Israelis Deny Meeting With Syrian

Israel on Thursday denied a report that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secretly met a high-ranking envoy of Syrian President Hafez Assad in Jerusalem last month, but a respected Israeli journalist insisted that an “exploratory” discussion did take place.

If true, the meeting would be the first direct contact between Netanyahu and the Syrian leadership. Five years of on-again, off-again peace talks between Israel and Syria have been frozen since February, and Syria has been among Netanyahu’s harshest critics since he assumed power in June.

Syrian officials did not comment immediately on the reported meeting. But a Syrian military official was quoted as saying that the country rejects holding peace talks in secret.

Meanhwile, the Jerusalem Post reported today that Netanyahu made a secret trip to Britain last weekend to meet Jordan’s King Hussein, who was receiving medical care there. The newspaper speculated that the two met to discuss Netanyahu’s attempt to entice Syria to resume negotiations with a formula he calls “Lebanon First.”

Under that plan, Israel would end its 14-year occupation of a self-declared “security zone” in southern Lebanon if Syria guarantees that cross-border Hezbollah guerrilla attacks would stop and that Israel’s Lebanese militia, the South Lebanon Army, would not be persecuted.

Netanyahu’s government proposes such an agreement as a confidence-building step leading to further negotiations between Syria and Israel on thornier topics, such as control of the Golan Heights, where the two sides remain far apart.

Netanyahu insists that Israel will not surrender the heights it conquered in the 1967 Middle East War, while Assad says returning the territory is the minimum condition for any “comprehensive” peace. Because Syria dominates Lebanon and has more than 30,000 troops there, Assad can veto any agreement involving Lebanon as well as Syria.

The report of a meeting between the unnamed Syrian official and Netanyahu evoked surprise in Israel and might have been discounted except that its author, Zeev Schiff, is reputed to be one of the country’s best-informed journalists on military and strategic affairs.

There have also been other hints that Syria is taking a milder line toward Israel.

Syrians apparently are cooperating in current efforts to locate remains of missing Israeli soldiers, and U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross said after a swing through the Middle East last week that differences between Netanyahu’s and Assad’s positions were smaller than he had expected.

Schiff said the meeting occurred shortly before Netanyahu’s July 8 trip to the United States, with only two officials besides Netanyahu let in on the confidence.

Syria sought the meeting to determine whether there was a “new political message” coming from Israel that had not been made public, Schiff said, adding: “I don’t see it as more than an exploratory meeting. This was not any kind of negotiations.”

Syrian officials might not hold secret negotiations, he said, but “they did not say anything about contacts.”

Publicly, at least, “Lebanon First” has met with derision from Syrian officials, who portray it as a rehashed bid to weaken Syria’s negotiating position by isolating the Golan Heights.

“Lebanon and Syria will not fall into a new trap of Israel’s,” Syrian Vice President Abdel-Halim Khaddam declared this week in Paris.

Assad himself repeated his commitment to recovering the Golan in a speech Wednesday.

He said he is determined to “liberate occupied Arab land” and pledged that the Golan will be freed “however long it takes.”

Meanwhile, several Arab newspapers, citing sources in Amman, said Jordan’s Hussein will try to soften Assad’s opposition to the “Lebanon First” idea when he meets Assad in Syria this weekend.

Netanyahu is to visit Hussein in Amman on Monday--his second trip to an Arab capital--and would presumably hear Assad’s reaction then.