Losing In Advance

Whether or not the frigid courtship maneuvers now taking place between Syria and Israel over a possible peace settlement involving the Golan Heights lead anywhere, they've already had one result. If serious negotiations do take place, Israel has lost them in advance.

It's enough to make one gnash one's teeth. Before the carpenter has even bought the wood for the table at which the negotiators may one day sit down, the Olmert government has made clear — as did the dovish Rabin and Barak governments before it — that it knows and accepts what the price of peace with Syria will be: "Land for peace," i..e., an Israeli withdrawal from the entire Golan Heights.

What, then, would be left to negotiate about?

One thing would be whether Israel also has to yield to Syrian demands to withdraw from even more than just the Golan – that is, from several dozen additional square kilometers of pre-1967 Israel, including the northeast shore of the Sea of Galilee, that the Syrian army was illegally in possession of before the Six Day War broke out.

Another would be how much of the Golan the Syrian government agrees to demilitarize, and how much Israeli or international supervision of its military activities there it accepts.

Yet another would be whether Syria establishes full diplomatic relations with Israel and opens its border to Israeli tourists, as the Egyptians and Jordanians did when they made peace with Israel.

And finally there is the question of whether Syria also agrees to ditch its support of Hizbullah, Palestinian terror groups, and Iran and to join an American-led coalition against it.

The last of these suggested quid-pro-quos — the only new element in an otherwise long kicked-around package — is so absurd that it is hard to believe that responsible statesmen, politicians, and strategists in Israel take it seriously. Not that Syria, if it suited its interests, might not conceivably be prevailed upon to switch camps in the international arena. But having given up the Golan in return for a Syrian commitment to do so, how could Israel possibly monitor such a commitment or react if it were partially or wholly broken?

Suppose that once Israeli troops and settlements are gone from the Golan, the Syrians do an about-face and re-establish close ties with Hizbullah and Iran, or revert to pro-Hizbullah or pro-Iranian positions: What exactly is Israel to do? Tell its tourists to leave Damascus? File a diplomatic protest? Recall its ambassador? Reconquer the Golan? Obviously, anything it might do would be ineffective, and anything that might be effective it wouldn't do. It would, quite simply, be left minus the Golan and with a bagful of broken promises.

But of course, this holds true, more or less, for the other aspects of a "peace for land" treaty with Syria too. If in five or ten years' time the Syrians found some pretext to send their army back to the Golan, as Hitler militarily reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland in 1938, it would be hard to imagine Israel going to war over it. After all, it is its fear of a war with Syria that makes the Olmert government ready to give up the Golan now. If Israel fears a military clash with Syria when the Israeli army is on the Golan, with all the enormous military advantages that this gives it, why would it fear it less when a Syrian army is there instead?

And if trading "land for peace" with Syria means giving up something substantial, and irretrievable once lost, for something insubstantial and easily lost again, why trade land for peace at all? Because the land is Syria's by right? But by its insistence on being awarded territory belonging to pre-1967 Israel, thus in effect declaring null and void the 1923 international border between it and Palestine, Syria has abrogated that right. Because Syria somehow deserves the Golan anyway? But it does not deserve it. It is already a country ten times bigger than Israel, and for 20 years, from 1948 to 1967, it used the commanding heights of the Golan to bombard Israel, as it did in the first days of the Six Day War until Israel attacked the Heights and took them in bloody battles.

And on top of all that, the Golan – unlike the West Bank – is today sovereign Israeli territory, having been officially annexed by Israel in 1981. What is the message that Israel would send the Arab world – would send its own people! – by surrendering the Golan? Would it not be that other sovereign Israeli territory is potentially surrenderable, too, if retaining it means having to fight for it? Suppose that in the year 2017 the Arab states issue Israel an ultimatum either to yield the Galilee, with its large Arab population, or be attacked: What reasons could the proponents of ceding the Golan in 2007 find for not ceding the Galilee ten years later?

There is a reasonable solution for the Golan, which would involve "some land for peace" – that is, returning to Syria the eastern half of it, which protects Damascus from possible Israeli attack, and letting Israel keep the western half, which protects the Hula and Jordan Valleys from possible Syrian attack. Until the day the Syrians are willing to consider such a deal, Israel should sit tight on all of the Golan – especially when the United States not only isn't pushing it to make a deal with a dictatorial Syrian regime now, but would much prefer that it didn't. That Jerusalem should be more anxious than Washington to give up a major asset like the Golan, and to evict 20,000 Jews who have been living there in prosperous settlements for the past 30 or 40 years along an equal number of peaceful Druze, is a sad commentary on how little confidence Israel's leadership has in its own people's mettle and in the justice of its cause.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.