Word: damascus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...between Israel and Syria were quickly translated into heartening action last week. On the Golan Heights, where 1,200 artillery duels have been waged since the end of the October war, the big guns fell silent. According to a Syrian military communique, "all fighting stopped at 2:15 p.m." (Damascus time) ?exactly half an hour after the ceremony in Geneva ended. Israel reported that one of its soldiers had been killed in the final round of shooting and two others injured...
...prisoner exchange was greeted on either side with joy. At airports in both Damascus and Tel Aviv, weeping, surging crowds welcomed wounded soldiers who hobbled or were carried off Red Cross airplanes. Kissinger himself celebrated the end of hostilities in the Israeli capital by unexpectedly planting an exuberant buss on the cheek of retiring Premier Golda Meir. Recovering her composure, Mrs. Meir chided the Secretary of State, "I didn't think that you kissed women too"?a reference to the spate of pictures showing Kissinger being hugged by Arab leaders...
...Secretary of State's tour de force was truly breathtaking. In a month abroad he had logged 24,230 miles, visited Jerusalem 16 times and Damascus 13, and made side trips to Algiers, Alexandria, Amman, Riyadh, Cairo and Nicosia.* Praise for Kissinger was all but universal. In the U.S., a Harris poll taken before disengagement was announced showed that 85% of Americans questioned considered that he was doing a "good to excellent" job. It was the highest rating ever recorded for anyone from the Executive Branch...
...later agreed to 1,000. Nor could the foes agree on the depth of "military zones" to be established on each side of the disengagement line. Jerusalem wanted relatively wide areas of 14.5 miles on either side of the U.N. buffer manned by limited forces in static positions. Damascus, on the contrary, wanted narrow zones (no more than three miles), each manned by 20,000 men and a hundred tanks free to roam instead of being confined to fixed positions. One reason: Damascus, Syria's capital, is only 30 miles from the present front. Syria also objected...
...Israelis and the Egyptians. Neither side had much to trade, especially since their armies were not stopped in exposed, vulnerable positions, as was the case in Egypt. The nature of the territory was also a factor: the vast Sinai desert is an obvious buffer zone, while the plain of Damascus and the Golan Heights are-or were before the fighting at least-populated regions with civilian settlements on both sides. Another difference: Egyptian and Israeli negotiators were willing to talk to each other, under U.N. auspices, at Kilometer 101; all the Syrian-Israeli negotiations had to be handled by Kissinger...