shebaa farms conflict
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, elected in 1999 on a platform that included an Israeli exit from Lebanon (“bring our boys home”) within a year, sought to negotiate Israel’s departure in the context of a peace agreement with Syria brokered by U.S. President Bill Clinton. One of the numerous accusations put forth by Lebanese border specialists was that Israel intended to annex the Shebaa farms even if it withdrew from South Lebanon and that the Lebanese government must therefore prepare for such a step and assert its rights over the area. Ahmad refers to the Shebaa Farms (occupied by Israel) as territory claimed by both Lebanon and Syria. It has waged wars against Lebanon and occupied Lebanon. U.S. diplomats see a golden opportunity to decouple Syria from Iran by forcing Israel to return territory Syria lost in the 1967 war. The Shebaa Farms, a tug-of-war Mideast conflict zone Patch of land lies at the junction of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, all of which want control over it By AFP 8 October 2014, 12:17 am 1 Edit In 2020, Israel retrospectively recognized the conflict as a war. Under the Baathist strongman Salah Jadid, Damascus adopted a strategy of transforming the Shebaa Farms area at the intersection of the Lebanese-Syrian border and the Golan Heights, which had just been captured by Israel, into a rear base from which Palestinian fighters could launch attacks against the Jewish state.
The border anomaly in the area of the Shebaa farms continued after Lebanon and Syria attained their independence in the mid 1940s. 55, No. A new genre of writing then developed in South Lebanon focusing on Israeli activities in the region. Of these three steps, only the first phase was completed in Lebanon. Hezbollah, along with its Syrian patron, soon contrived a new territorial claim. That Hizbullah needed a pretext to continue its armed struggle against Israel may very well be the case. Then, a peace deal with Syria should be struck and this would lead to the elimination of petty issues such as the conflict over the Shebaa farms. The area known as the Shebaa Farms is a small piece of land currently occupied by Israel but with contested ownership between Syria and Lebanon. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has often called for the resolution of the Shebaa Farms conflict as a means of neutralizing Hizbullah's military wing. Though the area in question—the Shebaa Farms—had been part of the Syrian Golan Heights in the post-mandate era, and although it was Syrian territory when Israel conquered it 1967, Syria and Hezbollah concluded that Israel was occupying Lebanese soil. Similarly, an Israeli retreat from the Shebaa Farms would once again threaten Hezbollah’s raison d’etre. The establishment of Hizbullah in 1983 only accelerated this development. This reality concerning the Syrian-Lebanese border in general and the area of the Shebaa farms in particular continued uninterrupted until Israel occupied the Golan Heights in June 1967. In practice, however, the residents of the area continued to consider themselves part of Lebanon. While Damascus bitterly repudiates Israel’s conquest of the Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War, it has avoided direct entanglement with the Israel Defense Forces. In the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948-1949, during which Lebanese forces participated in the coordinated Arab assault on Israel, Israeli forces overtook the area and its inhabitants fled to Lebanon. Ended with the 2006 Lebanon War, Israel continues to occupy the Shebaa Farms. Since borders are one of the prime attributes of independence and sovereignty, any Syrian initiative to discuss its boundary with its neighbor would implicitly have implied recognition of Lebanon as a sovereign state. This, however, would lay bare Hezbollah’s Iran-inspired agenda, and would certainly not appeal to all Lebanese citizens. Arab public opinion, on the other hand, considers it yet more proof of Israel's expansionist nature. All Rights Reserved. Hezbollah fighters ambushed an Israel Defense Force (IDF) convoy in the disputed Shebaa Farms area near the Golan Heights on January 28. Asher Kaufman is a research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Har Dov, as the area is called in Hebrew, consists of fourteen small orchards and pastures. This manufactured dispute centers around a small territory commonly known as the Shebaa Farms. It is also important to note that not all Lebanese officials agree with Hezbollah’s claims. On the Lebanese side of the farms is a remote Sunni region. On the Lebanese side of the farms is a remote Sunni region. The Israeli public favored an exit strategy. Indeed, provocations against Israel would only prompt further conflict, which the average Lebanese citizen does not want. It should be emphasized that because the borderline between the two countries has never been determined, border anomalies existed throughout the Syrian-Lebanese boundary. The analysis of regional security in the Middle East presents a very complex challenge given the many perspectives from which it must be considered. When this happens it will be left to Syria and Lebanon to determine who owns this piece of land, yet not before the two countries establish a relationship of mutual respect of their sovereignty. 'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); The Jewish Policy Center is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, 501(c)3 organization. Additionally, following the Israeli military activities in South Lebanon from 1978 on, the international border between Israel and Lebanon lost its relevance. Moreover, neither the 1967 Syrian-Israeli ceasefire nor the 1974 Agreement on Disengagement identified the area as Lebanese territory. Even the map of Lebanon appearing on Lebanese currency depicted the area as lying outside Lebanon’s borders. When Israel unilaterally withdrew its forces from Lebanon in May 2000, Syria faced a strategic conundrum. Indeed, Jamil al-Sayyid, then-director-general of Lebanon’s General Security Directorate (which took orders directly from Damascus), is rumored to have concocted the Shebaa Farms dispute based on a handful of Ottoman-era property deeds and French Mandate-era maps depicting the Lebanon-Syria boundary as several miles to the south of where it is now. The essay concludes with a few thoughts about the regional implications of this conflict and the prospects for resolution. For Hizbullah , the Shebaa farms front continues to preoccupy the armed wing of the organization and, in fact, to maintain its raison d'être - the muqawama - or resistance against Israel. Daniel Mandel is a fellow in history at Melbourne University, director of the Zionist Organization of America’s Center for Middle East Policy and author of H.V. The attack left two IDF soldiers dead and seven others wounded. Furthermore, from early 1968, the area became a war zone between Israel and Palestinian guerrilla organizations, a fact that entirely altered the focus on the region. 11 No. Yet, it is clear that the organization is attuned to Lebanese public opinion and, therefore, has been very careful to pull the rope tight enough to assert its existence but not too tight to provoke an Israeli response that may alienate Lebanese society. The lack of official border agreement between Syria and Lebanon continued after France evacuated the mandated territories. Yet, were Israel to withdraw from this territory, it would jeopardize an important Syrian asset—its last remaining pressure point to be used against Israel. To this end, Syria contrived a territorial dispute to justify sponsoring ongoing “resistance” against the Jewish state. This Hand and That Hand: The Biden Administration on Iran, Video: The War Between the Wars – The Threat on Israel’s Northern Border, Video: The Bridge from the Oslo Accords to the Abraham Accords, The Lebensraum Factor in Xi Jinping’s Strategy for Hong Kong and Taiwan, Video: U.S.-Saudi Relations in the Biden Era, Video: Don’t Give Domestic Extremists the ‘Post-9/11 Treatment’. My conflicts are political, not ideological." On several occasions, skirmishes in the area have almost created a spark that could have dragged the region into yet another war. Only a comprehensive peace effort would be able to release tension in the region and provide a broad resolution to small as well as large regional disputes. Based upon questionable interpretations of mandate-era documents, some eight square miles of Levantine territory became the new Syrian justification for sponsoring continued Hezbollah attacks against Israel. © 2021 Palestine-Israel Journal. Yet, as it appears now, this dispute is not going to disappear anytime soon from local headlines. So long as this issue remained within inter-Arab affairs, it had no volatile implications and left no impact on "regional security." Thus, despite the fact that the organization faces growing opposition in Lebanon to its military activities, Hizbullah has made it clear that it will not abandon its armed struggle against Israel and focus instead solely on internal Lebanese issues. The United Nations and Israel say that Shebaa Farms is part of the Golan Heights captured from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War.
Since the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel has occupied the Shebaa Farms, also referred to as Shab’a Farms, which was under the control of Lebanon. An Israeli Army outpost, in 2007, as seen from the Lebanese side of the border. The UN, for its part, sided with Israel on this matter and concluded that the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon was, indeed, complete. Sayyid, by way of background, is one of four government officials (the other three are Syrian) named in the U.N.’s Detlev Mehlis Report on the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri. Har Dov, as the area is called in Hebrew, consists of fourteen small orchards and pastures. Overview Israel has occupied the Shebaa Farms since 1967 without any armed resistance from Lebanon and annexed it in 1981. The start of the Lebanese civil war in April 1975 left no space in the public consciousness for "petty" issues such as the Shebaa farms. The Shebaa Farms have little to no significance in the broader Arab-Israeli conflict. At the beginning of May 2000, before the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon, the Lebanese authorities demanded that Israel also pull out of this area, citing the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 425. French officers who served in the region noticed this anomaly and reported to the High Commission in Beirut on the discrepancy between maps and de facto practice, and suggested amending the maps so they would correspond with local practice. Next on the agenda should be American insistence that any border rectification that Syria seeks must include a definitive designation of the Shebaa Farms, complete with signed maps. Chronicle of a Territorial Dispute," Middle East Journal (Fall 2002); Idem, "The Shebaa Farms: A Case Study of Border Dynamics in the Middle East." In 1974, with the signing of the Syrian-Israeli Disengagement Agreement and the deployment of UN forces in the Golan Heights, Syria accepted the existing maps, which located the Shebaa farms within the occupied Golan Heights. The Shebaa Farms Area in Historical Perspective
France, as the mandatory power, did delineate a border between the two countries on various maps, but not even once did official or professional surveyors on the ground carry out this process. The Shebaa Farms were captured by Israel from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War along with the rest of the Golan Heights; their future disposition, it has been assumed, is part of the Israeli-Syrian territorial dispute. Articles, excerpts, and translations may not be reproduced in any form without written permission. Similarly, with the deployment of the UN forces in South Lebanon in 1978, the Lebanese government endorsed the same maps, which excluded the Shebaa farms from its sphere of sovereignty. The lack of official border agreement between Syria … After six years of controversy, however, the United Nations relented. This alleged error occurred when British and French authorities fixed the boundary between their respective Palestine and Lebanon mandates, pursuant to the 1920 Treaty of Sevres. By the late 1990s, amidst mounting fatalities, the military presence in Lebanon had become increasingly unpopular in Israel. Lebanon could not remain indifferent to these developments and indeed Lebanese specialists made lists of territorial, financial and other demands from Israel. Until then, Damascus believed that Hezbollah was a powerful bargaining chip. In 2008, Syria engaged in several rounds of Turkish-sponsored diplomatic talks with Israel. Jumblatt, then an active participant in the anti-Syria Cedar Revolution, was issuing a direct challenge to Syria and its Lebanese agents. As the case of the seven villages reminds us, finding another tract of “occupied Lebanese territory” would be no simple matter. Specifically, when the United Nations (U.N.) confirmed Israel’s withdrawal to the Blue Line—the internationally recognized Lebanese-Israeli frontier —claims of “occupation” could not be sustained. Lebanon, however, supported by Syria, claims the area is an integral part of South Lebanon, and should have been included when Israel withdrew from Lebanon. Damascus, for its part, endorses Lebanon’s position and calls for Israel’s unconditional withdrawal. On August 1, 2008, then-newly elected president of Lebanon, Michel Suleiman, referring to the Shebaa Farms, stated, “the countdown for liberating the rest of our lands has begun. Mideast conflicts converge in tiny patch of Lebanon Syrian civil war makes Shebaa Farms area along Israel, Syria and Lebanese borders a hotspot for militias, arms smuggling and violence According to the official Israeli stance, the area is an integral part of the Golan Heights and should be negotiated with Syria, if and when peace talks are resumed. Shebaa Farms, also spelled Sheba'a Farms (Arabic: مزارع شبعا, Mazāri' Šib‘ā; Hebrew: חוות שבעא, Havot Sheba‘a or הר דוב, Har Dov) is a small strip of land at the intersection of the Lebanese-Syrian border and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Furthermore, from the early 1950s to 1967, Syria physically took control over the region of the Shebaa farms, imposing a de facto reality on what previously was no more than imperfectly drawn French maps. 2 For a detailed description of this issue see Asher Kaufman, "Who Owns the Shebaa Farms? As long as Israel occupies the Golan Heights and there is no sign of a future Israeli-Palestinian agreement, it is in Syria's interests to keep Israel "on its toes" pending a comprehensive peace deal. In the aftermath of the Israeli war against Hezbollah in 2006, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 called for the “Delineation of the international borders of Lebanon, especially in those areas where the border is disputed or uncertain, including in the Shebaa farms area.”, Today, the Lebanese government presses vigorously for rights to the Shebaa Farms. “Petty issues” such as the Shebaa farms conflict can only be resolved if Israel and Syria strike a peace deal. It is located about 3 to 12 km (2 to 7.5 mi) southwest of the Lebanese village of Shebaa, and about 5 to 7 km (3 to 4 mi) northwest of the Druze village of Majdal Shams. Source for information on Shebaa Farms: Dictionary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict dictionary. The point was to harass the Israelis with rocket and mortar attacks, to keep the conflict on a simmer but not lead to an all-out war. It is possible that American pressure might force the Syrian government to harness Hizbullah, but in my best judgment, such a scenario is not probable in the near future. He recommended, therefore, using the line separating the areas of operation of UNIFIL and UNDOF [the UN forces in South Lebanon and the Golan Heights, respectively] along the relevant portions of the Lebanese-Syrian boundary, which ultimately put the Shebaa area within the Syrian Golan Heights and, therefore, under Israeli control1.