The perils of crossing the fence

UNARMED Palestinian refugees clambering across the Syria-Israel border and getting shot by Israeli troops may provide a useful diversion both for Syria's beleaguered president, Bashar Assad, and for Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. The Palestinians, all of them apparently from camps in Syria, made their first attempt at breaching the fence on May 15th, the anniversary of Israel's founding, known to Palestinians as the naqba, or catastrophe. Hundreds crossed the line near the Druze village of Majdal Shams, on the Golan Heights, which were annexed by Israel after the war of 1967. They caught the Israeli army unawares. At least three were shot dead.

On June 5th, the anniversary of the naqsa, or defeat by Israel in 1967, they tried again. This time the Israelis were waiting and no one got across. The Syrians say two dozen people were shot dead. The Israelis disagree. They say ten demonstrators were killed near the border town of Kuneitra, when their own Molotov cocktails triggered border anti-tank mines.

For Mr Assad, television pictures of killings by Israelis may be a relief from scenes of Syrians dying every day at the hands of his own security men in cities across the country. Hence the ease with which the demonstrators got to the border zone, which is usually blocked to Syrians. But on June 6th Syrian army roadblocks prevented them from coming back, while in the huge Yarmouk refugee camp on the edge of Damascus mourners burned the office of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical group, blaming it for sending the demonstrators to their deaths.

For Mr Netanyahu, facing the prospect that the UN General Assembly may vote in September to recognise Palestine as a fully independent state, the border assaults feed his argument that the Palestinians still want all of Palestine, denying the existence of a Jewish state on part of it. The demonstrators on the Golan demanded the right to “return to Haifa and Jaffa”, the latter long since subsumed by Israel's biggest city, Tel Aviv. By demanding that those places be part of their state, those Palestinians seem not to endorse a “two-state solution”.

Nor, in practical terms, does Mr Netanyahu. He is at loggerheads with Barack Obama over how to proceed with a peace process. He is battling now against a French attempt to call a conference in Paris next month on the basis of Mr Obama's formula that so annoyed him last month: that the starting point should be the 1967 line, with mutually agreed land swaps and security provisions. Israeli and Palestinian emissaries have been in Washington meeting American officials separately to look for a way forward—so far in vain.

There is almost no opposition in Israel to the firing of live ammunition to keep out the Palestinian border demonstrators, unarmed or not. Opinion polls have rewarded Mr Netanyahu generously for his very public recent rejection in Washington of Mr Obama's peace ideas. The prospect of the UN vote in September is a cloud on the horizon: Israelis know it could lead to greater ostracism, but Mr Netanyahu seems confident Israel can weather it.

Wrong and dangerous, says Meir Dagan, who for eight years until January headed Mossad, Israel's foreign-intelligence service. Mr Netanyahu's judgment is not to be trusted, he says. The prime minister and his defence minister, Ehud Barak, may even decide to bomb Iran's nuclear plants to deflect attention from what Mr Barak has called the “tsunami” in September. General Dagan was a longtime military comrade and political ally of Ariel Sharon, who, as prime minister, put him in the Mossad post. Mr Sharon harboured an unwavering contempt for Mr Netanyahu.

Mr Dagan warns that an attack on Iran would be “stupid” and would trigger a regional war, “and in that case you would have given Iran the best possible reason to continue the nuclear programme.” Mr Dagan laments Israel's failure to put forward a peace initiative of its own or to accept, at least in principle, the Saudi peace initiative of 2002, whereby the Arabs would recognise Israel if it withdrew to the 1967 border.

He is the latest of a succession of retiring generals and top security men to have urged concessions, warning that a stalemate could provoke another Palestinian intifada (uprising) or even a regional war. General Dagan says that Gabi Ashkenazi, who headed the armed forces, and Yuval Diskin, who until last month ran the internal-intelligence service, the Shin Bet, both agree with him. “People would do well to listen to Dagan,” says Yaakov Peri, another former Shin Bet boss.