Israeli Control of the Golan Remains Strategically Critical

(Washington, D.C.): Today’s Washington Post gives front-page treatment to a study released last month by the Tel Aviv University’s Center for Strategic Studies under the headline: “A Fading View of the Golan; Heights No Longer Vital to Israeli Security, Analysts Say.” In the old Communist phraseology, the promotion of such a revisionist view at this particular moment in time is “no accident, comrade.”

After all, such pronouncements at present very much serve the interests of the Israeli government of Ehud Barak and those of the Clinton Administration. They are, after all, feverishly trying to reverse the national security strategy of the Jewish State and (i.e., the necessity of maintaining physical control of the Golan Heights) and eliminate one of its foundations (by surrendering all of the Golan to Syria).

The authors of the Jaffe study included what the Post describes as “half-dozen analysts from the Center including former top army officers.” They conclude that the Golan has lost its strategic value to Israel primarily because of a rapid decline in the combat capability of the Syrian military. In the words of Shai Feldman, the Center’s director, “The bottom line is that for now the region remains stable. There are no serious threats to Israel’s security and survival.”

This is, in fact, a highly debatable proposition. Other experts recognize that the Middle East is one of the last regions one would characterize as “stable.” Certainly, threats to Israel’s security and perhaps even its survival abide — including, proliferating weapons of mass destruction, the Egyptian military build-up, hostile regimes in Iraq and Iran, etc. The United States may actually become obliged to improve the condition of the Syrian military as part of price Hafez Assad demands as his price for agreeing to accept Israel’s surrender of the Golan Heights. It would be folly for Israel to relinquish the Golan Heights on the assumption that the historic strategic realities have disappeared and the end of history has arrived.

Those strategic realities were described authoritatively in a study published in Commentary magazine in 1994 prepared by the Center for Security Policy by eleven distinguished American security policy practitioners, five of them retired four-star flag officers — including three former members of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Al Gray and Chiefs of Naval Operations Admirals Elmo Zumwalt and Carl Trost. The attached excerpts gainsay the findings of the Jaffe Center study and bear careful consideration by the Israeli people and their American friends. Particularly noteworthy was the study’s observation that “Israel’s [then-] current Chief-of-Staff, Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak, has recently reiterated that, even under conditions of peace, the IDF must remain deployed on the Golan.”

The Bottom Line

That assessment of the strategic requirement for the Golan remains as valid today — in the age of missiles and in presence of a relatively degraded Syrian military — as it did when General Barak made it. Neither militarily unsound reasoning nor unfulfillable American security guarantees to Israel alter the fact that without the Golan Heights, the Jewish State will likely face a mortal threat to both its “security and survival.”