insisted, belonged to Arab farmers.[25] At eight
o'clock on the morning of 7 April a tractor began work on a little
strip of Arab land south of Tiberias. The Israelis waited for the
Syrians to open up with mortars as they knew they would -- and then
struck back with artillery, tanks and aircraft. Seventy jet fighters
pounded the enemy with
napalm and high explosives. The Syrians took a bloody nose: six planes
shot down, one over Damascus, some thirty fortified positions hit and
perhaps a hundred people killed. The Israelis, for their part, lost
one tank commander; he had got down to observe the results of his
shooting. Chief of Staff Rabin expressed the hope that the Syrians
had learned their lesson.
In reality, the 'lesson' was the
curtain-raiser to the June War. Nasser could not afford to stand idly
by again. Syria, he could see, was now the target of the kind of
military activism to which Egypt had been exposed before Suez. For
the 'Arab-fighters' it represented just the kind of plausible external
peril they needed. After all, Syria did bombard settlements from the Golan
Heights. It was apparently going ahead with its part of a scheme to
divert the headwaters of the river Jordan and thereby sabotage Israel's
own scheme, unilaterally undertaken, to channel water south to the Negev
desert. It way giving aid and comfort to Fatah, the Palestinian guerilla
organization which, since January 1965, had been sending its men into
enemy territory to lay mines and blow up installations. And since
February 1966, when an extreme faction of the ruling Baath party seized
power, Syria had officially adopted, with bellicose rhetoric to match,
the Fatah doctrine of a 'popular liberation war'. Obviously, the
Arab-fighters did not shout their intentions from the roof-tops, but it
was nonetheless apparent, from the indiscretions which did escape them,
that what Dayan and his men had in mind was to engineer a general
preventive war-to deliver a crippling blow at the Arabs' growing
military strength, to do as soon as possible, at lesser cost, what
they would be forced to do, probably at much greater cost, some time
in the future. It was this search for a pretext which the Chief of
Staff was getting at, in a duly circumspect way, when he told the army
magazine Bamahane in May 1965 that the Israelis could upset any Arab
military timetable at a moment's notice if they knew 'how to exploit
the moment when the Arabs are preparing to reach a certain level of
military strength'.[26]
For anyone who cared to look closely the external peril was plausible
in the extreme. Of course it must have been uncomfortable and sometimes
dangerous living in a frontier kibbutz under the shadow of Syrian guns,
but how many people actually got killed? Between January and June 1967,
apparently not one.
In the same period, how many Israelis died at the hands of the Fatah guerrillas?
One. As for the Jordan diversion scheme, this was a vain enterprise, whatever
Arab propaganda might proclaim, and the Israelis knew it. Even if the Arabs had
the means and the will to carry out their plans to the full-and this was
doubted in official Israeli quarters-they would have deprived the Israelis of
a mere 5 or 6 per cent of the share which they were taking for themselves.[27]
As for the 'popular liberation war', the Israelis knew more than anyone else
about the gulf between the Baathist words and Baathist deeds.
Unfortunately not many people did look very closely, and President Nasser was
very afraid that, Syrian verbal excesses and irresponsible brinkmanship
aiding, the Arab-fighters would lead him into a trap. Replying to the taunts
of his Arab opponents, he told a Palestinian audience as early as 1965:
'They say "drive out UNEF". Suppose that we do. Is it not essential to have
a plan? If Israeli aggression takes place against Syria, do I attack
Israel? That would mean that Israel is the one to determine the battle
for me. It hits a tractor or two to force me to move, is this a wise way?
It is we who must determine the battle.'[28]
NOTES:
15. Report by Colonel de Ridder, Acting Chief of Staff, UN Document S/2084, 10 April 1951.
16. Horn, Soldiering for Peace, op. cit., pp. 123-4
17. Burns, op. cit., p. 114-
18. Horn, op. cit., p. 79.
19. Khouri, Fred. J., 'The Policy of Retaliations in Arab-Israeli Relations', Middle East Journal, Washington, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1966. p. 447.
20. Burns, op. cit., p. 113.
21. Horn, op. cit., P. 78.
22. Ibid., p. 117.
23. Hutchison, Violent Truce, op. cit., p. 110.
24. Horn, op. cit., p. 69.
25. Syrian Complaint to Security Council, S/7845, 9 April 1967.
26. 2 May 1965.
27. Nimrod, Yoram, 'L'Eau, I'Atome et le Conflit', Les Temps Modernes, Paris, 1967, P. 893.
28. Al-Ahram, 1 June 1965.
