Activists Split on Prospective Peace with Israel

Mustafa and Elias, both opposition activists, are arguing loudly in a Damascus café. The source of their argument, which has more or less reached a dead end, is the future of Syrian-Israeli relations.

Syrians calling their relatives in the occupied Golan Heights – YouTube

Mustafa believes that any future government must make peace with Tel Aviv in order to focus on internal problems, while Elias sees the conflict between the two countries as an existential struggle with no room for mutual recognition and the establishment of normal relations.

Whether and how to confront Israel is among the thorniest issues Syrians will have to contend with should the present regime fall. So far, the question of Israel has been a red line for Syrians; the regime prohibits public debate of its enmity with Tel Aviv and has brandished the Palestinian cause as a means of shoring up a kind of popular legitimacy in the absence of real elections.

To get a sense of the divisions even among opposition activists on this issue, The Damascus Bureau conducted an informal online survey of 20 Syrian opposition activists from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. While the survey is by no means a scientific or representative poll, it does offer a glimpse into the variety of opinions on the matter.

Twelve of the 20 activists we contacted, about half of whom live abroad, responded that they support peace between Damascus and Tel Aviv, but eight of the 12 said only after the Golan Heights are returned to Syria and an independent Palestinian state is established. Three of the twelve said they would support peace following the return of the Golan Heights even if a solution has not been achieved on the Palestinian front, and just one person said he supported peace even if the Golan remains under Israeli control.

On the other hand, eight of the 20 activists said they would oppose a peace deal with Israel, but they were evenly divided between those who wanted to maintain the ceasefire and those who wanted to reignite the military confrontation with the Jewish state.

The Golan Heights are at the centre of the dispute between Syria and Israel. Israel has occupied the Heights since the Six-Day War in 1967 and officially annexed them in 1981, in a move that was not recognized by the international community. United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 calls on Israel to withdraw from the occupied Arab territories, including the Syrian Golan Heights. In May 1974, Syria and Israel struck a ceasefire deal in Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations, the Soviet Union and the United States.

“The conflict exists and will continue, but the forms of resistance and struggle are countless and start from a culture that does not, and will not, recognize this status quo,” says Syrian novelist and opposition activist Abdel Nasser Ayed. “[The struggle] starts with demographic changes in favour of the Palestinians, and it ends with intellectual, technical and military superiority that we might witness one day.”

“The Arab Spring may be a prelude to a wave of advancement in the Arab world that will sweep the Israeli entity away,” he adds.

Mahmoud Mahmoud, an opposition activist who spent five months in an Israeli prison in 2011, says that talk of peace with “the Israeli enemy” cannot happen now. He believes that such an agreement can only occur when “all the Palestinian refugees have returned to their historic homeland, the stolen land is given back and the separation wall is destroyed.”

Mahmoud believes that Israel should be replaced by a state where people from all the ethnicities and religions that once existed in Palestine, including Jews and Arabs, live side by side without discrimination.

But the main currents in the Syrian opposition have not yet addressed the issue of future relations with Israel clearly.

The Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most prominent Syrian opposition forces, has so far avoided offering any concrete solution to the problem of the Golan Heights. Riad al-Shaqfa, the secretary general of the movement, has been asked about the subject in a number of press interviews but always offers vague answers.

The clearest statement so far was made by Burhan Ghalioun when he was the head of the Syrian National Council.

In an interview with Wall Street Journal in December 2011, Ghalioun said if the opposition came to power in Syria it would be committed to restoring the Golan Heights, but would seek to recover them through negotiation rather than armed force.

The last direct peace talks between Syria and Israel took place under the auspices of Washington in 2000 but the two parties failed to reach an agreement. Turkey sponsored indirect talks in 2008, but it pulled out after the Israeli attack on Gaza end of the year.

On Wednesday, Israeli aircraft hit a military target inside Syria, near the borders with Lebanon. This has been the first direct Israeli intervention since the start of the uprising in March 2011. Nonetheless, the Golan Heights have remained relatively untouched by the events as talk of the future of territories under Israeli occupation was put on hold.

In the long run, one of the changes that Israel might have to deal with is an atmosphere of freedom in Syria that would end the Baath party’s monopoly on managing the Israeli-Syrian conflict.

In 2006, five years before the outbreak of protests demanding fall of the regime, the Syrian writer Yassin Haj Saleh wrote in his book ‘Walking on One Foot’ that “democracy in Syria or the creation of a rational political life is the first step towards restoring the Golan Heights.”