Austria’s decision [June 6] to evacuate its 380 UNDOF (United Nations Disengagement Observer Force) troops from the Golan Heights landed in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hands like a ripe fruit. He opened Sunday’s [June 9 cabinet meeting by telling his ministers: “The withdrawal of the Austrian forces underscores the fact that Israel cannot depend on international forces for its security.” Netanyahu was absolutely correct. There is no country anywhere that can depend on international forces to ensure its security for years, not least in a region that the entire international community, without exception, regards as being occupied territory. Not even Israel can do that.

The UNDOF force was established as part of the Disengagement Agreement (1974) in which Israel withdrew from all the new territories it conquered in the Yom Kippur War and an additional 60 square kilometers in the Golan Heights that it had controlled since the Six-Day War in 1967. A UN buffer zone was created in the evacuated area, and the number of Israeli and Syria troops deployed on both sides of the border was reduced.

But that was not the end of the story. It wasn’t even the main chapter. The creation of UNDOF was just one part, and not even the main part, of UN Resolution 350, which was adopted by the UN Security Council on May 31, 1974, without any dissenting votes. As part of that same resolution, the members of the most-important international forum in the world “welcomed” the disengagement agreement reached between Israel and Syria, noting that the agreement was reached in the context of implementing Security Council Resolution 338 of October 1973, that key resolution and the twin of Resolution 242 of 1967, which called for an Israeli withdrawal of all of its armed forces from those territories occupied in the most recent conflict. Similarly, all of the parties were instructed to recognize and respect the sovereignty of all states in the region and to ensure their territorial integrity and political independence. Israel’s various governments, including the Begin government, officially adopted UN Resolutions 242 and 338.

With the help of then-Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, who refused to come to Jerusalem in the wake of his Egyptian colleague Anwar Sadat (1977), the temporary situation in the Golan Heights has become increasingly permanent. In December 1981, the Knesset passed the Golan Heights Law, imposing Israeli law on the occupied Golan Heights and effectively annexing it. Israel acted rather elegantly in the way it ignored the fact that not a single nation in the world recognized this annexation and that the UN Security Council passed a resolution calling for the annulment of the law and rejecting its international validity. That same Security Council then went ahead and extended the UNDOF mandate in the Golan Heights buffer zone. That mandate did not include intervention in the establishment of 33 Israeli settlements in the Golan, which are home to more than 20,000 Israelis, who use up most of the region’s natural resources, including its water, pastures and agricultural land.