Disputed plot may be key to Lebanon settlement
AS WORLD leaders scramble to stop the fighting, the key to untangling the Middle East crisis may come down to a small patch of land, a badly drawn map, a softly-spoken historian and some long-forgotten papers in a Paris archive.
For almost 40 years a stumbling point in relations between Syria, Lebanon and Israel has been the ownership of a sparsely populated area called the Shebaa Farms. It sits on the border of the three states and was seized by Israel from Syria in the 1967 war.
In the past week, during diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has raised the territory as the key to finding a long-term resolution to the conflict.
Dr Rice has reportedly asked Israel - which does not lay claim to the land - to hand it to the Lebanese Government as a goodwill gesture.
The US believes this could bolster the Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, who would then be expected to call for an international force in southern Lebanon and assist with the disarming of Hezbollah.
The problem is that ever since French mandate officials began drawing lines between the two countries over an 1860s Ottoman-era map the land has been claimed by both the Syrians and the Lebanese. Since it gained independence in 1946, Syrian maps have included the land, while Lebanese maps put the territory in Lebanon.
Negotiators have long sought some final proof to show that the land belongs to one side or the other. Four years ago, while rummaging through government archives in Paris, a historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Asher Kaufman, stumbled on documents that appear to resolve the dispute.
Kaufman discovered a set of papers from the French mandate era, from 1920 to 1941, that show that French officials in the 1930s had accidentally put the Shebaa Farms in Syria. The papers revealed that the officials realised their error and wanted to correct the maps, but the mistake was never fixed.
An Israeli journalist, Akiva Eldar, has urged the United Nations to revisit its Lebanese resolutions, an action it is likely to undertake this week.
Professor Kaufman's findings were published two years after Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and were not considered by the UN team that investigated where to draw the border. At the time, Lebanon presented the UN with a map dated 1966 that showed the land was Lebanese, but it was later shown to be a forgery.
Eventually, after examining almost a hundred maps, the UN declared that "on all maps the UN has been able to find, the farms are seen on the Syrian side". The Israeli withdrawal was rubberstamped by the UN and the dispute over the Shebaa Farms was put aside for future negotiations between Syria and Israel.
But Lebanon never ceded its claim. Israeli officials have long dismissed Hezbollah's claims to the territory as an excuse to attack Israel, but the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has this week reportedly expressed a willingness to return the land to the Lebanese Government.
As Israeli and Hezbollah troops still clash inside Lebanon, the peace may depend on Professor Kaufman's papers, which in turn may convince Syria to relinquish its claim.