OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 1 January 2004 — Israel disclosed plans yesterday to expand Jewish settlement in the Golan Heights captured from Syria in a 1967 war, infuriating Damascus not long after President Bashar Assad proposed reopening peace talks.
Agriculture Minister Yisrael Katz, running the rightwing Israeli Cabinet’s settlement committee, said the plan aimed to underline that the Golan “is an integral part of Israel” before any negotiations for its return demanded by Syria.
A senior official close to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon denied the plan was a “political message” to rebuff Assad or prejudge dialogue on the Golan, insisting “agricultural and tourist development” was the goal.
But Damascus saw a maneuver to make Israel’s control over the strategic plateau irreversible. “Israel is deluded that it can achieve something by relying on power and occupation,” Deputy Foreign Minister Isa Daweesh told Reuters.
“The new Israeli steps...block the way to any inclination or initiative to push matters in the direction of achieving a just and comprehensive peace in the region,” the official Syrian Arab News Agency quoted a government spokesman as saying.
Israel’s main daily Yediot Aharonot said the $62 million plan would double the Golan’s 18,000 settler population within three years.
But an Agriculture Ministry spokesman said “only” 900 families would be settled — a roughly one-third increase.
An explosion in downtown Tel Aviv yesterday was initially reported to be a bombing by Palestinians. But police, on high alert for possible attacks to mark the New Year, announced a false alarm. Israel Radio blamed a tire blowout.
Earlier in the day troops shot and wounded 10 Palestinians and one Israeli in the second confrontation in five days with protesters opposing a wall Israel is building in West Bank territory which Palestinians seek for a state, witnesses said.
Expanding settlements in the Golan would add to Israel’s demographic and security moves cementing its hold on lands occupied in 1967 — similar to the way the West Bank barrier would incorporate settlement blocs that Sharon vows never to relinquish under any peace deals.
A senior Israeli official said the point of the Golan plan was to develop the thinly populated highland, which Israel annexed in 1981 in a move condemned internationally and which is now given over mainly to agriculture and nature preserves.
“This was not intended as a message to Syria. This program has been misused and slanted and twisted, taken out of context for internal political purposes,” the official said.
Sharon’s coalition comprises his mainstream rightwing Likud party — to which Katz belongs — and ultra-nationalist allies who, while prone to rows over political tactics, broadly oppose major territorial handbacks on security and religious grounds.
Some 20,000 Druze also inhabit the Golan as holdovers from Syrian rule. Israel and Syria have no diplomatic relations and remain in a state of war, but the Golan — from which Syrian forces periodically shelled Israel’s northeastern Galilee region before the June 1967 war — has been quiet for decades. Assad, like his late, long-ruling father Hafez Assad, has demanded Israel hand back the Golan as well as other occupied lands as the price for peace with the Arab world.
The Syrian president urged Washington via a recent New York Times interview to help revive peace talks with Israel that collapsed in early 2000, a few months before his father died.
Israeli officials dismissed Assad’s offer as a ploy to relieve US pressure on Damascus over accusations, which it denies, that it harbours militants menacing US interests.
— Additional input from agencies
