A false 24-year claim about farmland killed 12 young footballers

The defence of Iran through the promise of a massive retaliatory attack on Israel from Lebanon if Iran were attacked is Hezbollah's principal military mission.

Iran and Hezbollah therefore seek to strike a careful balance: do enough, militarily, to demonstrate solidarity with Hamas, but stop short of total war with Israel. Its vital role in Iran's strategic defence is not something Hezbollah's leadership tells its constituents or other Lebanese.

Resistance status

For many in Lebanon, Hezbollah is the movement that has empowered Shiite Muslims, a sect that has often been marginalised, ignored, and exploited in Lebanon and its Ottoman predecessor. 

For Lebanese, Hezbollah is the 'Lebanese Resistance' that forced Israel to evacuate southern Lebanon in May 2000 after 18 years of combat. Ever since, its 'resistance' status among Lebanon's political class has supported its refusal to disarm in accordance with UN resolutions. 

In short, Hezbollah has Lebanese political cover for it to focus on its main (though unstated) mission: to defend Iran.

What is the "Lebanese Resistance" resisting? Its false but straightforward response is the ongoing Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory.

This occupation allegedly continued after Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000 and after the subsequent drawing of the 'Blue Line' by the United Nations confirming Israel's withdrawal. 

Israel's retreat, and the United Nation's certification of this, presented Hezbollah with a dilemma: why should it remain armed if its mission was accomplished?

With the assistance of an officer in the Intelligence Directorate of the Lebanese Armed Forces, it found the justification it needed. This discovery led directly to the horrific events in Majdal Shams on 27 July 2024.

Drawing maps badly

When France controlled Lebanon and Syria between the two World Wars, it was neither rigorous nor consistent in defining the boundaries between the two, especially in lightly populated areas.

Indeed, on the northern edge of the Golan Heights, France would bequeath to Syria and Lebanon some ambiguity as to its boundary intentions.

This confusion was heightened by the fact that some residents of the indisputably Lebanese town of Shebaa owned some pasturage on the heights south of the town, tracts known locally as 'the Shebaa Farms.'

Independent Syria governed this area as part of the Golan Heights, a fact supported by both Syrian and Lebanese military maps.

Independent Lebanon raised no strong objection to Syrian sovereignty over the farms in question, asking only for bilateral talks aimed at clarifying the boundary, discussions that might (from a Lebanese point of view) ideally incorporate the farms into Lebanon.

All in agreement

Prior to the June 1967 War, there were occasional Lebanon-Syria discussions on the matter, but nothing changed; the farms remained inside Syria. Maps on Lebanese banknotes even seemed to acknowledge Syrian sovereignty. 

Moreover, when Israel seized the Golan Heights (including the Shebaa Farms) from Syria in June 1967, there was no claim from Beirut that Lebanese territory had been taken. Indeed, there would be no such claim for the next 33 years. 

The UN Disengagement Observer Force patrolling the Golan Heights since the 1974 Syria-Israel Agreement on Disengagement considers the Shebaa Farms to be part of its Israel-Syria peacekeeping mandate, consistent with the 1974 ceasefire maps.

When the Blue Line was completed in June 2000, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced that Israeli forces had withdrawn completely from Lebanon in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 425. 

The Government of Lebanon had raised some objections about parts of the line dividing Lebanon from Israel-proper, claiming—correctly, it seems—that, in some places, the Blue Line did not correspond exactly to the 1949 Lebanon-Israel armistice line. In terms of disputed territory, however, these discrepancies were minor. 

The hand of Assad

It was in fact the Hezbollah claim, supported by the Government of Lebanon, that part of the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights was in fact Lebanese that set the stage for a continuing an armed conflict most thought should have been resolved by Israel's May 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon.

Back in 2000, the key player behind the scenes was not Iran, but Syria. Damascus hoped to facilitate Israel's 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon in return for an agreement that would return the Golan Heights and parts of the Jordan River Valley to Syria. 

But when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak chose to withdraw from Lebanon unilaterally, Syria immediately concluded that an armed Hezbollah would be a useful pressure point on Israel. 

When, therefore, the Government of Lebanon fell into line with Hezbollah's Shebaa Farms claim, Damascus supported it informally in a 16 May 2000 phone call from Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa to Annan. Yes, the Shebaa Farms were indeed Lebanese, Al-Sharaa said.

Annan pointed out the obvious: that neither Lebanon nor Syria offered anything to substantiate a territorial transfer, and that, for 22 years, Lebanon had never identified the Farms as a place where the UN Interim Force in Lebanon should operate. The claim, in short, was clearly fraudulent.

The farms' importance

In 2009, I became the American mediator for Syria-Israel peace in the US Department of State. This gained rapid momentum in later 2010 when Assad and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel accepted a proposal of mine.

What they accepted was my idea to draft a treaty of peace to serve as the basis for shuttle diplomacy and eventually direct negotiations aimed at producing agreement on a final, signed document.

Within a few weeks, consensus was achieved on nearly all the points related to the extent of Israel's anticipated withdrawal from occupied territory, withdrawal that would take place in return for full peace and Syria's strategic reorientation.

There was, however, a potential territorial complication requiring a solution: the status of the Shebaa Farms. Were they part of an Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, to be returned to Syria? Or were they an Israeli-occupied part of Lebanon, so potentially unaffected? 

I already knew the farms were part of the Golan, but within the context of my mediation, Syria's position was critical. I asked Assad what he thought on 28 February 2011 during a 50-minute, one-on-one meeting in the Tishreen Palace. 

A fly in the ointment

The meeting was to inform Assad of the extent to which Syria must modify its relations with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, before Israel would initiate and complete its total withdrawal from occupied Syrian territory, and to get Assad's reactions. 

A document with detailed footnotes was presented to him, defining in plain language the adjustments Syria would have to make. We then reviewed it together, line-by-line.

He did not flinch when presented with the requirement that Syrian military relationships with Iran and Hezbollah be dissolved before Syria could recover occupied territory. 

He acknowledged that if Syria were to sign a treaty with his southerly neighbour securing Syria's central interest—the recovery of all occupied territory—it would make no sense for him to do anything threatening towards Israel. 

He expressed confidence that Iran would accommodate itself to Syrian interests and that Hezbollah would focus on becoming a true political party in Lebanon.

As mentioned in my book (Reaching for the Heights), I asked Assad if his vision of Hezbollah getting out of the resistance business would require Syria to transfer to Lebanon the 'Shebaa Farms' once Israel left.

Indeed, the footnotes of the document presented to Assad had mentioned Lebanon several times, something he found mildly objectionable. 

Claim quickly dropped

Given Syria's verbal recognition of Lebanon's claim to the area in 2000, I was concerned about how this narrow strip of land might complicate an Israeli withdrawal, but Assad was direct: he dropped Hezbollah's Shebaa Farms claim like a bad habit. 

He assured me that maps showed the Shebaa Farms to be Syrian territory. While future adjustments with Lebanon might be possible, but the land in question was Syrian. I agreed entirely with his assessment, but I was stunned, nonetheless. 

Here was the President of Syria acknowledging that Lebanon's claim of sovereignty over the Shebaa Farms—the entire justification for Hezbollah's "Lebanese Resistance" status—was baseless. 

Of course, Lebanon was free to take any position it wished with respect to territorial ambiguities inherited from France, but the President of Syria was saying something consistent with the truth: the area in question had been governed by independent Syria and had been occupied by Israel, along with the balance of the Golan; since 1967.

There had been no transfer of land from Syria to Lebanon, and whatever informal telephone tactics Syria had employed in 2000 to keep the "Lebanese Resistance" in business, the land in question was Syrian territory occupied by Israel.

Thirteen years after that conversation twelve young Druze Arabs, presumably all Syrian nationals (since none were Israeli citizens), died needlessly because of a fraudulent territorial claim invented in 2000, one rejected even by Assad. 

True, Syria in 2000 wanted to preserve Hezbollah's ability to harass Israel militarily, and it went along verbally with the Shebaa Farms fiction. But, according to Syria's president, the land in question remained Syrian.

Seeking a better Line

The world now awaits a ceasefire in Gaza, to mitigate a humanitarian catastrophe and put a lid on the latest Hezbollah-Israel conflict. US diplomacy seeks, among other things, Blue Line adjustments in the hope that this latest dial-up will be the last. 

These prospective adjustments seem to centre on the stretch of Blue Line separating Lebanon from Israel-proper, the objective being to bring that line into greater conformance with the 1949 armistice line. Those adjustments should not be difficult.

There is also the matter of Ghajar, where the Blue Line bisects an Israeli-occupied Golani village that expanded northward into Lebanon over the years. By all accounts, Ghajar residents want to remain under Israeli governance. 

But a solution enabling local self-rule with some combination of Lebanese security forces and UN military personnel stationed in the northern part of an otherwise undivided town would not seem impossible to achieve.

Applying these diplomatic sticking plasters to Blue Line anomalies would be good. In the end, however, it is the Shebaa Farms that hold the key to peace (both formal and de facto) between Israel and Lebanon. 

Land for peace

Hezbollah's resistance pretension does not rest on Blue Line discrepancies involving small plots of land. They could all be fixed to the complete satisfaction of Beirut.

But if the Shebaa Farms controversy remains unresolved, Hezbollah will continue to use armed "resistance" to dominate Lebanon for the benefit of Iran. Indeed, it would do so even if it were to agree to abandon military positions adjoining Israel-proper.

Who knows, the day may come when an Israeli government offers to evacuate this small strip of land in return for the verified, supervised, complete disarmament of Hezbollah, and full normalisation with Lebanon. 

If that day ever comes, would Hezbollah be prepared (unlike in 2000, when Israel forces left Lebanon) to declare victory, disarm, and become a genuinely political entity? Or would it only do so after a similar détente between Iran and Israel? The belief here is that Hezbollah will be fully in the service of Iran until that service is no longer needed.

For the families of 12 dead young people, it is no consolation that the killers missed their target—Israeli military forces in "occupied Lebanon." 

One need not support Israel's occupation of the Golan or its actions in the West Bank and Gaza to conclude that a false claim of sovereignty justifying the "Lebanese Resistance" has had deadly consequences for too many on both sides of the Blue Line. 

The Shebaa Farms are part of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. No Lebanese militia has the right to fire rockets and kill people, deliberately or accidentally, in the Golan. A functioning Lebanese state would not permit it. Alas, such a state no longer exists.