It was and is all about water

Dec.1, 2007

It was and is all about water

AT LEAST one Israeli minister seems to have read the right message from Syria's decision to attend the Annapolis conference. Judging from the comments made on Saturday by a member of parliament from Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak's Labour Party, Danny Yatom, a former chief of Israel's Mossad secret service, Barak understood from Annapolis that Syria is ready to resume peace negotiations.
Well, it has been known for a long time that Syria wants peace with Israel, but on the basis of Israel returning the Golan Heights in its entirety to Syrian sovereignty, something past Israeli leaders were not ready to do.
What is new is Yatom's call on Israel to resume peace talks with Syria without preconditions. These preconditions include an end to Syria's relations with Palestinian resistance groups and Lebanon's Hizbollah. It is a catch-22 situation since the issues are closely linked to the Israeli-Syrian conflict and once that is solved then everything else could also be addressed sastisfactorily and Yatom seems to have come to appreciate it.
Obviously, Yatom was briefed by Barak after the minister returned from Annapolis, and hence it could be assumed to a large extent that the former Mossad chief's comment reflected Barak's thinking.
Yatom asserts that an Israel-Syria peace agreement would be easier to be worked out than an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Israel and Syria had reached an advanced point in negotiations in 2000, when, according to Yatom, then US president Bill Clinton had offered to Syria, with Israeli backing, a peace deal that would have seen Israel withdrawiing to the 1967 borders, "except for a very slight modification in the north-eastern part of the Sea of Galilee."
Well, what Yatom might see as "very slight" would be very important for Syria, which has insisted that Israel withdraw to the border lines it held on June 4, 1967 ie. before the start of the war.
When Israel occupied the Golan Heights in 1967, it claimed that the action was aimed at preventing Syrians from firing down at Israeli farmers. In reality, the Israelis seized the Golan Heights mainly because the strategic area holds the main source of water for Israel and they wanted absolute and unchallenged control of their water sources.
An Israeli general exploded a bombshell when he said in 2004 that the Israeli military is capable of ensuring the country's security without having control of the Golan Heights. But that comment, which seemed to have been hushed up without anyone further up in authority commenting on it, did not seem to take into consideration Israel's greed for water and the reality that the Israelis, whose per capita water consumption is among the highest in that region, are paranoid about their water sources (never mind that the sources are in other's territory and there are international conventions and agreements governing sharing of water).
As such, one of the key questions that follow Yatom's call is: Is there a realistic shift in Israeli thinking to keep their water paranoia at bay and accept good-faith negotiations with Syria?