Word: golan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Middle East last week, but for once Henry Kissinger was not involved. This time it was United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who flew back and forth between Jerusalem and Damascus in a last-ditch effort to extend the mandate of the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force on the Golan Heights. At week's end, after exhaustive deliberations in the U.N. Security Council, Syria reluctantly agreed to extend the mandate...
Complex questions were involved in Waldheim's effort to keep the 1,220-man force of Austrians, Iranians, Canadians and Poles on the Golan. Israel was willing to renew the mandate, but only on the same terms as the original mandate worked out by Kissinger in May 1974. Damascus made renewal of the mandate a cliffhanger by presenting some new - and to Israel, unacceptable - demands. Syria argued that any extension of the U.N. force should be tied to a Security Council decision on rights for the Palestinians and to a peace treaty, within six months, calling for Israeli withdrawal...
...does not want another Middle East war so soon after 1973 (see box), and is testing diplomatic alternatives while keeping up his military guard. His brinkmanship act over the U.N. mandate last week was in part intended to show the world that Syria plans to regain all of the Golan Heights. Syria has refused to rebuild the ruined city of Quneitra, the ancient Golan capital given up by Israel in the 1974 disengagement agreement. Syrian officials delight in showing foreign visitors the remains of buildings bulldozed by the Israelis before they left...
...Ramat Magshimim focused new attention on Israel's most perilous frontier. The Heights are a very different proposition from the Sinai peninsula, where Secretary of State Kissinger was able earlier this year to work out a second disengagement accord between Israel and Egypt. For one thing, the Golan is a much smaller area−444 sq. mi., compared with 23,622 sq. mi. for the Sinai. For another, the Heights are not barren desert but an area of green, undulating hills with considerable strategic value. Although some military people say jets and missiles make this kind of thinking obsolete...
Vocal Hawks. If anything, the Syrians are even more adamant than the Egyptians in insisting that Israel must return all Arab lands seized during the Six-Day War. The diplomatic problem is that the Israelis have created on the Golan Heights what they euphemistically refer to as "new facts"−no fewer than 18 settlements containing 2,500 people, who have replaced the 70,000 Syrians who lived there prior to 1967. Since the region has ample water and long, sunny summers, the hard-working farmers have become prosperous. More significantly, since they occupy the sites from which Syrian bunkers...