Syria and the Problem of Meaning

On of the more intractable controversies in philosophy is over how meaning gets produced. Many of the best minds that we’ve produced over the last 150 years have tried to grapple with the issue using some of the most formal and rigorous tools that we’ve developed over the last 2000 years. And yet they have bumped up against dead ends over and over again. So maybe we shouldn’t blame Assad for apparently telling Western envoys that he is willing to begin negotiations with Israel “without preconditions” and then insisting as soon as the envoys leave that negotiations can only be picked up where they were left in 2000. Maybe he’s just getting tangled in the inscrutability of meaning. Or maybe he’s just a duplicitous bastard who will do or say anything to relieve the stranglehold of the Israeli/Turkish/Iraqi noose that is increasingly tightening around him. It’s an open question.

Israel should certainly not give back the Golan. For starters, there is the point made in Moshe Aren’s (former MK, former Ambassador to the US, former Minister of Defense, former Minister without Portfolio, former Minister of Foreign Affairs) recent article that “a nation committing aggression not be “rewarded” after being defeated, by the return of territories it lost as a result of the war it had started. Violation of this rule is nothing less than an invitation to further aggression.” For more than 3 decades, Syria used the Golan to rain down bombs on Israeli civilians. Twice they launched attacks from there – attacks meant to do nothing less than wipe out every Jew in Israel. They tried a third time, with implicit Soviet backing, and Israel took it from them.

Immediately, Israel began to cultivate the plateau. Today, it has families and businesses and wineries and resorts.

Then Syria tried to overrun Israel for a fourth time, in the surprise Ramadan/Yom Kippur attack that they launched in 1973. But for the Golan (and the brave soldiers that they ended up capturing, torturing, and executing) they would have succeeded. Well, they wouldn’t exactly have succeeded. Golda Mier would’ve nuked Damascus, and tactical nuclear weapons would have been deployed against the Arab armies in the field.
Regardless, Syria should not get the Golan back. If they had not been genocidal maniacs, they never would have lost it. And Israel should keep it not only because I’m not so sure that they’re not going to become genocidal maniacs again in the near future. Also, they don’t deserve it back – they wouldn’t have the nerve to demand from Turkey the land that Turkey took from them in the 1920s when Syria attacked them – only the Jewish state is supposed to fight to survive and then, after they do and get a little breathing room, voluntarily put their head back in the noose.