Ben-Gurion wasn't rushing anywhere

On April 5, 1949, the truce talks between the Israeli delegation and the Syrian delegation began at Mahanayaim. Six days earlier, on March 30, the chief of staff of the Syrian army, Husni Zaim, took control in his country in the first military coup d'etat in the state's history.At the opening session of the talks, Israel demanded that the Syrians withdraw from the territories they had conquered during the War of Independence to the Mandatory border of 1923. The Syrians wanted to freeze the existing situation until the conciliation talks that were supposed to get underway in Lausanne in May 1949.

At the second session, the Syrians offered a proposal to the Israeli delegation through the head of the conference on behalf of the UN. At the heart of this proposal was the Syrian demand that the border between the countries run through the middle of the Sea of Galilee.

"That was funny," said Josh Palmon, a member of the Israeli delegation and one of the founders of Shai - the intelligence wing of the Haganah. "Mordechai Maklef (the head of the Israeli delegation) jumped out of his skin. We devoted two sessions to this, but when we were outside, we laughed." Palmon defined two sorts of negotiations common among the Arabs: haggling (muftsala in Arabic, which means to give a little, take a little) and what is called shtara, which in effect is to take from the other side. In his opinion, the Syrians conducted the negotiations in the shtara style.

"There was not a single issue in which they did not demand things that they were certain they would not get. Maybe something would work." For the Syrian demand that that the border pass through the middle of the Sea of Galilee, there were two justifications. @: Ps100t-3h96.0007z8.8k0b0c"Black"f"Olympian">One of these justifications had its source in the Sykes-Picot conference of 1916, when France, Britain, Russia and Italy discussed the division of the territories that had been under Ottoman control. Britain won control of the Haifa Bay area and lands upon which to build a railway line that would link Haifa to Mosul in Iraq.A week after the conference ended, on May 16, 1916, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, sent a message to the French ambassador to Britain, asking to trade the strip of land between Haifa and Zemah, which was intended for the railway line, for a strip along the Sea of Galilee and part of the Yarmuk Valley. The French agreed. This agreement was the basis for the division of the mandates in the San Remo agreements of 1920, and was later anchored by the League of Nations in 1923. Thus the 10-meter wide strip along the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee was born. The Syrians, for their part, claimed that this arrangement was illegal.

The second Syrian argument for splitting the Sea of Galilee down the middle was based on a ruling in international law whereby borders should be drawn down the middle of a water barrier between two states. Parallel to the official track of talks under the auspices of the UN, there was also a secret track behind the scenes, which was run by Palmon with a representative of Husni Zaim. In this track, the military ruler in Damascus proposed making a peace treaty with Israel and absorbing 300,000 refugees in Syrian territory. In the tent with Kaukji About half a year earlier, during the battles in the Galilee, Palmon crossed the lines at Kalkilya. On the other side of line a Jeep was waiting for him, driven by the deputy of Fawzi Kaukji, the commander of the "Syrian Rescue Army," who brought him to Syrian headquarters. When he arrived, he was greeted by a full military parade and led with great respect to Kaukji's tent. Between the two a friendly discussion developed, during which the Syrian commander promised that he had no intention of carrying out the wishes of his enemies from the clan of the mufti of Jerusalem, the Husseinis, who wanted heavy armaments he had at his disposal in the Castel area. He even promised to find an opportunity to withdraw from Galilee, but not before his honor, which had been lost at Degania, was restored by conquering Mishmar Ha'emek.

At Mishmar Ha'emek, Kaukji's army was trounced, and it returned to Syria. Palmon kept up his connections with the Syrians and met with Husni Zaim (beginning in September 1948), after the latter was appointed chief-of-staff of the Syrian army. The meetings between the two took place at regular intervals, and at a meeting in early November Zaim asked for Israel's help in financing the military coup he was planning.

This request was put before the prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, by Ezra Danin, Palmon's senior partner for intelligence activities, and was rejected outright. This fact did not affect the relations between Zaim and Palmon, who continued to meet with the same frequency.

On April 19, 1949, before the convening of the conciliation talks at Lausanne, Yigal Yadin reported on a secret meeting that Maklef and Palmon held with a Colonel Nasser, Zaim's representative: "There has been a meeting with the Syrians. They are full of admiration for Zaim. They want to sign a peace agreement immediately and not an armistice, and to exchange ambassadors and so on. Zaim wants to fight for control of the Middle East and he has calculated that Israel and Syria together can field 500,000 soldiers, who, if they were to appear as a united bloc, could take control of the Middle East. As they are talking about peace, the border demarcation must be changed. They want the border to run through the Sea of Galilee and from there along the Jordan River....

"We had a meeting with the prime minister and I also invited Maklef and Palmon, who were present. The prime minister said that if we do not reach a cease-fire with the Syrians before Lausanne, he doubts whether we will be able to sit with them at Lausanne. With respect to the border he said that we are only prepared for changes that are to our benefit, or else the international border. The Syrians said that they would pass this along to Zaim.

"I proposed one more thing: a direct meeting between us and Zaim to clarify things, and I stressed that this would be a precedent. Yesterday the meeting took place and we were tough about telling them our position. When we asked them about Degania, they could not say exactly what its fate would be. They are proposing that the eastern half of the Sea of Galilee go to Syria and from the Sea of Galilee on up, the line would be the Jordan River. They say that this is convenient."

In his "War Diary," Ben-Gurion wrote about his meeting with Maklef and Palmon on the 15th and 16th of April: "Maklef and Palmon spoke with Zaim's representatives without the participation of the UN. The Syrians proposed a separate peace with Israel, cooperation and a joint army... However, they want a border change, half of the Sea of Galilee. I told them to inform the Syrians in clear terms that first of all there must be an armistice agreement on the basis of the previous international line, and afterwards - discussion of peace and a TREATY (stressed in the original) and we will be prepared for maximal cooperation."

The proposal submitted to Israel was also reviewed on April 28 by Zaim and James Kealey, the American diplomatic representative in Damascus, who was backing Zaim in anticipation of the coup. Zaim even proposed taking in about a quarter of a million refugees, with suitable American financial support, and offered to meet with King Abdullah of Jordan and King Farouk of Egypt in order to convince them to take a more realistic stance towards Israel. However, he made his offer conditional on conducting the negotiations with Israel on the basis of mutual concessions on both sides and not only concessions on the Syrian side. He reiterated this position in an additional meeting with Kealey, a few days later on May 1.

During those two weeks at the end of April, almost simultaneously, two contradictory proposals were being discussed in Ben-Gurion's office: a plan for a comprehensive military action and the possibility of a real peace proposal to Syria. The proposal for a summit with Zaim was discussed at a meeting at Ben-Gurion's office at the end of April and was rejected outright. Parallel to this Ben-Gurion rejected the proposal by the chiefs of staff to implement "Oranim Plan 2" to take Kuneitra with the help of two brigades within five or six days of fighting. Ben-Gurion froze both proposals.

Syria's apparent readiness to relieve Israel of one of the biggest headaches of the War of Independence, the refugee problem, which faced Israel at the conciliation talks in Lausanne, and the use of military force on the Golan Heights were weighed with equal seriousness and in both cases Ben-Gurion chose to "sit on the fence." He did not give a negative answer to the Syrian proposal, but he wanted to bring the level of the talks down to the level of foreign ministers. However, he also rejected military action. The man who had no hesitations about conquering the Negev and adjusting the eastern border even as the cease-fire talks with Jordan were underway, or about irritating Britain by deploying the five British Spitfires that infiltrated the Negev (in an action in which Ezer Weizman took part), hesitated to use the army in order to expel the Syrians beyond the international border, and at the same time rejected direct talks with an Arab leader who was prepared to absolve Israel of the headache of the refugees and enter into a "warm peace" with Israel.

Was achieving peace Ben-Gurion's top priority? In his "War Diary" on July 14, 1949 is the following entry: "Abba Eban came. He does not want to run after peace. An armistice is enough for us. If we run after peace - the Arabs will demand a price from us - borders or refugees or both. We will wait a few years..." As Ben-Gurion saw it, peace should not be seen as a value on its own but rather as one of the ways of attaining national goals. Peace is perceived by the Arab countries as a national goal of Israel, as a commodity that Israel wants. From this perception, the price of peace is derived. If the Jews want peace, we will sell them peace, but they will have to pay for it with hard currency, i.e. sovereignty and the return of the refugees.

Ben-Gurion tended to construct a different equation. Peace has its place in prophetic vision. In everyday reality, there is bargaining and peace must be removed from the realm of bargaining. If the other side is prepared to talk in visionary terms, all well and good - it has its own visions, but if there is a danger to the existence of the State of Israel, its sovereignty or its inhabitants, this problem has various solutions, and peace is one of the ways to arrive at them. The development of economic, industrial and military strength is the solution he found preferable. The alternative - achieving peace at the price of damage to what he saw as the state's existential interests - did not look to Ben-Gurion like a possible substitute.

This report is based on the author's M.A. thesis, recently been submitted to the School of History at Tel Aviv University

Last changed: August 16, 2004

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