Netanyahu Reiterates Wish to Resume Talks With Syria

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday he wants to resume peace talks with Syria “without preconditions,” in effect ruling out Syrian demands for Israel to acknowledge understandings reached between the two governments before negotiations broke down last year.

“Obviously, we will take note of what took place in the talks between the Syrian negotiators and the previous government, but we cannot be bound by conversations or by ideas or by speculations and suggestions and hypotheses,” Netanyahu said. “We can only honor signed agreements.”

The dispute is critical because the talks will not resume unless the two sides agree on a starting point.

Israeli and Syrian sources have said that during marathon talks last year, the two countries reached informal understandings calling for Israel to withdraw from most of the strategic Golan Heights in exchange for a peace treaty and security assurances from Syria.

But negotiators had not nailed down the details before the talks were suspended in advance of the Israeli election in May in which Netanyahu defeated Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Syrian negotiator Walid Moualem has said the talks should resume from the point at which they ended--with the Israeli offer to withdraw on the table.

Moualem maintains that the Israelis were prepared to abandon the entire territory that they seized during the 1967 Middle East War, but Israeli sources said the Peres government was not ready to go that far.

The Clinton administration supports Netanyahu’s position that Israel and Syria are not bound by informal understandings.

“If there had been a virtual agreement or an agreement a year and a half ago, or two years ago, then there would be peace between Israel and Syria,” State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said. “There isn’t peace between Israel and Syria because they haven’t agreed on the outlines of a peace accord.”

Netanyahu met with President Clinton for more than three hours at the White House on Thursday.

He will be followed to the Oval Office in the next six weeks by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Hussein.

U.S. officials say the purpose of the meetings is to rejuvenate the Middle East peace process. But Syrian President Hafez Assad, who seldom leaves Damascus, the Syrian capital, is not on the guest list.

Israeli sources say Netanyahu outlined to Clinton a negotiating strategy intended to revive the talks with Syria without accepting Syrian demands for a total return of the Golan.

According to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Netanyahu told Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that “you must make it clear to Assad that he must think of other options--the option of a total withdrawal from the Golan does not exist from our point of view.”

Although Clinton and Netanyahu declined to discuss the Israeli plan in public, the president said he was encouraged by the Israeli proposals.

“I think our position is both fair and viable,” Netanyahu said Friday in a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank. “We want to negotiate without preconditions. And I’ve said many times that we believe each side can bring to the table its own concerns and go on from there.”