Israel Withdraws From Town Near Lebanon
The New York Times reports:
JERUSALEM — Israel’s inner cabinet approved a plan in principle on Wednesday to withdraw from the northern part of a village straddling the border with Lebanon, addressing an American concern and a longstanding point of contention between Israel and Lebanon.
But the action was unlikely to ease American pressure on Israel regarding a new moratorium on construction in West Bank settlements that is intended to get Israeli-Palestinian peace talks back on track.
Ghajar, a far-flung village of pastel-colored houses, has had a complicated history, sitting at a volatile juncture where Israel, Lebanon and Syria meet.
Both the United States and the Lebanese government have been keen to settle the issue of Ghajar, in part to deny Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia, any justification for attacking Israel on grounds that it is occupying Lebanese territory.
The 2,200 residents of Ghajar are members of the Alawite sect, the governing minority of Syria. The village came under Israeli control with the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau that Syria lost to Israel in the 1967 war. When Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, the villagers chose to become Israeli citizens.
But when Israel withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000, the United Nations determined that the line of Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon would run through the center of Ghajar, which by that time had significantly expanded to the north.
The border remained mostly a virtual one, and when Israel went to war in 2006 against Hezbollah, Israeli soldiers returned to take control of the part that sits on Lebanese soil. Under the cease-fire terms of the United Nations Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 war, Israel was expected to withdraw, but did not do so, citing security concerns.
