The Israeli Foreign Ministry decided this week that it would no longer impose an official itinerary on visiting diplomats.
While the itinerary has traditionally included visits to the Golan Heights and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin focused specifically on the Golden when the announced the decision.
“There is no reason to make someone visit certain sites when they come here,” Beilin told Army Radio.
“If they want to go to the Golan, we won’t stop them. The decision is more because we no longer feel it is necessary or appropriate to plan a specific itinerary,” he said.
Golan residents who oppose any withdrawal From the area as part of an eventual peace deal with Syria said the decision proves that the government has already given Up on the Golan.
Labor Knesset member Avigdor Kahalani, who heads the Golan lobby in the Knesset, said he planned to introduce a bill that would make it more difficult for the government to make any territorial concessions on the Golan in its ongoing negotiations with Syria.
Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations have long been deadlocked over a Syrian demand that Israel withdraw completely from the Golan in return for peace with Syria.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has offered to make a phased withdrawal from the area. But he has called on Syria to first spell out the nature of the peace it envisions with Israel, a move Damascus has so far refused to make.
The decision to exclude Yad Vashem from the itinerary also drew fire, with members of the Knesset attacking the Foreign Ministry’s decision.
Knesset speaker Shevach Weiss said he does not understand the decision, since, he said, Yad Vashem represents Israel’s identity. Likud Knesset members Uzi Landau and Eliahu Ben-Elissar demanded that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin cancel the decision.
Ephraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Weisenthal Center in Israel, sent a letter of protest to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.
“I think that it is absurd that official visitors in the state of Israel not be taken to Yad Vashem as an integral part of [their] visit,” he told Israel Radio.
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