With well-practiced polish, Israel has just slipped into “good cop” mode. The world has been surprised to hear from a senior Israeli officer, Gen. Moshe Yaalon, that the continued occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights will not be strictly necessary to ensure the country’s future security. Meanwhile Israel’s Deputy Premier Ehud Olmert has apparently cut across his government’s policy by announcing that he believes that far more than just four illegal Israeli West Bank settlements will have to be evacuated as set out in the Bush-endorsed Sharon plan, which also involved a total withdrawal of settlers from Gaza.
The effect of these two announcements will be to make the outside world think that there is a genuine debate under way at the most senior levels in Israel. Observers will be encouraged to believe that powerful elements in the country’s political and military elites are prepared to take a pragmatic approach to the search for peace. Unfortunately past experience suggests this is just another piece of hokum, an adroit maneuver to present Zionist policies as based on reason and negotiation. This will doubtless prove to be a diversionary tactic while the real business of Israeli occupation, the rigid policing of Palestinian communities, the further enlargement and fortification of existing illegal settlements and - most importantly - the continued construction of the security wall, largely on Palestinian territory, will carry on regardless.
Nevertheless, flying the kite of a complete return of the Golan to Syria will serve another useful purpose. Past negotiations with Syria have always stuck on Israel’s insistence on their occupation of a key strip of land known as the Lake of Tiberius. The new proposal might give the Sharon government an insight into the thinking of Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad. Might it be possible to secure a separate deal with Damascus and so end Syrian support for the Palestinians and perhaps also a transformation of its influence in the Lebanon? Those who believe such a rapprochement to be unthinkable should not forget the 1978 Camp David agreement between the out and out Zionist Menachem Begin and Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat in which territory was swapped for disengagement.
If Damascus does not take the bait so unofficially trailed by one of its top generals, the Israeli government will have lost nothing. Indeed it will have gained because even the simple proposal, however vague and indirect, will contribute to the phony impression that this Zionist government is in truth always searching for a fair and reasonable solution to the troubles in which it has been plunged by a hostile Arab world. And the same for the evacuation of West Bank settlements. The die-hard Zionist occupants of these illegal conurbations will howl with feigned anger, comfortable in the knowledge that their Zionist Premier Ariel Sharon has no intention of actually giving up an inch of Palestinian land if he can help it. At a time when Israel along with the Palestinians is under attack from the UN for failing to protect civilians and making no progress toward reforms under the road map, coming up with some apparently positive proposals will take the pressure off the Sharon government. The fact that these so-called initiatives will come to absolutely nothing is irrelevant as far as the Israelis are concerned. They have once again presented themselves as the good cop, to whom strong-armed tactics, repression and illegality are utterly alien. Tragically however it is all presentation and no substance.
