Syria Hints Middle East Peace Deal Is at Hand

Three days before he is scheduled to hold a landmark meeting in Washington with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh said Sunday that the 51-year state of war between Syria and Israel could be ended within a few months.

Shareh’s surprisingly upbeat tone bolstered speculation that the basic outline of a bargain has been reached, requiring Israel to abandon the strategic Golan Heights in exchange for Syria’s granting the Jewish state full diplomatic recognition and guaranteeing its security along the Syrian and Lebanese borders.

“I am so optimistic as to say that a few months could be enough to reach a peace agreement, and also that Lebanon in parallel would resume the peace talks soon,” Shareh said in Damascus, the Syrian capital.

Shareh spoke to reporters after a meeting to brief the Egyptian foreign minister, Amr Moussa, about recent developments. He called his upcoming meeting with Barak “a very important moment in the history of the peace process.”

The highest-level meeting ever between Syrian and Israeli government officials is to take place Wednesday, hosted by President Clinton. The session will mark the resumption of formal peace talks that were broken off by Israel in early 1996, at the time of a suicide bus-bombing campaign carried out in Israel by the radical Palestinian group Hamas.

Shareh’s comments were the first direct remarks by a high-level Syrian official about the renewal of talks since it was announced last Wednesday by Clinton. Because he is Syrian President Hafez Assad’s right-hand man for the peace negotiations, Shareh’s words are normally seen as reflecting the thinking of the 69-year-old leader.

Assad will not himself negotiate with Barak--a decision attributable either to his reportedly failing health or to the Syrian’s well-known reluctance to sit face-to-face with an Israeli leader until a deal is 100% cast in concrete. Assad also resisted overtures from Barak’s predecessors for a handshake during the previous four years of negotiations, from 1992 to 1996. Those glacially paced discussions were conducted on the ambassadorial level, with the exception of one direct meeting of the Israeli and Syrian chiefs of staff.

Despite the lingering distrust between the two sides, Shareh on Sunday clearly chose to accentuate the positive. His optimism could be due to Clinton’s assertion that the renewed talks will pick up where they broke off in 1996.

In a recent interview in the Arabic magazine Al Wasat, Shareh claimed that by 1996, Syria had already completed 80% of a peace deal with former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his successor, Shimon Peres, who took over as premier after Rabin’s 1995 assassination by a Jewish extremist.

Shareh did not go into the specific differences that remained, but it is known that the talks at that time were stuck on definitions of security arrangements, including how far back from the eventual borderline Syria and Israel would have to keep their heavy troops, and on whether Israel could maintain, at least temporarily, its sophisticated lookout and listening post on Mt. Hermon, the Golan’s highest point.

From Mt. Hermon, Israeli troops now gaze down into both Lebanon and Syria and listen in on phone conversations in Damascus, just 25 miles away. Assad has said any ongoing Israeli presence there would be an intolerable infringement on Syrian sovereignty. Syrian negotiators also argue that the surveillance is no longer vital for Israel’s security because today’s spy satellites can provide the same early-warning protection.

Israel and Syria have been in a formal state of war since the origin of the modern Jewish state in 1948. However, there has been no actual fighting along the Syrian-Israeli front since an armistice worked out after the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

After the armistice, the struggle between the two states instead shifted to Lebanon, where Israel and Syria through various proxies vied for control for much of the remaining 1970s and the ‘80s.

Israel has occupied a slice of southern Lebanon since 1978, and in recent years especially, its involvement there has turned into a quagmire because of the increasing effectiveness of Iranian-supported Lebanese Hezbollah guerrilla resistance fighters.

Although the U.S.-equipped Israeli army and air force are superior to anything Syria could ever hope to muster, Assad has managed to maintain pressure on Israel simply by giving Hezbollah leeway to operate in southern Lebanon. There, its fighters have repeatedly bloodied the Israelis and their Lebanese allies through ambushes, rocket attacks and roadside bombings.

Judging from its public statements, the Damascus government is still insisting on regaining the Golan Heights up to the line that existed June 4, 1967, just before the outbreak of the Six-Day War. In that conflict, Israel took control not only of the Golan from Syria but also of the West Bank from Jordan and of the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt.

Israel, on the other hand, has indicated that the more valid frontier would be the internationally recognized border set up by the British and the French in 1920 to divide Syria from what was then the British-governed Palestinian Mandate.

The difference between the two lines is that the 1920 border would keep the Syrians slightly to the east and deny them access to the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s principal source of fresh water.

After the talks broke off in 1996, Syria made public a claim that Israel during the course of negotiations had conceded in principle its willingness to withdraw from the Golan back to the June 1967 line.

Israel, however, has vehemently disputed the Syrian claim that Rabin ever agreed to such a far-reaching pullback, saying any discussions were merely “hypothetical.”