Israel Fumbles Through Vote on Golan Heights

Call it Keystone Knesset.

In a vote that caught even legislators by surprise, Israel’s parliament on Wednesday gave preliminary approval to a bill that would make it nearly impossible to trade parts of the occupied Golan Heights for peace with Syria.

The government had claimed to oppose the proposed law, which would require approval of a two-thirds majority of the Knesset for any Golan swap, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the rest of his Cabinet members present voted for it.

The opposition Labor Party was so busy congratulating itself for having just defeated another proposed law on the Golan that many of its members missed the subsequent vote, allowing the even more restrictive bill to pass.

Labor then cried foul and accused the government of chicanery.

“That’s ridiculous,” huffed Knesset Chairman Dan Tichon. “The ones who claim I stole the vote are the ones who messed up. What was I supposed to do, wait until everyone got back to his seat?”

Netanyahu hinted that the parliamentary vote held little meaning, while his foreign minister, who was abroad, criticized it. The defeated opposition insisted that its impact would be grave.

“This means the government of Israel cannot conduct negotiations with Syria,” Labor legislator Haim Ramon said. “This will lead to a greater break with Syria, I think to greater deterioration.”

In fact, the 43-40 vote in favor of the proposed law could be overturned if the opposition succeeds in forcing another vote. Tichon said he would decide today.

Meanwhile, the Knesset action sends another signal to Syrian President Hafez Assad that the Netanyahu government is digging deeper into the land that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War.

At a ceremony marking 30 years of Israeli settlement on the Golan last week, Netanyahu told cheering residents that they would be able to remain on the land Syria wants back. Labor leader Ehud Barak was booed at the same gathering when he said he would be willing to make concessions in exchange for peace with Syria.

Syrian television played Wednesday’s Knesset vote prominently and asserted that Israel was reneging on commitments it made at the 1991 Madrid conference to trade land for peace.

The proposed law, which passed the first of three readings, would make approval of territorial concessions on the Golan conditional on the support of at least 80 of the 120 Knesset members and on a majority vote in a popular referendum.

The bill that Labor defeated would have required a majority vote of 61 members of the Knesset and a popular referendum to give back Golan land.

Netanyahu spokesman David Bar-Illan said the prime minister’s position was closer to the first bill and that the one approved would be amended in committee to require 61 votes rather than 80. He said that Netanyahu had not wanted the issue to come up at all right now, but once a faction of his coalition brought it to a vote, the prime minister was forced to go along.

“We were caught between our conviction that the timing was not right and our commitment to the contents of the bill,” Bar-Illan said. “We believe that if any territorial concessions are made, they should be brought to a vote by the public and Knesset. On the other hand, this may be misinterpreted as a provocation.”

The last peace talks between Israel and Syria were held more than a year ago under the previous, Labor governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, who had indicated that they were willing to return most, if not all, of the Golan. Netanyahu’s coalition platform calls for keeping the territory, and there has been virtually no contact between Syria and his government.

Yet Netanyahu insisted that he was echoing the policy of the late Premier Rabin, who also had pledged to bring any final deal with Syria to the public for approval.

“I think the Golan is very vital--it is an important territory, it is important to this government,” Netanyahu said. “We seek peace with Syria. We intend to conduct peace negotiations with Syria. This legislation not only does not prevent these negotiations, but it grants them moral validity by enabling us to turn to the public when the day comes, if we indeed reach [an] agreement.”