Golan Heights a Crossroads for Mideast Peace

The wind is relentless atop these cypress- and eucalyptus-covered hills, blowing up the canyons and shearing the backs of the trees as it rushes across the mountaintops toward Israel and Lebanon.

Here, near the peak the Arabs always called “Sheik” for its dignified white cap in winter, is the high ground under which the well-tended Jewish farms and settlements of Galilee spread out on the other side for miles.

If there is a nerve center of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is here, amid the barbed wire, roaming military vehicles, rocky hills and shell-pocked villages of the Golan Heights.

Kuneitra, former capital of the Syrian Golan, still stands in ruins 17 years after departing Israeli troops bulldozed its houses and shops into rubble, carefully preserved testimony to a war whose guns have been silenced but not put away.

“Destroyed by Zionists,” says the sign in front of the hospital, whose bullet-riddled facade hides empty corridors of fallen bricks, broken concrete and, as everywhere, the whistling breeze.

Suddenly last month, amid the remnants of warfare and division that straddle these hills, an envoy in a long white dress came out of the land of occupation: A bride, in her wedding gown, flanked by officials of the United Nations and the Red Cross, picked her way across the 328-yard no-man’s land between Syria and the Israeli-occupied zone to join her new husband from a village on the Syrian side of the Golan.

They had met at a refugee camp near Damascus and corresponded after returning to their villages on either side of the dividing line. The bride’s motorcade was allowed to go as far as the U.N. checkpoint on the border, where the groom was waiting. Then, the bride’s family turned back, and the fence of barbed wire became impermeable once again.

An effort to bring a final peace to the Middle East is under way, but there will be no settlement of the years of enmity between Israel and Syria, its most implacable Arab foe, until the fate of this uneasy frontier is decided.

Twenty-four years after Israeli troops seized it during the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict and 17 years after they gave part of it back after what the Arabs called their “War of Liberation,” the Golan Heights remains an eerily quiet expanse of ancient villages and neat farm fields whose most visible tenants are the U.N. peacekeeping troops, Israel Defense Forces and young Syrians with machine guns slung over their shoulders who prowl along the buffer zone that divides it.

It has been described as the most strategically located region of the Middle East, a towering plateau overlooking virtually the whole of the Galilee which for years served as a base for Syrian guns to rain shells down on Jewish residents below.

It was in the Golan Heights that Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat’s fledgling Fatah movement launched its first operation against Israel in 1965, and in the Golan where Syrian troops placed on full alert ignited the tensions that led to the Six-Day War with Israel two years later.

Some of Israeli’s finest soldiers lost their lives scaling the mine-infested highlands on the last day of the war to capture the plateau and recapture it again in 1973 after it was partially retaken by the Syrians, and Israelis still describe vividly the constant fear of living under the shadow of the Syrian guns while tilling their fields.

Though the Israeli-Syrian border in the highlands has proved to be Israel’s most peaceful frontier, the Israelis have made it clear they will never again leave themselves so dangerously exposed.

The Syrians seem equally adamant.

“We are a people who suffered the evils of war. We know the consequences of war. We have been subjected to bombardment, our children, our women and elderly people were killed as a result. We of all people are not against living peacefully on this Earth,” said Jamal Salem, who fled the village of Ein Fit near here as Israeli troops advanced in 1967 and who now tends the museum at Kuneitra created to memorialize the Israeli occupation.

“But here rises a question. If somebody comes and expels you from your house, takes your house by force, what do you do? In what way do you react? We have been forced to defend ourselves. This fact was dictated to us. My land is under occupation. Nobody in the world can accept to live in coexistence with a man who is occupying his own home.”

Israel, for its part, sees the highlands overlooking the vulnerable plains of Galilee as a strategic necessity. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has vowed to give up “not one inch” of the Golan, effectively annexed by Israel in 1981, and an estimated 8,000 Jewish settlers have pushed over the years into the 463 square miles controlled by Israel.

Now, with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s vow to keep a proposed Middle East peace conference on track, attention has focused on these windy hills and on Syria--the most inscrutable partner in a peace process heavy with old enmities and conflicting agendas.

President Hafez Assad’s unprecedented agreement to join in face-to-face talks with Israel constituted a milestone of sorts, coming as it did after four decades of staunch refusals even to acknowledge the existence of the Jewish state and years of hostility toward the only Arab country that did--Egypt, which signed a peace treaty in 1979.

Indeed, Syria is not a place that feels as if peace is about to break out. The government-controlled Syria Times runs almost daily harangues against Israel, accusing the “Zionist aggressors” of attempting to derail the peace process and, at one point last month, running Shamir’s photo side by side with a photo of Adolf Hitler.

Western visitors are escorted to Kuneitra, where a government guide points out the methodical destruction of street after street of houses and then drives up to the edge of the graveyard where, as the Syrians tell it, the Israeli soldiers dug up the dead.

Western diplomats are frustrated at what they say is Assad’s skillful game of walking both sides of the fence.

On the one hand, faced with an end to years of Soviet sponsorship that provided easy credit terms for a military buildup against Israel, Syria correctly identified the direction of the new world order, cast its lot with the West, and joined the allied coalition against Iraq during the Persian Gulf War.

Syria has also moved to exert whatever influence it holds over hostage-holders in Lebanon in an attempt to free the remaining 10 Western captives.

Yet at the same time, Syria has moved with the $2.5 billion it received from grateful Gulf nations to acquire new long-range Scud-C missiles and sophisticated new Soviet-built tanks as a hedge against what it says is Israel’s continuing military buildup.

Assad, in the view of many Western officials, has also paid little more than lip service to the idea of giving the boot to radical Palestinian and suspected terrorist groups that have used their offices in Damascus as platforms to criticize PLO leader Arafat’s moves toward accommodation with the West.

Indeed, Ahmed Jibril, head of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, which took responsibility for the 1970 bombing of a Swissair flight to Tel Aviv that killed 47 people and for a number of raids into northern Israel, still operates out of a comfortable office in a Damascus residential section. And he does so, even after having come out during the Gulf War with several statements in support of Assad’s nemesis, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

In the view of some analysts, Assad is happy to leave Jibril and others talking the radical line that he no longer is publicly espousing, even when it is in apparent direct contradiction to Syria’s own public policies.

“The statements he (Jibril) made in favor of Iraq, clearly Syria allowed them. This is not a country where lapses take place,” one analyst said. “You ask why did you allow this to happen, and they say, after all, don’t you have freedom of speech? But in terms of policy framework, they never like to give up an option. What he (Assad) is really looking for is to preserve Syria’s credentials as a hard-line country.”

The Syrians scoff at such notions and say that while Jibril may hold office hours in Damascus, he is conducting no military or terrorist operations out of Syria. “He’s not operating in Syria. He’s settled in Syria, that’s all, and you have to feel safe that he’s here,” one official said.

Several Western diplomats said Assad’s recent moves toward the West represent not so much a change of conviction as an assessment that this is where Syria’s interest lies, for the moment.

“Assad didn’t change his policy, but he accepted to play the American game,” said one.

Well, part of the American game. On the one hand, in the view of diplomats in the Syrian capital, Assad calculates that the peace process is the best way to try to recapture the Golan, or at least to strike a compromise that would return sovereignty to Syria.

He also figures that playing with the Americans is the best way to assure their cooperation--or at least noninterference--in Syria’s recent moves into neighboring Lebanon by means of a cooperation agreement that has left Syrian troops in virtual control of the country.

Though Israel has objected loudly to Syria’s open-ended military presence in Lebanon, “the U.S. has some interest now in Syria staying in Lebanon because they know it will be stable, at least,” a European envoy said.

In the Syrian view, Damascus has not come around to Washington. It’s the other way around. For the first time, Syrian officials say, U.S. officials are talking about a comprehensive settlement to the Middle East conflict on the basis of U.N. resolutions that the Arabs believe will force Israel to withdraw from occupied Arab lands. They also point to continued American assurances that Washington regards Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights as illegal.

“We think that the West now finally looks at us as part of the world. It was to us humiliating and insulting all those years when they thought of us as a Soviet proxy,” said an official of Syria’s ruling Baath Arab Socialist Party.

“We are hopeful now because we see the U.S. Administration for the first time in their history serious about dealing with the problem in the Middle East. They talk about 242 and 338 and so do we,” he added, referring to the U.N. resolutions proclaiming the right of all the region’s countries to live peacefully within secure boundaries and calling on Israel to give up territories it occupied in 1967 in return for such peace.

Officials admit that Syria, indeed, is keeping its options open by continuing to acquire new arms--even after the harsh example of the Gulf War.

“Assad was afraid of being next on the list to be destroyed,” said one Western envoy in the wake of the war. “When Saddam was defeated, many people here thought it will be us next time.”

Again, it seems to be a matter of hedging one’s bets, making sure both sides of the table are covered.

“As no result has been achieved yet, no conference has convened yet, and the Israelis are every day placing obstacles to peace, do you think Syria will sit still and say OK, we have surrendered to peace, and we will wait until the conference gives its results?” said a prominent Damascus newspaper editor.

“No. Nothing has changed,” he said.

There is very little public opinion voiced in Syria, at least openly, unless it coincides with the views of Assad’s still-dictatorial regime. Diplomats here say that Assad has shown a remarkable willingness to pursue hard-line policies over the years despite the economic costs to the Syrian population of Western sanctions.

Yet there are signs that the Syrians themselves, while highly supportive of Assad’s insistence that Israel give up occupied Arab lands in the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, are also getting weary of seeing anywhere from 60% to 70% of the national budget spent on the military.