Not an overflight but a checkpoint

Syria's state news agency SANA said Israeli forces advanced towards villages in the south-west on Sunday and set up a checkpoint at Al-Ardah, with shelling heard nearby. Syria's foreign minister, Asaad Hassan al-Shaibani, called for a withdrawal and described the operations as a direct threat to the region's security. Al Jazeera's report gave no casualty figures.[1]

The previous chapter of this argument was set out in this column yesterday: the 1974 arrangement stood for fifty-two years less through the binding force of its text than because the authorities on both sides preferred predictability. Today's development pushes that argument one step further. A flight through airspace is a reversible act; a checkpoint established on the ground is an act of de facto administration. The difference concerns how long a breach lasts, and it is precisely there that a boundary arrangement begins to erode.[1], [2]

An arrangement without an executor

In Damascus, Antonio Guterres said Syria's sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity must be fully respected, called Israel's conduct contrary to the 1974 agreement unacceptable and demanded that it stop, and announced that the UN would submit a comprehensive report to the Security Council before the end of the month. He also called for the immediate removal of all sanctions on Syria.[1]

Naming a breach and stopping it are different powers. A report to the Security Council is an instrument of documentation; it becomes an instrument of execution only so far as the Council can agree on it. The problem the 1974 text faces today lies less in its age than in the gap between the body identifying the breach and the body able to end it. The disanalogy matters as well: in 1974 the line drew a status quo both sides wished to preserve, whereas President Ahmed al-Sharaa now says Damascus is seeking a security agreement with Israel without giving up its claim to the occupied Golan Heights. The line is being reopened for negotiation as well as breached. Whether the Council agrees on a text after the report announced for the end of the month will be the first concrete sign of which way the arrangement comes apart.[1]