By Stan Goodenough
The global effort to wrest the Jews' restored homeland from them lurched ahead Wednesday with the revelation that the Olmert government is - and has been for more than a year – preparing to negotiate an agreement with Damascus that is believed to involve Israel's surrender to Syria of the Golan Heights.
Indirect talks through Turkish intermediaries, Israelis suddenly learned, are slated to start two weeks from now according to an almost simultaneous announcement made by Israel and Syria Wednesday morning.
The Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem released a statement that read: "The two sides have begun indirect talks under Turkish auspices [and] have declared their intention to conduct the talks without prejudice and with openness... They have decided to conduct the dialogue in a serious and continuous manner with the aim of reaching a comprehensive peace."
Syria's foreign ministry said "Syria has started indirect peace talks with Israel under Turkish auspices. Both sides have expressed their desire to conduct the talks in good will and decided to continue dialogue with seriousness to achieve comprehensive peace."
But according to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem added that in advance of the negotiations, Israel has promised to give away the Golan Heights and withdraw to the ceasefire line that was in place between 1949 and 1967.
Israeli officials denied this, but Syria has consistently conditioned any peace treaty with Israel on such a surrender of the heights, and the denials are being treated with some cynicism.
The Golan Heights is a ridge of slopes leading to a plateau high above the Huleh Valley and Lake Kinneret in the Upper Galilee. An integral part of the biblical Promised Land, and known in ancient Israel as Bashan, the "Land of the Giants," Joshua awarded the territory as an inheritance to the Israelite half-tribe of Manasseh.
In the second half of the first century of the Common Era Rome, which then occupied the entire Land of Israel, attacked the Jewish communities on the Golan - including the town of Gamla - massacring their inhabitants and sending the survivors into exile.
For nearly 2000 years the Golan was part of Middle Eastern territory that came under the control of one nation after another, most notably the Ottoman Empire, to which it belonged as part of the province of Palestine for 600 years until that empire was destroyed during the First World War.
The Heights was included in the territory pledged to the Jews in the 1917 Balfour Declaration for the recreation of their national homeland.
But the British Empire, given the mandate to oversee the creation of this Jewish state, instead lopped off the Golan and gave it to the French protectorate of Syria.
Syria - one of a number of Arab states newly-created out of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire - won its independence in 1944 and so controlled the heights until 1967 - a period of just 23 years.
During that time Syria made no effort to develop the land, instead using it as a platform from which to shoot down on the Jews in the farms and communities below.
After failing to destroy Israel in her War of Independence, Syria between 1949 and 1967 violated the Armistice Agreement signed as a result of that war some 400 times.
At least 140 Israelis were killed by Syrian fire in that period.
In response to the unrelenting aggression and terrorism, the Israel Defense Forces threw the Syrians off the Golan in 1967, returning the land to Jewish rule for the first time since the Romans conquered it nearly 2000 years ago.
It has now been under Israeli control for 40 years.
Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981 and that land is under Israeli law and home to approximately 40,000 Israelis - Jews, Druze and Muslim Arabs.
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