There's no agreement on over 60 percent of
the lines of the international border
By Amos Harel (Haaretz-29/3/2000)
In advance of the IDF plan to withdraw from Lebanon - called "New Horizon," for a departure with an agreement, "Morning Twilight" for a unilateral withdrawal - the IDF mapping unit has prepared a kind of "encyclopedia of the Israel-Lebanon border." The information, which has been bound together into four thick volumes, was placed on the desks of senior General Staff officers. Its bottom line is quite surprising: There is no agreement on over 60 percent of the lines of the international border.For years, Israel treated the border with Lebanon as its own domain. With one country in effect controlling both sides of the border since the 1978 Litani operation (and all the more so since the 1982 Operation Peace for Galilee), many opportunities existed for taking unilateral steps. The IDF for various reasons moved a few sections of the border fence several dozen or hundred meters to the north and west of the border line.
Usually, the reasons are tactical: Moving the fence and setting up outposts nearby enabled better control of areas from which cells (from Palestinian organizations, at first, and then later from Hezbollah) infiltrated into the vicinity of the northern border. However, over time, other considerations were added: Several homes in the western neighborhood of Kibbutz Misgav Am, for example, were built inside Lebanon, as was the road near Manara.
The defense establishment acknowledges that these are deviations from the old border, but the problem intensifies when they start to deal with the question of where exactly that border ran.
The border was first demarcated in an agreement between Britain and France in 1923, when the British controlled Palestine and the French controlled Lebanon and Syria. Until 1940, numerous small adjustments of the border were made, with the consent of the parties, in order to resolve local problems, such as a link between a village and its fields or its water sources. The adjustments, backed up in written documentation, were approved by the League of Nations.In 1949, Israel and Lebanon signed cease-fire agreements in Rhodes. In them, the Mandatory era border was adopted.
However, it turns out that the delegations reached agreement only on parts of the border. The difficulty stems from the documents left behind by the British and French. The scale of the maps is relatively small, so a deviation the size of a pencil point can amount to an error involving several hundred meters.
Consequently, when the British and French determined that in the area of Hanita, the border will run along "the crest," the difference between Israel's and Lebanon's positions on the ground could become significant. Furthermore, a large part of the Ramim range (west of Metula to Margaliot) was not even discussed. On other sections - from Margaliot to Yarun, from Matat to Netu'a and from Hanita to the sea, no agreement was reached.
The situation gets complicated when it comes to Mount Dov. The Syria-Lebanon border runs just to the north of the Mount Dov range, but France never bothered to properly demarcate it, because the area of both countries was under its control. After Israel conquered the Hermon in 1967 and in Operation Peace for Galilee in 1982, it gained control of both sides of the border. Some of the outposts on Mount Dov were situated inside Lebanon and in the early 1990s the IDF even moved the border fence on the mountain into Lebanon's territory.
If a decision is made to carry out a unilateral withdrawal, Israel will face a dilemma. Suppose a decision is made to evacuate the "deviant" outposts on Mount Dov (some of which are of considerable intelligence value) - should they be relocated to the Hermon area, which is territory that is in any case likely to go to Syria, along with the Golan?
Another problem is raised by the Alawite village of Rajar, which is located in the area where the borders of the three countries meet. The village, which was captured in 1967, was annexed by Israel. Its residents asked for, and received, Israeli citizenship, but according to the maps, two-thirds of the village is located in Lebanese territory.
At the same time, the residents object to a transfer to Lebanon: "Until 1967, we were Syrians. Now we are Israelis. If there's one thing that we never were, it's Lebanese," they argue. Israel is considering a proposal to absorb the residents of the village who want to be absorbed, if it is withdrawn in the framework of a comprehensive agreement.
Professor Moshe Braver, a geographer, is not fazed by the fact that the border is not clear. "These are not problems that are similar to the disagreement there was with Egypt over Taba," he says.
Braver, who researched the border issue as early as the 1950s, and was a member of the consulting team on this issue during the Rabin government, says that the border was relatively precisely marked by the British and French. "Part of the border," he says, "runs through wadis and therefore, for fear of being washed away, the border stones were placed not in the riverbed, but on the slopes, several dozen meters away from the real border. There are also places where the stones have disappeared."
In the end, Braver says, "the disagreements are not very significant. It is mostly rocky terrain that isn't of much value. An objective committee of experts can be appointed to recreate the original border with the consent of the parties."
In the event of a unilateral withdrawal, Israel has many possibilities open: the most radical of them is withdrawal while adhering to "the Lebanese map" (Lebanon's version of the border), including the evacuation of the western homes of Misgav Am and of Mount Dov. On the opposite end of the spectrum: withdrawal while maintaining a narrow "security zone" that will include outposts such as Karkum and Shaked, that are up to a kilometer inside Lebanese territory.
On the one hand, no one in the defense establishment is willing to accept the Lebanese map, certainly not if it means evacuating homes in Misgav Am. On the other hand, Prime Minister Ehud Barak has already ruled out the proposal to leave the Karkum outpost in place.
With mediation, other possibilities exist, from adopting the Israeli map from 1949, to restoring the border to its 1982 status, to adopting a line that will include both the adjustments to the border fence made by the Israelis and the outposts that deviate from the border by dozens of meters.
The final decision, in the unilateral withdrawal scenario, will apparently support a border line that includes the outposts along the fence. The assumption is that such a line will earn Israel international recognition of the withdrawal and provide it with enough world support for retaliatory actions, if it is attacked.
If the negotiations with Syria and Lebanon resume afterwards, Israel will consider a withdrawal by agreement to a border line that is further back (and more detailed), to be determined by the parties
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