"Rose-colored blindness," a phrased coined by the writer Aharon Megged, almost hit us a decade ago. In the spring of 2007, a few years before the Arab Spring – which turned out to be a chilling winter – a few dozen artists, writers and former MKs and defense officials gathered on the Shouting Hill near Majdal Shams in the northern Golan Heights. They waved to Syrian President Bashar Assad and asked that the Israeli government see him as a partner and someone with whom they could hold a dialogue. It was clear to everyone what the price for the deal would be: every last inch of the Golan Heights, or almost every last inch.
The website Occupation Magazine, which covered the group's visit, featured a jocular piece by an anonymous writer who predicted that "Bashar was the 'shaar' [gate] to Europe." He also made jokes about Israelis who were hard to convince to give up the Golan, saying their appetite for "hummus in Damascus and salep in Aleppo" would win out.
Prominent figures in the new movement included author Sami Michael; former head of the Shin Bet security agency Yaakov Peri; and Middle East scholar Professor Moshe Maoz. The group leader was career diplomat Alon Liel, a former director general of the Foreign Ministry. Around the same time, former minister Yossi Beilin decreed that "the question of the Syrians wading into the Sea of Galilee [which the Syrians wanted entirely for their own] is childish." Dan Meridor compared the government's refusal to talk with Syria to Arab countries' former refusal to talk with Israel. The rose-colored blindness also struck former Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer; the chief rabbi of Turkey, who met with Assad and thought he was "nice"; and even Brig. Gen. Yossi Baidatz, former head of research in the IDF Intelligence Corps, who in 2009 told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that "if Syria is faced with the dilemma of securing a [peace] deal with Israel, it will be willing to cool its relations with Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinians organizations." Former head of Military Intelligence, Maj. Gen. Uri Sagi, also found it difficult to forgive former Prime Minister Ehud Barak for "missing" a chance to make peace with Assad.
What most of these people had in common was a sense that Israel was missing the boat on Syria, as well as a willingness to pay "100% of the territory for 100% peace;" evacuate Jewish settlements on the Golan; and restore Syrian sovereignty to the shores of the Sea of Galilee in exchange for defense agreements, demilitarization and normalization.
Preventing another Gaza periphery
Years later, only two senior journalists – Sever Plotzker at Yedioth Ahronoth and Ari Shavit at Haaretz – were brave enough to admit how wrong they'd been. Plotzker did a mea culpa and said he had failed to take into account "the tyrannical nature of the Damascus regime. I fooled myself. … I believed in that peace so much so that I refused to see the reality. … Benjamin Netanyahu was right. … You don't make peace with murderers and dictators."
Shavit thinks that if the worldview he espoused had been implemented, "battalions of global jihad would be parked next to Ein Gev and we'd have al-Qaida camps on the banks of the Sea of Galilee." He also said that "northern Israel and its water sources would border an armed, radical, uncontrollable Islamist entity … if we had conceded Katzrim and [Kibbutz] Snir, we'd have gotten terrorism in [kibbutzim] Dan and Dafna and all sorts of materials would be flowing into the sources of the Jordan River. There would be frequent fire on Tel Katzir and HaOn. … The Syrian Golan would have become a black hole."
A decade too late, the president of the U.S. also identified the "black hole," but Donald Trump's historic declaration also commits Israel to historic action to avoid sinking into rose-colored blindness ever again and keep the Golan Heights periphery from turning into another Gaza periphery – to prevent Tiberias and Ein Gev from becoming the northern versions of the Eshkol and Shaar Hanegev regional councils and avoid the kind of black hole in the north that the disengagement from Gaza created in the south.
Israeli governments have neglected Jewish settlement in the Golan Heights. In the first government under former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Agricultural Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Ezer Weizman waged an epic battle about what kind of settlements should be established in Judea and Samaria. Sharon wanted a settlement on every hilltop and wanted to spread out to dozens, even hundreds, of little points as a means of controlling the territory. Weizman was satisfied with settlement blocs – six large cities with significant populations – and did not want to spread out. In the end, they both won: today, some 450,000 Jews live in over 230 cities, settlements and outposts throughout Judea and Samaria. In the Golan, however, there are no large cities and only a handful of small communities.
Now it's our turn
The Golan, where Jews have lived since ancient times and where there is no "demographic problem" and which is vital to Israel's security, is still thinly populated by Jews and is a missed opportunity for settlement and Zionism. For 52 years, only 22,000 Jews have settled there, a pretty pathetic number – less than 5% of the Jewish population of Judea and Samaria. The Ariel-Elkana bloc, for example, is now home to a population three times as large as the Jewish population on the entire Golan Heights.
Even if we compare the rate of growth of the settlements in the Golan Heights to the rate of growth in Israel's periphery cities, we see a notable gap: in the same period when the Golan became home to 22,000 Israelis, Eilat grew by 39,000 residents; and cities like Nahariya and Kiryat Gat each grew by 33,000.
Historians will determine the reason for that. What is important now is to fix what is wrong or we won't really be worthy of Trump's Purim present. Now it's our turn. A settlement and employment revolution must take place on the Golan. The government must take the initiative. The public must answer the call. The Golan, with its grand views and wonderful, but limited, population, has become part of the Israeli existence. Many see its views, its communities and even its products as part of their Israeli life, but as long as we don't put hundreds of thousands of residents there – enough to put an end to any talk about handing it over to Syria any time in the future – Trump's declaration won't guarantee its future. The Golan, which is replete with remnants of Jewish heroism and the Jewish kingdoms from the time of King David to the heroic battle for Gamla and the Talmudic period, deserves to be much more than we have made it.
The Golan is Israeli and should be treated as such. The Golan was put under French rule as part of a colonialist division and Syria, which became independent in 1946, held it (a total of 1% of its territory) for only two decades. In that time, it became a launching ground for attempts to occupy and destroy Israel. The Syrian army would regularly bomb Israeli border communities, attack fishermen on the Sea of Galilee and try to divert its water resources. Syria made the lives of Israelis living at the foot of the Golan Heights a living hell, much like the situation today in the western Negev. In 1967, the Golan was recaptured in a justified war of self-defense. We secured it through blood. The Syrians lost it by law and Begin applied Israeli law there in 1981. This week, the U.S. acknowledged that. Now it's time for us to do the same.
