Israel Cannot Defend Itself Without the Golan Heights - Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, Part 2

Five incorrect assumptions about an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement.

Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland participated in press conference on April 22, 2009 held at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs about his new special report on Defensible Borders for the Golan Heights.
View the entire briefing at http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/showpage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=7....

http://www.defensibleborders.org/security/
http://jcpa.org


Defensible Borders on the Golan Heights
By Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland
Introduction:
For most of the period since the June 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel captured the Golan
Heights from Syria, Israel has viewed this strategic region as the front line of its defense in the
north. Prior to 1967, Syrian armor and artillery on the Golan posed a constant threat to Israeli
farms and villages in the Galilee below. However, in the years that followed, with the Israel
Defense Forces (IDF) positioned on the Golan, Israel acquired an optimal line of defense
to enable its quantitatively inferior standing army to hold back a Syrian ground attack and
provide Israel with the time it needed to mobilize its reserves and neutralize any aggression
against it.
Despite these military considerations, since the early 1990s, both direct and indirect contacts
have taken place between Israel and Syria to examine the possibility of arriving at a peace
agreement. In most cases the contacts did not mature into genuine and open negotiations
with the intent of arriving at a detailed agreement. The one exception was the effort
initiated by Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the years 1999-2000. The negotiations at that time
reached the stage of discussion over details that included security arrangements intended
to compensate Israel for the loss of the Golan Heights. The talks at that time did not lead to
the signing of a peace agreement, but the reason behind the failure to reach an agreement
did not stem from an appreciable gap on the security issue. On the security issue, both sides
appeared to reach almost total agreement.
Given that background, when indirect Israeli-Syrian negotiations were renewed again in
2008 under Turkish auspices, they were conducted under the assumption that there was
a military solution that would compensate Israel for the loss of the Golan and that such a
solution was acceptable to the Syrians.
The purpose of this analysis is to demonstrate that Israel does not possess a plausible solution
to its security needs without the Golan Heights. Not only was the "solution" proposed in the
year 2000 implausible at the time, but changing circumstances, both strategic and operative,
have rendered Israel's forfeiture of the Golan today an even more reckless act.

Please read the full report:
http://www.jcpa.org/text/DefensibleBorders-GolanHeights.pdf

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