High Hopes for Israel-Syria Talks

By mid-February, Israel and the Palestinians hope to have agreed on the outline of a final peace agreement. By September, they aim to achieve a full settlement. The contentiousness of the issues to be resolved and the cramped timetable make those extraordinarily ambitious goals.

Hovering in the background is another potential negotiation that, though less complex, promises to be no less demanding. A comprehensive Middle East peace of the kind urged by the United States requires Syria’s readiness to end its long conflict with Israel and Israel’s readiness to give up strategic depth in exchange for normalized relations. The sense in Washington, Jerusalem and, it appears, Damascus is that there is probably no better moment than now to test whether such a deal can be struck.

Syria and Israel have spent years talking about what it would take for them to make peace. Those discussions were suspended in 1996 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put the brakes on the peace efforts pursued by his more moderate predecessors. Now both Israel and Syria again seem in the mood to sit down together. Their earlier talks went into great detail about the arrangements each insists must be part of a land-for-peace agreement. Israel would have to end its military occupation of the Golan Heights, which it has held since 1967. In return it would insist on adequate security safeguards, diplomatic ties, open borders and sharing of scarce water supplies.

President Hafez Assad, who has ruled Syria since 1971, is in declining health. The speculation inside and outside Syria is that he would like to settle the conflict with Israel before power passes to his son Bashar, 34, his designated successor. But a readiness to think about what was once officially unthinkable--peace with Israel--doesn’t mean that Assad will be any less tough a bargainer than he always has been. For openers, he wants Israel to agree in advance to hand back the whole of the strategic Golan Heights. Serious negotiations won’t be possible until he accepts that no Israeli government is going to give away its most valuable bargaining chip before it locks in offsetting concessions from Syria.

Still, Assad has clearly signaled his interest in reopening negotiations. The Syrian leader used unprecedentedly warm words to greet the election of Prime Minister Ehud Barak. He let it be known he won’t allow radical Palestinian groups based in Damascus to carry out violence against Israel. Among Syrians the economic and political benefits of peace with Israel are now being openly discussed. Bringing the two sides back to the bargaining table is properly one of the Clinton administration’s top priorities.