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Israel and the Golan
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To the Editor:
In the May letters columns, the authors of the Center for Security Policy report, “U.S. Forces on the Golan Heights?” [December 1994], give a conclusive reply to their critic, Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. But one thing should be added. It may seem secondary yet it goes to the root of the dispute, and is a good example of the subtle, even subliminal, pro-Arab propaganda spread around the world by supposedly “honest arbiters” who manage, habitually, to suggest that whatever happens, Israel is in the wrong.
Mr. Eisenstadt writes that “the return of the Golan would eliminate Syria’s central grievance vis-à-vis Israel.” Syria’s grievance? In 1948, to prevent Israel’s very birth, Syria (in alliance with six other Arab states) wantonly attacked Israel—from, inter alia, the Golan Heights. Israel, woefully lacking in arms, nevertheless came out fighting and (at a cost of 1 percent of its entire population) consolidated its sovereign existence. For nineteen years thereafter, Syria contented itself with attacks, intermittent but frequent, sometimes daily, on the Galilean plain below. Many Israeli children in the area had to attend school in underground bunkers, sheltered against Syrian shells lobbed down from the Golan.
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