Word: golan
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That encounter took place near Hattin, within sight of the Golan Heights. Saladin had assembled a pan-Islamic force of 12,000 cavalry near Lake Tiberias. The Christians were lured on a long July march across Galilee's parched Plain of Lubiya. Saladin had the right bait--he had besieged the lakeside town in which a knight's wife was staying--and the Crusader force, frying in heavy armor and unable to fight its way to the water, was overwhelmed by the Muslims. When the Christian knights retreated to the coastal fortress of Tyre, Saladin turned his army inland. Jerusalem...
...during her previous meeting with the Syrian President had been getting locked in that bathroom until a security agent pried open the door. She'd avoid the room this time, but Albright expected the same demands from Assad that had so far blocked talks with Israel on returning the Golan Heights to Syria. Twenty minutes into the meeting, however, the Secretary of State and her Middle East aide, Dennis Ross, looked at each other with "something's-changed-here" expressions on their faces. Assad now wanted to resume talks--minus preconditions Israel found unacceptable...
...long-stalled Israeli-Syrian peace track, this counted as a major breakthrough and one that three men--Assad, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton--were eager to exploit. The ailing Assad, 69, seems eager to seize this chance to get back the Golan Heights, which Israel appropriated in the 1967 Six-Day War. Barak came to power pledging to entice Syria back to the negotiating table. And Clinton, who quickly arranged for Barak and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shara to start the talks in Washington this week, was hungry for a foreign policy triumph after the disastrous...
...past three months, Washington--mostly in the persons of Ross and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger--has been acting as a secret go-between for Barak and Assad, working to restart the Golan Heights talks, which broke off four months after the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. But until last week, Assad had refused to come to the table unless Barak first agreed to a promise the Syrian leader claims Rabin made: to withdraw Israeli forces to the line separating the armies of the two countries just before the Six-Day War. That line would put Syria...
...Israel's immediate Arab neighbors recognize the 51-year-old Jewish state as a permanent reality, and that remains an enticing prospect for Barak - to be pursued with urgency before the ailing Assad leaves the scene, potentially complicating any peace moves. Right now, Israeli opposition to ceding the Golan actually suits Barak's negotiating strategy by emphasizing the difficulty of Israel's concessions. "Polls may show Israelis divided over handing over the Golan, but they also showed Israelis opposed to handing back the Sinai to Egypt ahead of the Camp David talks," says Beyer. "Public opinion will shift quickly once...