Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Lebanon leaves the Golan naked
If you have the time the full article is worth reading. The Syrian regime is in considerable difficulty. Its weakening in Lebanon leaves its greatest dilemma unresolvable: How to get back the Golan heights?
Jax
At the center of the ongoing crisis surrounding the Syrian presence in Lebanon, a 38-year-old elephant has been loitering almost unnoticed. While the world scrutinizes Syria's promised withdrawal, gawks as the Lebanese opposition and Hezbollah flood the streets of Beirut in their war of demonstrations, and debates whether the Bush administration deserves credit for inspiring the "cedar revolution", little attention has been given to a principal factor binding this Levantine Gordian knot - the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan heights. Though not as glamorous as the more polarizing Israeli occupations in the West Bank and Gaza, Golan is of immense importance because it is the last tangible redoubt of Syrian-Israeli enmity and the physical embodiment of their 57-year ideological and territorial conflict. With Golan quiet since the armistice agreement of 1974 (established after the 1973 "October" War), Lebanon has long been the proving ground for the Levant's principal antagonists. History's arc can easily be traced from June 4, 1967, when Israel conquered the strategically valuable Golan plateau from Syria, across the gory horizons of the Lebanese civil war, in which Syrian and Israeli intervention would eventually contribute to the instabilities that produced the Valentine's Day assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and the present imbroglio. The Lebanese pawn may soon be liberated from the stratagems of the surrounding horsemen, however, stripping the Levantine chess board to its bare essentials: Syria and Israel left glowering at each other across the armistice line that divides the mountainous Golan from the road to Damascus. The problem for Syria is that even if the new reality ends up spotlighting the Golan occupation, it will come at the cost of its suzerainty over Beirut. Syria's Hezbollah ally in south Lebanon has been an invaluable stick to prod Israel into negotiations, and, along with Syria's troop complement, the Shi'ite militia serves as a buffer to westward Israeli invasion. Thus weakened, Syria's chances of retrieving the entire Golan from hardline Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may then be about as likely as an elephant walking through the eye of a needle. (Much More)
Jax
At the center of the ongoing crisis surrounding the Syrian presence in Lebanon, a 38-year-old elephant has been loitering almost unnoticed. While the world scrutinizes Syria's promised withdrawal, gawks as the Lebanese opposition and Hezbollah flood the streets of Beirut in their war of demonstrations, and debates whether the Bush administration deserves credit for inspiring the "cedar revolution", little attention has been given to a principal factor binding this Levantine Gordian knot - the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan heights. Though not as glamorous as the more polarizing Israeli occupations in the West Bank and Gaza, Golan is of immense importance because it is the last tangible redoubt of Syrian-Israeli enmity and the physical embodiment of their 57-year ideological and territorial conflict. With Golan quiet since the armistice agreement of 1974 (established after the 1973 "October" War), Lebanon has long been the proving ground for the Levant's principal antagonists. History's arc can easily be traced from June 4, 1967, when Israel conquered the strategically valuable Golan plateau from Syria, across the gory horizons of the Lebanese civil war, in which Syrian and Israeli intervention would eventually contribute to the instabilities that produced the Valentine's Day assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and the present imbroglio. The Lebanese pawn may soon be liberated from the stratagems of the surrounding horsemen, however, stripping the Levantine chess board to its bare essentials: Syria and Israel left glowering at each other across the armistice line that divides the mountainous Golan from the road to Damascus. The problem for Syria is that even if the new reality ends up spotlighting the Golan occupation, it will come at the cost of its suzerainty over Beirut. Syria's Hezbollah ally in south Lebanon has been an invaluable stick to prod Israel into negotiations, and, along with Syria's troop complement, the Shi'ite militia serves as a buffer to westward Israeli invasion. Thus weakened, Syria's chances of retrieving the entire Golan from hardline Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may then be about as likely as an elephant walking through the eye of a needle. (Much More)
