Israel marks pockets of Lebanon as its own

Nicholas Blanford

If no agreement is reached with Syria by July, the Israeli government will order a unilateral withdrawal to the border but retain several key military outposts located just north of the border on land annexed by the Jewish state, a growing number of observers believe.
Israel’s deputy defense minister, Ephraim Sneh, has said that Israel will try to keep these pockets of Lebanese territory even if a deal is reached with Syria and Lebanon allowing for an organized withdrawal.
A senior Western military source described the proposed plan as “preposterous,” saying that it would bring the war to the Lebanese-Israeli border.
The so-called Purple Line encompasses several strategic parcels of land where the Israelis have pushed the border fence northward a few hundred meters, annexing the high ground with dominating views into Lebanon.
The four incursion zones ­ known as technical fences ­ along the border have been in place since the early 1980s. They include the border ridges near Yarin and Rmeish in the western sector, the hills between Adaisseh and Markaba in the central sector and the southern end of the Al-Marj valley in the eastern sector.
The Purple Line is also thought to encompass key posts such as the Abbad hilltop compound in the central sector, distinguished by its twin radio antennae and ever-present observation balloon.
The technical fences also are designed to provide protection for some Israeli settlements that abut the border, such as Misgav Am which lies behind the Adaisseh incursion. The incursions are known to the UN as Permanent Violations of the 1949 Armistice Agreement.
In December, Sneh said that the Israeli Army would pull back to behind the international border and the technical fences would be dismantled. His comments ­ which came after the resumption of peace talks between Israel and Syria ­ appeared to quash long-held speculation that the Jewish state might try to retain the strategic salients.
However, the stalled peace negotiations coupled with the Israeli government’s policy of withdrawing the troops by July, appears to have helped resurrect the Purple Line option.
Sneh, who is a former Israeli Army commander of the occupation zone, said on Thursday that the option of returning to the Purple Line existed only in the event of a unilateral withdrawal. Yet on Sunday, within hours of the Israeli Cabinet’s unanimous approval for a July withdrawal, Sneh admitted that whatever the manner of the pullout, the technical fences would be kept.
The statement from the Israeli Cabinet inferred a degree of ambiguity, promising that troops would “deploy on the border” rather than a clear commitment to pull back to the internationally-recognized frontier.
The point was picked up by an unlikely collection of observers. “The decision does not speak about withdrawal but refers to redeployment,” wrote Mohammed Khair al-Wadi, the director-general of the Syrian government daily Tishreen. He accused Israel of wanting to keep “strategic parts of south Lebanon.”
Zeev Schiff, the respected military correspondent for the Israeli Haaretz daily, also described the Cabinet decision as amounting to a redeployment rather than a withdrawal.
He said that despite Barak approving the army’s New Horizon withdrawal plan last December, not a single tender has been issued for the $240 million worth of defenses to be constructed along the border.
Nahum Barnea, the influential columnist in Yediot Ahronot, wrote that a withdrawal to the Purple Line was “a predicament lying in wait” for Israeli Premier Ehud Barak. “If he leaves the fence where it is now, he will be providing Hizbullah with an argument to continue the fighting,” Barnea wrote.
Nabatieh MP Mohammed Raad, who heads Hizbullah’s politburo, agreed on Tuesday, declaring that resistance operations would continue if the Israelis occupy “just one inch of Lebanese land.”
“It’s only natural that we don’t permit the Zionists to remain on one grain of Lebanese soil,” Raad told The Daily Star. “That means that the withdrawal must be all the way to the international border.”
Barak has warned that cross-border attacks following a withdrawal will be met with severe reprisals. Yet if the Israeli Army deploys in the incursion zones ­ within 600 meters of the border ­ the likelihood of fighting spilling over the frontier into northern Galilee is considerably higher than at present, where the width of the buffer strip extends between 3 and 20 kilometers.
The Western military source, a long-time observer of the Israeli military, said he was baffled at how the Israelis “expect to get away with it.”
The source said it was “perfectly clear that they have no idea what to do” but believed a withdrawal to the Purple Line is under serious consideration by the Israelis. “I see a very nasty situation down the road because the Israelis won’t make a clean break … It will require a very forceful intervention from Washington otherwise it could become very nasty indeed,” the source said.

1-     The Daily Star , 08/03/2000