ברמת הגולן היה טיהור אתני וכיבושה
לא היה חיוני והיתה בו מתאוות הבצע. מדובר בעשרות אלפי פליטים שנעקרו אין בעניין הזה בר סמכא כמשה דיין בראיון המפורסם לרמי טל : In 1976 Dayan gave an extraordinary interview to Israeli journalist Rami Tal but embargoed it. He died in 1981. Only on April 27, 1997, did his daughter Yael, a Labor parliamentarian, release it. It was not new news in Israel, but it made a stir. It made practically no stir in this country; I missed it at the time. Said Dayan: "I made a mistake in allowing the [Israeli] conquest of the Golan Heights. As defense minister I should have stopped it because the Syrians were not threatening us at the time." The attack proceeded, he went on, not because Israel was threatened but because of pressure from land-hungry farmers and army commanders in northern Israel. "Of course [war with Syria] was not necessary. You can say the Syrians are bastards and attack when you want. But this is not policy. You don't open aggression against an enemy because he's a bastard but because he's a threat." About those shellings: Syria shelled and otherwise emanated cold hostility. But, Dayan told his interviewer, "at least 80 percent" of two decades of border clashes were initiated by Israel. "We would send a tractor to plow some [disputed] area . . . and we knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was." So, on the authority of what you could call an impeccable Israeli source, the situation is very different from what is commonly portrayed. Israel, with an appetite for land, for political profit and for strategic depth, was in the Golan instance--not in all instances--an aggressor, not the victim of aggression. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-12/24/044l-122499-idx.html Israel and Syria: Correcting the Record By Stephen S. Rosenfeld
