Is Syria Somehow Serious? : Through winks and nods Damascus talks about the diplomatic road to Israel

Hans-Dietrich Genscher announced in Damascus the other day that Syria had just recommitted itself to recognizing Israel’s “right to exist.” Dramatic news? It might have been, if Genscher were the foreign minister of Syria instead of the visiting foreign minister of Germany. As it happens his comments--which his hosts pointedly refrained from repeating publicly--do nothing visible to advance the prospect that Syria is ready finally, like Egypt in 1979, to end its state of war with Israel and settle down to more peaceful neighborly relations.

Should that moment ever come, the odds are that it will be announced straightforwardly by Damascus and Jerusalem in statements earlier hammered out in secret bilateral meetings. Third parties can be very useful in helping to resolve the fine points of an agreement that both sides have concluded is in their best interests to reach; Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy after the 1973 Middle East war and President Jimmy Carter’s brokering of the Egypt-Israel Camp David accords are cases in point. But third parties really aren’t needed if one or another of Israel’s Arab neighbors decides it’s ready to end more than 40 years of hostility and warfare.

Israel, having been over this ground before, did not swoon with excitement over the Genscher statement. It welcomed his interpretation of the Syrian position as perhaps indicating “a positive change of tone,” but also noted quite correctly that Israel’s “right” to exist is an inarguable fact, whether or not Damascus can bring itself to say so.

Giving the impression through winks and nods that a breakthrough may be near can be shrewd politics--Syria, needing aid from the West, currently finds it advantageous to appear conciliatory--but that’s not the same thing as serious diplomacy. Probably few people recall that Iraq, when it was in deep trouble fighting Iran in the mid-1980s and needed all the help it could get, hinted obliquely if unmistakably that peace with Israel was possible. Then the fortunes of war changed, Baghdad’s self-confidence returned, and before long the Scuds were on their way to Tel Aviv.

Could Syria, which has never been accused of political moderation, at some point decide to become the second Arab state to make peace with Israel? Anything is possible. But if that decision is made, President Hafez Assad or his successor will know that the surest way to convey that message to the Israeli government is directly, not through the filter of a third party.