What’s behind Golan sovereignty confusion?
It took only one speculative report in The Washington Free Beacon about the Biden administration’s potential intention to rescind US recognition of the Golan Heights for the Israeli media to announce it as a fact.
Both Army Radio and Channel 12 ran headlines on the website’s article, which was titled “Biden Admin Walks Back US Recognition of Golan Heights as Israeli Territory.”
The subhead declares: “State Department pushes back on signature Trump admin foreign policy decision.”
The article said that when “pressed on the issue by The Washington Free Beacon, a State Department official said the territory belongs to no one and control could change depending on the region’s ever-shifting dynamics.”
But the line was not in quotes and was a paraphrase of a conversation with an unnamed State Department official. Nowhere in the article does the Beacon qualify its assertion with a document or a quote, even an anonymous one, supporting that assertion.
If anything, the State Department quote on which the article is based appears to indicate that US President Joe Biden is not interested at this stage in nullifying the 2018 Trump administration recognition of Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights, particularly in light of the long-ranging civil war in Syria.
“The Secretary was clear that as a practical matter, the Golan is very important to Israel’s security,” a State Department official toll the Beacon. “As long as [President Bashar Assad] is in power in Syria; as long as Iran is present in Syria – militia groups backed by Iran, the Assad regime itself – all of these pose a significant security threat to Israel. And as a practical matter, the control of the Golan remains of real importance to Israel’s security.”
A diplomatic source said that “the issue of the Golan Heights has not come up at all in the dialogue with the Americans.”
“It goes without saying that the Golan Heights will remain under Israeli sovereignty forever,” the source stated.
The US rejected the Beacon report outright.
“US policy regarding the Golan has not changed, and reports to the contrary are false,” the State Department tweeted under its Near Eastern Affairs account on Friday.
SO WHY would a US statement of support for Israel’s security interests in the Golan so quickly become a story in Israel about how the Biden administration plans to withdraw support for Israeli sovereignty there?
The answer falls into three parts. The first speaks to the strategic significance of the mountainous range to Israel, which captured the territory from Syria during the 1967 Six Day War and officially annexed it in 1981.
Israel has been clear from the start that it has no intention of withdrawing from that territory, although there have been some initiatives to link it to a peace deal with Syria.
Without such a deal – and no such deal seems within the realm of possibility at this time – the Golan Heights remains an important piece of the Jewish
state’s defense against Syria, where a dangerous civil war has raged for the last decade.
Syria is also one of the significant areas where the Israeli-Iran battle is being fought, with Jerusalem rebuffing Iranian attempts to entrench itself along Israel’s border.
The potential of an Iranian military presence on the Golan Heights overlooking Israel, in the aftermath of an Israeli withdrawal, poses an existential threat to the Jewish state.
Secondly, insecurity over the Golan Heights is heightened by the international community’s refusal to recognize Israeli sovereignty there. Many countries refuse to even acknowledge that the current military reality presents pragmatic challenges to any possibility of an Israel withdrawal. Every year, countries pass several resolutions at the United Nations calling for Israel to withdraw from the Golan.
LASTLY, the Biden administration has triggered insecurity on the Golan. From the first moment it articulated its foreign policy, while it spoke of support for Israel’s retention of the Golan at this time, it did not promise sovereignty recognition.
Already in February, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN that, “as a practical matter, the control of the Golan in that situation I think remains of real importance to Israel’s security. Legal questions are something else – and over time, if the situation were to change in Syria, that’s something we [will] look at, but we are nowhere near that.”
In April, State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters that there was no change to existing policy.
The Biden administration’s inability to pledge sovereignty recognition has concerned US legislators, who believe the Golan should be within Israel’s permanent borders.
Last month, two Texas Republicans, Rep. Mike Gallagher and Sen. Ted Cruz, introduced the Israeli Sovereignty Reassurance Act (ISRA) designed to enshrine US recognition of the Golan as part of the State of Israel.
At the time Gallagher said: “The Golan Heights provides Israel with defensible borders and serves as a key buffer between Israel and the chaos in Syria. At a time when Israel – our most important ally in the Middle East – is literally under attack, we should do everything in our power to ensure they can defend themselves.
“Ensuring we continue to recognize their sovereignty over the Golan Heights is the most basic way we can do so,” he added.
Just last week, members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee also attempted to press US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Friedman on the matter.
“This is an issue the administration is still working on,” Thomas-Greenfield said. She clarified, however, that “we have not changed any of the decisions of the prior administration” and that the issue is not on the agenda at this time.
For those with the long view in mind, her answer was hardly reassuring. Friday’s headlines might have been premature, but for those battling for Israeli sovereignty on the Golan, her words bear a warning for a future time when such a headline might indeed be the news of the day.