Word: syrian
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...across their bases on the Golan Heights. By the hundreds, members of the Israel Defense Forces spilled out of their barracks, speeding toward their assigned tanks. Engines roared to life, maps were unfurled, and within minutes two full tank brigades were rolling out. The armored leviathans rumbled to the Syrian front and onto ramps built long ago as battle stations, many of which were overgrown with weeds from disuse. Once there, the troops parked and waited, peering anxiously into the night for the Syrian attackers...
This time they didn't come. Nor did the Syrian army appear during a repeat exercise weeks later. But the full-dress rehearsals on the Golan, unprecedented in recent years, show just how nervous Israeli commanders have become about the possibility of a genuine Syrian assault. That danger had been more or less dismissed in the previous five years as the two countries engaged in serious, if fitful, peace talks. Today, once again, Israel sees war as an immediate threat...
Concerns about Syria began to escalate in August, when officials in Damascus started threatening to use force to reclaim the Golan, the Syrian plateau captured by Israel in the 1967 war. Syrian President Hafez Assad was plainly frustrated by the policies of the new Israeli government of Netanyahu, who, unlike his two immediate predecessors, rules out a return of the strategic high land in exchange for a comprehensive peace treaty...
Soon after the menacing statements from Syria, Israeli defense officials say, they noticed that Assad was training his forces more aggressively, emphasizing attack rather than defense strategies. Most ominously, he moved his 14th division, an elite commando outfit, from Beirut, where it protects Syrian interests in Lebanon, to positions close to the frontier with Israel. Syrian officials say the recent activity is defensive and insist they have no plans to strike. Moreover, many Arab analysts accuse Israel of playing up the war talk as a means of diverting attention from the paralysis in the peace process since Netanyahu came...
...with internal bickering in the Israeli political scene. "It's in the Labor Party's interest to show that they can bring peace and Likud can't," McGeary said. The book maintains that Rabin agreed to a full withdrawal from the Golan after the U.S. informed him that Syrian President Hafez Assad, in a change of positions, agreed to accept all the security arrangements demanded by Israel. The understandings, including details of withdrawal and normalization of relations, were then spelled out by the Clinton administration in a non-binding document, Azulai-Katz said. Two senior Israeli officials have denied that...