The Golan Heights were taken fom Syria in the 1967 war. When you read of peace talks with Syria, this is the bone of contention.

Golan-- the human dimension

The Sharon government has been hinting that, in the absence of any credible peace diplomacy toward the Palestinians, it might be prepared to resume the long-stalled talks with Syria. What else is new? The tactic of "threatening" to turn away from one track of the so-called "peace process" (a.k.a. the peace-free process: all process and none of the peace) is an old, old one for Israeli leaders of both major parties. And then, just as those hints about possible talks with Syria start going around, the Sharon government announces a massive new settlement-building project on the Golan. Again, so what else is new?

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Golan Days
by Helena Cobban

Broad sweeps of fertile land being farmed by prosperous Israeli settlers. An embattled Arab community maintaining a tough-minded collective resistance to the occupation -- even as it fights to hang onto its remaining lands. Deep divisions among the settlers over whether they would ever be prepared to leave... All this and more I discovered on a recent visit to the occupied Golan Heights, a journey that helped to put a human face on what many outsiders look at mainly as a 'strategic' or military issues: the issue of the Golan. On my journey I met community organizers from Majdal Shams and other Syrian- Arab villages, who under difficult circumstances are keeping alive the spirit of resistance they showed most publicly during the successful 1981-82 campaign to resist having Israeli identity cards imposed on them. I met an Israeli Member of Knesset, one of the first settlers on the Golan back in July 1967, whose successful agitation against any withdrawal acted as a strong brake on Rabin's diplomacy back in 1995, and whose role in forming a new political party, 'Third Way', helped to bring down the Labor government in 1996. And I met a different kind of settler leader, too: a spokesman for the point of view that in the event of a full peace with Syria, all options including a full withdrawal should be considered -- and he pointed out that while 'Third Way' gained only 17 percent of settlers' votes in '96, Labor, which remained committed to a withdrawal won more than 50 percent... Altogether, the situation on the Golan, both demographically and politically, has many features different from the parallel occupation being run just a few kilometers to the south, in the occupied West Bank. What is the same between the two, however, is the daily battle of the indigenous Arab communities to hang onto their land and their national- political identity in the face of concerted Israeli attempts to strip them of both.

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