NO MORE EXCUSES: EARLY ELECTIONS IN ISRAEL DEMAND EARLY CONGRESSIONAL ACTION ON ANY U.S. GOLAN DEPLOYMENT

(Washington, D.C.): Israeli Prime Minister
Shimon Peres’ announcement that he will accelerate the
schedule for national elections from late fall 1996 to
the end of May could prove to be a godsend: It might
enable a potentially calamitous development in
U.S.-Israeli relations to be avoided.

That development would be the deployment of U.S.
forces on the Golan Heights as part of a peace agreement
between Israel and Syria. As noted in the Center for
Security Policy’s blue-ribbon study of the costs and
benefits of such a deployment ⁽¹⁾,
placing American troops on the Golan would have profound
and adverse implications for Israeli security, for the
strategic ties between the United States and its most
important regional ally and for U.S. interests in the
Middle East more generally.

Israeli security will be endangered by the surrender
of the Golan Heights — a massif overlooking northern
Israel from which, when in hostile Syrian hands, the
Jewish State has been attacked repeatedly. The loss of
the strategic depth offered by the Golan will compel
Israel once again to rely upon a policy of preemption for
its security, hardly a formula for enhanced regional
stability.

‘Send in the Marines’

These concerns have led American and Israeli
officials to conjure up the idea of stationing U.S.
military personnel on the Heights. Such troops are
likely to be portrayed very differently in Israel and the
United States: The people of Israel will probably be
encouraged to see the Americans as a substitute for the
Israeli armored forces currently stationed there. As
such, they would be a deterrent to renewed Syrian
aggression that would, if necessary, help fight Syria if
deterrence fails. To U.S. audiences, however, the Golan
deployment would be described as merely a peacekeeping
one between two parties committed to a durable end to
hostilities. In America, it will be implied (if not
stated) that — should there be renewed conflict — these
troops will be withdrawn, rather than ordered to fight.

This disconnect invites disaster. Israel would be
encouraged to abandon its traditional posture of military
self-reliance in favor of a de facto dependence
upon U.S. forces misconstrued to represent a form of
security guarantee. The practical effect of their
presence on the Golan will probably not be to inhibit a
Syrian attack (if Damascus decides to go to war with
Israel, it will have already discounted U.S. unhappiness)
but to foreclose — or at least greatly complicate —
Israeli options for nipping that attack in the bud. Even
if Israel survived the assault, it is not clear that
vital U.S.-Israeli strategic cooperation would do so.

Then there is the issue of broader American regional
interests. On the one hand, it is not self-evident that
those interests will be served by directly implicating
the United States in any future conflict between Syria
and Israel. On the other, the United States has many
reasons to hold Syria at arms’ length — including
Damascus’ drug-trafficking, support for terrorism,
wholesale counterfeiting of U.S. dollars, colonization of
Lebanon, strategic cooperation with Iran and acquisition
of weapons of mass destruction. It would be foolhardy to
ignore such problems simply because Israel has decided,
for its own reasons, to try to make peace with Syria. In
the face of these outstanding grievances, it would be
outrageous were the United States to wind up paying Syria
many millions of dollars as it has done for other parties
who have traded Israeli-controlled land for pieces of
paper.

Excuses, Excuses

In the past, various excuses have been served up to
justify deferring debate about a U.S. deployment on the
Golan Heights. Now, with the Peres announcement that he
intends to go to his people in May seeking a mandate for
completing an agreement with Syria, there can be no
more excuses.

For example, the Clinton Administration long sought
political cover by claiming that it had made no
commitment to effect a Golan deployment. That excuse went
over the side last month when Secretary of Defense
William Perry expressly pledged to put U.S. forces on the
Golan Heights if and when a peace agreement had been
signed by Syria and Israel.

Administration spokesmen have also insisted for
months that it would be “premature” to discuss
the idea until after an agreement was signed and the
precise terms of the deployment had been agreed. But
if the Israeli people are being asked, in effect, to
approve the overall deal based on nothing more than the
broad outlines that are now known, then the American
people and their elected representatives ought to be at
least as able to evaluate just one component of
that incipient agreement.

More to the point, how can the Israeli electorate
make an informed decision on surrendering the Golan
Heights without an accurate understanding of the actual
security risks that will be entailed? In particular, the
people of Israel need to know whether U.S. troops are
going to be on the Golan — and, if so, to what end and
under what rules of engagement (and disengagement).

Establishing the answers to such questions is clearly
an American responsibility. It is ironic that
Shimon Peres has, by asking Israelis to affirm his Syrian
diplomacy before it is completed, created circumstances
that should insulate U.S. decision-making about a Golan
deployment from the most insidious charge of all: that
American efforts to debate the merits of that deployment
are a subterfuge for meddling in the internal affairs or
domestic politics of Israel. Peres’ political
timetable that now demands U.S. decisions helps show this
charge for what it always was — the last refuge of
Israeli and U.S. partisans unable, or unwilling, to
address the serious substantive problems associated with
an American deployment on the Golan.

The Bottom Line

The debate on those problems can no longer be
deferred. The people of Israel need to know whether the
Clinton Administration’s latest ill-advised peacekeeping
commitment will be honored by Congress. The American
people need to understand beforehand the serious
implications if that should happen. And the interests of
both peoples will be better served if it does not.

(1) See href=”../studies/golan94.html”>U.S. Forces on the
Golan Heights: An Assessment of Benefits and Costs
(25 October 1994).