Old MacNasrallah's farms

Kofi Annan, during his visit this month to Beirut, has closed the issue of the Shaaba Farms from one standpoint but has also left it open from another.

By Amir Oren, Ha’aretz, 26.6.01

What is to be done with a territory that one country has handed over to another and which has been occupied by a third? Should the occupier return it, and, if so, when and to which country?

This issue cropped up last year when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) completed its withdrawal from Lebanon (or perhaps it has not completed that withdrawal - this is the crux of the dispute referred to below). As may be recalled, the issue arose in connection with the disputed land known as the Shaaba Farms - one of the central pretexts, if not the sole one, for Hezbollah's operations against the IDF along this particular segment of Israel's northern frontier. The Arabic name "Shaaba Farms" has undergone a "conversion" to Judaism in Israel and has been Hebraized to "Har Dov."

The land belongs to Syria, which allowed Lebanon to work the fields there. Thus, it could be argued, for the sake of convenience, that this is actually Syrian territory, as indicated in the maps, or Lebanese territory, if the presence of the Lebanese tenant-farmers gives them any right of ownership.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, during his visit this month to Beirut, has closed the issue from one standpoint but has also left it open from another. He has closed it as far as the Arab-Israeli dispute is concerned because, despite Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, this particular piece of territory will unquestionably be returned, at some point in the future, to one of the above two Arab countries. However, he has left the issue open from the internal-Arab standpoint and has allowed the question of Syrian versus Lebanese ownership to remain unresolved.

Annan exercised great caution in dealing with this issue. UN surveyors, who, in the summer of 2000, marked the Blue Line between Lebanon and Israel, left the Shaaba Farms on the Israeli side, that is, on the Syrian side; in other words, its fate will have to await the signing of a peace treaty between Jerusalem and Damascus, a peace treaty that will also include an Israeli withdrawal. Had Annan decided now that the territory was Lebanese, he would have, with that single utterance, erased the political basis for the boundary to which the IDF withdrew and would have regenerated an old quarrel.

Even after the redeployment of Syrian forces in Lebanon, Damascus continues to view Lebanon as an integral part of Syria. During the Ehud Barak regime, Israel put Syria to the test and allowed the American administration headed by president Bill Clinton to inform the two Syrian presidents belonging to the Assad family - namely, the late Hafez Assad and, subsequently, his son Bashar - that, if Syria produced a written waiver and relinquished all its claims to the Shaaba Farms in favor of Lebanon, the IDF would be prepared to withdraw from that area as well. Syria found itself in a genuine quandary and chose the option of silence. In other words, there were limits to Syria's generosity vis-a-vis Lebanon.

Since the dispute is now strictly a legal one, it is surprising to discover that the experts of both the defense and foreign affairs ministries have completely forgotten a precedent that has a direct bearing on this case: the islands of Sanafir and Tiran at the mouth of the Gulf of Eilat. Israel first seized those two islands in the Sinai Campaign of 1956; however, despite the giddiness with which Israel declared the "establishment of the Third Kingdom of Israel," the government headed by David Ben-Gurion gave in to external pressure and, four months after the end of that war, surrendered all the lands it had captured.

In 1967, when the closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships was the pretext for the crisis that preceded the outbreak of the Six Day War, the IDF again seized the two islands. This time, Israel's presence in the area was more protracted, and, as Egypt and Israel fought - in the political arena and on the battlefield - the Americans demanded that Jerusalem return the islands, or at least Sanafir, to the rightful owners, the Saudis.

Of the four countries along the shores of the Gulf of Eilat, Saudi Arabia prefers to maintain a very low profile and has let the other three - Egypt, Jordan and Israel - share the spotlight in that area. (In fact, Saudi Arabia granted about 10 kilometers of its own beachfront to Jordan to the south of Aqaba.) The Red Sea coast is regarded by the Saudis as their most exposed flank, given its distance from the kingdom's centers of political and religious power. Furthermore, this area is difficult to defend from an aggressor, who could simply close off all navigation toward the area by seizing Bab el Mandeb, located to the south.

Saudi security has depended on an alliance with the Americans and on the country's refusal to get into any direct conflicts with Arab powers, namely Egypt and Iraq. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser confronted Saudi Arabia in Yemen; however, the Saudis, who have never signed a peace treaty with Israel and who have settled for clandestine contacts with the Israelis, granted the Egyptians the right to use the islands, which are located between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

When it reached the two islands in June 1967, the Israel Navy found signs of an Egyptian military presence: a cannon and a harbor that had been camouflaged as a civilian facility but which was used by an Egyptian naval commando unit. When the war ended, the Saudis demanded that the islands be returned to their jurisdiction.

From the standpoint of sovereignty, the Saudi case is simpler and clearer than the Lebanese one. Nonetheless, despite pressure from the U.S. State Department and from various oil companies, Israel adamantly refused to evacuate the islands, which remained primarily sanctuaries for rare birds. The islands continued to be visited by Israelis, including then defense minister Moshe Dayan, who was then on a honeymoon with his second wife in Sharm al-Sheikh. Ten more years would pass before Israel, in the wake of the peace agreement it signed with Egypt three years earlier, finally evacuated Sharm and the islands of Tiran and Sanafir.

Hezbollah is operating in the Gaza Strip (where it is credited with the demonstration of the efficiency of mortars) and on the West Bank (where it has set up a terrorist infrastructure that it is expected to begin activating within the near future). Hezbollah is continuing to fight Israel because of the organization's hostility toward the Israelis and also to serve Iran's interests.

This fighting is still going on, despite the fact that the IDF withdrew from Lebanon a year ago - a withdrawal whose image is worse than the reality of that operation. One of the reasons for the withdrawal's poor image is the fact that the Israel Air Force has not taken the trouble to emphasize the extent to which it was successful in destroying weapons and equipment left behind by the IDF and by the South Lebanon Army.

Old MacNasrallah (Hezbollah General-Secretary Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah) had a farm and on that farm he built a pretext to continue attacking Israel. If that pretext is denied him, he will no doubt find another.