Assad to Wait Before Talking With Israel

Syrian President Hafez Assad on Monday said he will not resume peace negotiations with Israel until he is convinced that the new government of Benjamin Netanyahu will be negotiating in earnest and not playing him for a fool.

In the first public reaction by the Syrian leader to Wednesday’s election, Assad said at a news conference with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that Arabs must unite to face the challenge posed by the right-wing Netanyahu government expected to take power later this month.

As Assad was warning of a possible delay in the peace process, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said in Britain that Netanyahu cannot back away from commitments made by Prime Minister Shimon Peres and his predecessor, assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The previous peace agreements are “a contractual transaction between two sides, with no change of mind and no unilateral withdrawal” permitted, Arafat said in a speech to the Oxford Union. The comments by Arafat and Assad on Monday appeared to represent a toughening of Arab resolve to try to keep Israel on the peace path blazed by Rabin and Peres.

Initial statements last week by Mubarak and King Hussein of Jordan had attempted to put a more positive spin on last week’s Israeli vote.

There has been skepticism among Arabs about Netanyahu’s commitment to the peace process because positions he staked out before his election seemed to reject any further Israeli concessions to the Palestinians and Syria.

Netanyahu stated he would never return the strategic Golan Heights to Syria. For Syria, recovering the Golan--which it lost to Israel in the 1967 Middle East War--has always been the sole aim of any peace accord.

Netanyahu also pledged to settle more Israelis in the occupied West Bank and said he would never discuss the status of Jerusalem--positions that would seem to thwart any chance of an agreement with Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.

Referring to the new prime minister’s statements, Assad said, “We want to understand them clearly” before going back to peace talks.

“Initially, we do not have a feeling that things are going in a positive direction. Therefore, we must be alert so that we won’t drop our guard or be taken for fools.”

For now, he said, “continuing the talks is not on the agenda.”

The quickly called Assad-Mubarak summit was part of a series of feverish consultations since Netanyahu’s election.

On Wednesday, Mubarak, Arafat and Hussein are to hold a summit at the Jordanian Red Sea resort of Aqaba to discuss their positions. The three have been trying to act as a bloc; their meeting was scheduled before the election and now has taken on new urgency.

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Generally, the region’s Arab leaders believe unity will aid their negotiations with Israel. Assad said Monday that Arab consensus is “the only guarantee for salvation.”

Mubarak--whose country was the first to sign a peace treaty with the Israelis--said Netanyahu’s victory speech Sunday night “did not inspire optimism.” Nevertheless, Mubarak said he and Assad had agreed to “wait until we really see the actual policies of this government.”

Netanyahu’s speech did not give any sign that he would be willing to withdraw from Arab territory and did not specifically mention Arafat’s PLO, the Israeli government’s negotiating partner for the past three years.