• What's in a track?  - Joseph Bahout
Obama's Middle-East sherpas would be well advised to get quickly rid of three illusions regarding any Lebanese-Israeli process.

• The Seven Villages dispute  - Nicholas Blanford
Hizballah occasionally raises the demand for the Seven Villages as part of its ongoing psychological warfare against Israel.

• Israel should use its leverage  - an interview with David Welch
Having a Lebanon more like Jordan, remote as that might seem, is much more in Israel's interest.

• Israel between Shebaa and Ghajar  - Eyal Zisser
Israel's assumption is that if these excuses are removed from the table, Hizballah will find new ones.

What's in a track?
 Joseph Bahout

War, peace, enforced truce: the Lebanese-Israeli issue has recently been caught in a web of diametrically opposed outlooks. On the one hand, ideas are floated that US President Barack Obama's Middle-East strategy would seek to tackle this track first, since it is considered the easiest. On the other hand, the drumbeats of war are sounding, induced by Hizballah's activities south of the Litani (the Hirbet Salim depot explosion) as well as by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's verbal escalation and threats.

In between, and much more realistically--though this realism remains to be coldly reassessed, lays the idea of a resurrection of the truce agreement that put an end to the 1948-49 war between the two countries. This agreement is still considered by some, especially in Lebanon, as the only workable device to ensure a durable ceasefire in this spot of the Arab-Israel dispute provided some "pending" issues are resolved, foremost among them the Shebaa Farms.

The Lebanese-Israeli track may seem the easiest to resolve. However, the historical sequence of events and geopolitical legacies, as well as the many entanglements and ramifications of this track, could just as well lead to the quite opposite conclusion. If it is true that the 1948-49 war ended with no territorial difference between Lebanon and Israel, it planted the seeds of a much deeper problem for the Lebanese polity, that of the Palestinian refugees and their fate. If it is also true that the subsequent 1967 war left Lebanon on the side, consequently unconcerned with the process induced by UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, the Shebaa Farms issue finds its nexus exactly here, since this tiny strip of land that was occupied then was formally Lebanese, even if de-facto Syrian controlled and lost to Israel by the Syrian army.

Soon after 1968, the Palestinian human factor became consolidated as an inseparable part of the Lebanese domestic political agenda, giving birth to the Cairo Agreement and the creation of Fateh-land, a Palestinian-controlled enclave in the south of Lebanon that two Israeli invasions, in 1978 and 1982, sought to sweep away. These in turn brought further UN resolutions such as 425 and 520. The PLO and its military wing were eventually ousted, but a substantial part of the Palestinian population remained in the suburbs of big Lebanese towns. Finally, the Israeli withdrawal of 2000 reminded everyone again of the forgotten Shebaa Farms issue, and the July 2006 war, ending with the latest in that line of resolutions, 1701, stressed the necessity to address it along with all other issues.

With this brief chronology of the Lebanese-Israeli dispute in mind, and if one has to be truly realistic, it is obvious that it is no longer a truce but Resolution 1701 that is today the only game in town to ensure a durable cessation of hostilities between Lebanon and Israel while we await a potential peace. And this is despite all the grievances each party has about the incomplete implementation of the resolution and its many shortcomings. If Israel is alarmed by persistent quasi-military activity by Hizballah south of the Litani and worried by the flow of weapons the resistance still receives, the Lebanese side feels constantly provoked by repeated Israeli military overflights, the several infringements across the Blue Line, the expansion of spy rings inside the country as well as the non-solution to the Shebaa Farms issue and other territorial questions such as the Ghajar village.

Mutual recriminations aside, however, the true question is how to consolidate, widen and upgrade the scope of Resolution 1701 in order to ensure a long-term cooling of the front. It is exactly at this point that the internal Lebanese political reality pops up, a reality that Netanyahu himself is stubbornly trying to constrain and alter. In the real world, any effective Lebanese government today is a government that will include an active and ever-more decisive Hizballah factor. This means that Israel, on its way to obtain any enhancement of 1701, including on its Shebaa element, will have to acknowledge that it is engaging Hizballah in one way or another, with all the regional implications that such a move might entail.

On a longer-term perspective, and if one is to accept that there is a US desire to obtain a rapid breakthrough on the Lebanese-Israeli track, it must be remembered that things are not as easy as they may appear. Lebanon essentially faces two options, either to enter into separate and direct negotiations with Israel or to join, at some point and in coordination with Damascus, the track of talks between Syria and Israel. The first is a choice completely ruled out by today's official Lebanon. President Michel Suleiman himself gave his word to Syrian President Bashar Assad, as a sine qua non guarantee before his consensual election, that Beirut would wait for significant progress by Damascus before getting into any separate process with Israel. The second is a choice the Lebanese majority still considers unacceptable, since it represents a sad return to the inglorious days of Syrian tutelage over Beirut's policies.

There is a third, fragile alternative, that of sticking to the global umbrella of the Arab Peace Initiative, within which Lebanon itself insisted on adding the clause on the right of return of Palestinian refugees, given the inflammatory and sensitive character of this question for domestic Lebanese politics.

Obama's Middle-East sherpas would be well advised to get quickly rid of three illusions regarding a Lebanese-Israeli process. Any serious authority in today's Lebanon is one that will not ignore Syria's own progress in talks. Any talks that ignore Hizballah will backfire sooner rather than later, torpedoing the whole venture. And any structural solution that ignores the Palestinian dimension is a sure recipe for Lebanese turmoil.

The Lebanese track may seem an easy path to go down. It is not.- Published 20/8/2009 © bitterlemons-international.org


Joseph Bahout teaches Middle East politics at Science-Po Paris, and is a senior researcher at Academie Diplomatique Internationale.

While Lebanon's campaign for the return of the Shebaa Farms has became well known over the past nine years, it is not the only outstanding territorial dispute between Lebanon and Israel.

A more arcane--and generally misunderstood--Lebanese grievance with Israel is the fate of the Seven Villages, originally populated by Shi'ites who found themselves in the French mandate of Greater Lebanon in 1920 before being transferred to Palestine in 1924.

Hizballah occasionally raises the demand for the Seven Villages as part of its ongoing psychological warfare against Israel, hinting that winning back the Shebaa Farms alone is insufficient reason for the party to disarm. In fact, Hizballah long ago dropped conditioning the retention of its military wing on the return of Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.

Today, Hizballah claims its resistance is a vital component of national defense against future Israeli aggression. As Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizballah's leader, said as long ago as 2000, before Israel had withdrawn from Lebanon, "so long as our neighbor is an entity that has committed aggression, is aggressive by nature and could attack our country at any moment, we should adhere to our resistance, if only to defend our country."

The Seven Villages dispute arose because of an overlap in the early 1920s between the initial administrative line separating the French mandate of Lebanon and the British mandate of Palestine and the time it took to ratify the international boundary between the two countries.

At the end of World War I, the British and French established military-run Occupied Enemy Territorial Administrations (OETA) covering Syria and Palestine. The line separating the northern French OETA and the southern British OETA ran eastward from Ras Naqoura more or less horizontally terminating just north of the now dried-up Lake Huleh in Upper Galilee. In December 1920, the British and French signed an agreement that defined the borders of the Middle East territories under their supervision, including that of Lebanon and Palestine.

The Lebanon-Palestine border was demarcated between March and July 1921, and the final documents--a sketch map of the boundary line and a detailed written description--were submitted to the British and French governments in February 1922. The following month the French mandatory authorities in Beirut authorized elections for a Representative Council, the forerunner of the Lebanese parliament. A census--of highly questionable accuracy--was conducted covering the area of the French administered OETA, which included the Upper Galilee and its villages and farms and its Jewish populated areas such as Metulla. Those covered by the census were given Lebanese identity cards entitling them to vote in the April 1922 elections.

Although Britain and France were awarded their respective mandates at the San Remo peace conference in 1920, the League of Nations only formally approved the mandates in February 1923. That step allowed Britain and France finally to ratify the Lebanon-Palestine border, which replaced the OETA line.

The final act came in April 1924 when around 24 villages and farms that had found themselves north of the OETA line (thus under French administration) but south of the new border were formally transferred to the jurisdiction of British mandate Palestine. Of these, 12 were populated by Sunnis, two were Maronite, one was Greek Catholic, two were Jewish, six were Shi'ite and one was divided between Shi'ites and Greek Catholics. The six Shi'ite villages were Terbikha, Saliha, Malkiyah, Nabi Yusha, Kades and Hunin. The mixed Shi'ite-Greek Catholic village was Ibl Qamh. Collectively, these villages today form what is known as the Seven Villages. During the 1948 Arab-Israel war, most of the residents of the Seven Villages met the same fate as other Palestinians and were driven from their homes to become refugees in Lebanon. They were granted Lebanese citizenship in 1994.

Lebanon's argument for the return of the Seven Villages is premised on the fact that the residents were Lebanese citizens before they were transferred to Palestine and became Palestinian citizens. But citizenship does not denote sovereignty, otherwise the Shebaa Farms dispute would have been resolved in 2000. Lebanon was unable to persuade the United Nations of the validity of its claim over the Shebaa Farms because it could not satisfactorily prove sovereignty over the area, despite the former residents possessing Lebanese citizenship and property deeds registered in Lebanon.

The OETA line was a purely administrative boundary, not a legal and internationally-recognized border, much as the UN-delineated Blue Line also is not a border but a temporary military line drawn up in 2000 to confirm that Israel had pulled out of Lebanon in conformity with UN resolutions.

The case for the Seven Villages is further undermined by past precedent. Previous Lebanese governments have recognized the legitimacy of the southern border with Israel on many occasions, including in 1949 when it formed the basis of the Armistice Demarcation Line and in 1978 when UN Resolution 425 called on Israel to withdraw from all Lebanese territory "within [Lebanon's] internationally recognized boundaries".

There is nothing to prevent Lebanon and Israel mutually agreeing to amend the border in the future if they so wish. But demanding an amendment that would place the Seven Villages inside Lebanon would also allow Israel to press for its own alterations to a border with which it has never been satisfied.- Published 20/8/2009 © bitterlemons-international.org


Nicholas Blanford is a Beirut-based correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor.