WATCH THIS SPACE: CONGRESS MUST DEBATE GOLAN DEPLOYMENT EARLY ON — OR RISK ANOTHER OSLO-STYLE FAIT ACCOMPLI

(Washington, D.C.): The apparent failure of the latest
shuttle diplomacy undertaken by Secretary of State Warren
Christopher this week to achieve a breakthrough in peace
negotiations between Israel and Syria should not be
confused with a permanent breakdown in those
talks. It certainly does not mean that the Clinton
Administration’s misguided effort to commit U.S. forces
to a peacekeeping or “peace monitoring”
function on the Golan Heights is at an end.

To the contrary, unless the new
Republican-controlled Congress acts to prevent such a
deployment early next year, it is predictable that it
will be faced sometime in 1995 with a diplomatic fait
accompli: Just as the deal between Israel
and the Palestine Liberation Organization (that is now
coming unravelled) was announced without warning in
August 1993 — leaving little opportunity for debate or
critical analysis — all other things being equal, an
accord between Hafez Assad and Yitzhak Rabin will
probably emerge before the end of 1995 and the
insertion of American troops on the Golan will be
portrayed as the cornerstone of the agreement.

Why 1995 Is Assad’s Year

This assessment is predicated upon a very
straightforward calculation. Assad, who enjoys a
well-earned reputation for ruthless cunning, surely
appreciates that Rabin’s declining popularity and
mounting political needs in the run-up to the 1996
elections in Israel are likely to make the Prime Minister
more tractable next year about the extent and speed of an
Israeli withdrawal from the Golan than he has been to
date. Indeed, it is arguable that Mr. Rabin’s only
hope for reelection will be if he is able to claim
credibly that he has achieved a valuable peace agreement
with Syria.

Having said that, there is a chance that Assad will
remain unwilling to accommodate his Israeli foes. He is,
after all, in the position of an mafioso who is
well-schooled in the rules of the underworld but who
finds himself in changed circumstances, operating under
new and uncertain rules. It cannot be precluded that he
will continue to rely upon terrorism and violence to
advance his purposes rather than seek to do so through
diplomatic gambits.

Still, Assad is perfectly capable of utilizing such
instruments if he calculates that a peace agreement with
Israel in which the United States is fully implicated
will: swiftly return to his control all of the Golan; end
his country’s blacklisting by the U.S. on account of its
support for terrorism, drug-trafficking, counterfeiting
of American dollars, etc.; facilitate renewed Syrian
access to the resources of the international financial
institutions; and create conditions likely to weaken —
if not imperil — U.S.-Israeli relations. Those bilateral
ties could suffer, for example, should the United States
adopt a neutral stance in future Israeli-Syrian disputes
and/or if Americans troops are withdrawn from the Golan
under fire, unnecessarily calling into serious question
once again U.S. reliability as an ally.

Will the Israeli People Fall For Another
False Peace?

A further complication for Prime Minister Rabin is the
fact that the Israeli people have now had an opportunity
to react to not one but two peace treaties —
the 1993 PLO deal and the 1994 accord with Jordan. As
noted above, the former is increasingly seen as a
political liability for Rabin as his people appreciate
that there will be no peace with the Palestinian Arabs,
either because Yassir Arafat is too weak to guarantee it
in the face of the determined terrorist attacks mounted
by extremist Islamic factions operating in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip or, alternatively, because such attacks
serve his unchanged objective of destroying Israel.

Far more interesting, however, has been the Israeli
public’s reaction to the agreement with Jordan: Mr.
Rabin has received virtually no credit with his
populace for achieving this treaty. It seems
that this is the case because the people of Israel have
understood that the accord did little more than formalize
a peace that had already been in practice for years.

In other words, the Israeli public now appears to
appreciate something lost on many of their leaders —
and, for that matter, leaders and publics elsewhere in
the West: There is a fundamental difference
between peace and a peace treaty. If you have peace, you
do not necessarily need a treaty. If you have no peace,
it does not matter whether or not you have a treaty.
If anything, having a treaty under such circumstances may
actually make matters worse, particularly if the
arrangements entailed in that treaty compromise Israel’s
ability to defend itself and facilitate its adversaries’
efforts to exploit Israeli vulnerabilities. The Israelis
have come, regrettably very belatedly, href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾ to realize
that the PLO agreement is having this effect. There is
reason to believe that they recognize the same will be
true of any deal that might be reached with Syria.

What to Watch For

As the Israeli government enters 1995 — the last
window of opportunity for it to make the concessions
necessary to seal an agreement with Syria before
electioneering starts in earnest — it is clear that
Prime Minister Rabin’s coalition will be seriously torn.
Some hawkish members of the Labor Party will argue
against pursuing a Syrian treaty that is likely to prove
very expensive in terms of Israeli security and
problematic politically. They will observe, correctly,
that the timing is wrong, that Israel already has a lot
to digest as a result of the PLO and Jordan agreements.

On the other hand, the Party’s left-wing, dominated by
Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, has made known its
view that the proper response to Labor’s diminishing
prospects is to proceed full speed ahead with securing a
deal with Syria. For instance, Beilin has recently
encouraged his partisans to seek to create “facts on
the ground” with respect to treaty obligations and
territorial concessions that a successor regime cannot
reverse.

An early indication of the ascendancy of Beilin’s
“doves” would be if the Rabin government starts
signalling that it is unreasonable to expect Hafez Assad
to accept a worse deal than the late Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat got — namely a complete Israeli withdrawal
from occupied territory within three years. These are
conditions that Assad could well accept, particularly if
sweetened over the next 3-10 months by further
concessions on the part of Israel and the United States.

The Bottom Line

To ensure that a future “breakthrough”
between Israel and Syria will not simply produce
conditions that lead to their next, and most devastating,
war, it is imperative that it not to be predicated on the
false expectation that the considerable risks for
Israel’s safety entailed in such a deal will be mitigated
by the presence of U.S. forces on the Golan, forces
dispatched there ostensibly as a tangible expression of
American security guarantees to Israel. Such an
expectation can only be prevented if the Congress
carefully examines the costs and putative benefits of
such a deployment as an early order of business — and
acts as a result of such a net assessment to ensure that
U.S. troops will not be placed on the Golan
Heights.

– 30 –

1. The Center for Security Policy
endeavored to warn the Israelis and their friends in the
United States of the serious dangers inherent in the
agreement with the PLO on the day it was signed in
Washington.