On the heights of Tiberias in northern Israel, in October 1973 Joan Howard looked out of her lounge-room window and had a grandstand view of a war. Spread out far below her was Lake Tiberias, known in Israel as the Kinneret, the biblical Sea of Galilee. Close across the lake rose the equal heights of the Golan escarpment, the southern end of the Syrian territory that Israel had captured in 1967. At night she could see the flashes of artillery. During the day, ignoring the sirens that warned her to take shelter, she stood at the window watching air battles as Israeli jets flew low over her house to keep under the Syrian radar, fighting dogfights above the lake before swooping down over the Golan. She was close enough to see Syrian tank formations come over the ridge and fight their way down towards the lake before being halted by Israeli armour.

The first 30 years of conflict between the State of Israel and its Arab neighbours was focused chiefly on Egypt, Jordan and Syria. But Egypt made peace with Israel in 1978 and Jordan in 1994, after a long period of de facto peace between the two countries; and although there has been no peace between Israel and Syria, and Israel still occupies a large part of the Syrian Golan, the area itself was generally quiet from 1974 to 2006 (when this history ends) and beyond. Instead, after the 1973 War, there was increased conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and vastly escalated conflict between Israel and its northern neighbour Lebanon. These conflicts were not unconnected, but this chapter looks in particular at the case of Lebanon.

No problem has proved more intractable for the United Nations than that of the former British mandate of Palestine. Seventy years after the organisation first dealt with the problem, Israel occupies some of the territory of one of its neighbours, has poor relations with others, and has an unresolved relationship with the Palestinian state that was meant to have been born in 1947, but which has still not successfully emerged into the light. It is possible to argue that UN policy in the area has been wrong-headed from the start: certainly, it has not been successful. Only Kashmir can rival it for longevity on the United Nations’ agenda: seven decades after the organisation took up the issue of Palestine, there is no solution in sight.

In June 1967 the Arabs and Israelis fought a war that lasted for just six days but changed the face of the Middle East. For the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (Untso), the challenges were immense. For the previous 19 years Untso’s operations, centred on the four Mixed Armistice Commissions (MACs) described in chapter 9, had plotted a more or less steady course, although there had been plenty of tensions. But in three of Untso’s four areas of operation, the 1967 war ended with radically changed boundaries between the belligerents and an entirely new geography of peace for the observers to monitor. For the next six years, Untso had to meet the new challenges unaided: it was only after the 1973 war that new UN missions were set up in the Sinai and on the Golan (see chapters 20 and 21). This chapter shows how Untso was able to reposition itself – literally as well as figuratively – to respond to the new environment after 1967 and describes the key roles played by Australians in that process.

By the beginning of 1990, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (Untso) and its Australian observers were maintaining a well-established routine. On the Golan, the usual round of observation and patrolling continued, with little change in the level of activity. Observation duties in southern Lebanon were more challenging with low-level conflict between Hezbollah and other Muslim groups and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), but as the long Lebanon civil war had formally ended in 1989, fighting between the Lebanese factions was decreasing. Within Israel, the Intifada – the Palestinian uprising – was still running, but Untso had no role in trying to end or even moderate the violence. The Untso observers and their families tried to keep away from any Intifada-fuelled riots or bombings.