- Forum Paper 19: “Planning Ahead for a Peacekeeping Mission on the Golan Heights: a Role for NATO?”, by Celine Touboul.
The new Forum Paper by the Research Division has been written while violent protests are challenging the future of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Regardless of the outcome of the uproar, the question of an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement remains on the agenda. Thus, the paper aims at examining whether NATO could be the provider of an international force to supervise the implementation of an Israeli-Syrian peace treaty and outlines the main characteristics of the peacekeeping mission needed for that task, based on the likely provisions of the future Israeli-Syrian peace treaty.
Based on previous Israeli-Syrian negotiations, the research assumes that any future Israeli-Syrian peace agreement will be based on two main demands: Syria’s demand for Israel’s full withdrawal from the Golan Heights and Israel’s demand for well-defined security arrangements. As in the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, these security arrangements will include, without being limited to, the creation of demilitarized and limited force zones supervised by an international mission (IM) which would serve NATO’s interests by giving the Alliance the opportunity to contribute significantly and positively to long-lasting stability in the Middle East.
However, the IM’s purpose would consist in a long-term post-peace agreement mission with an open-ended mandate. Mainly for this reason, NATO does not seem to be the right candidate for such a mission, which is not fully consistent with the Alliance’s natural purpose.
Since Israel’s deep mistrust of the UN precludes the possibility of a UN mission, a preferable option would be an ad hoc independent organization created especially for this task and shaped according to the parties’ needs and concerns.
The uncertainty surrounding the fate of the Assad regime does not affect the validity of the arguments expressed in this research, or its conclusion. While current events may delay the prospects of an Israeli-Syrian peace settlement, the key parameters of a peace agreement are thus expected to be the same tomorrow as they are today.
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