Peace Deal With Israel Is Again on Syria’s Radar

There is a disconnect about Syria today. Despite this country’s reputation for being the Arab world’s most implacable enemy of Israel, it is filled with people who are saying just the opposite: that real peace with Israel would be great.

“Syria needs peace,” explains Tameen, 22, a medical student at Damascus University, sipping a can of orange soda in a school snack bar. “And I think it will come. I think there is a 70% chance this time.”

Hopeful rumblings about a resumption of the frozen peace negotiations between Syria and Israel started as soon as Ehud Barak replaced Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister in July, but a series of diplomatic stumbles has since sent both sides back to their corners.

Yet both still clearly yearn for talks to start, and observers in the region rate the next few months as offering a historic chance for peace, even more so than the last round of talks, which broke off in 1996.

One Damascus-based diplomat said of Syria and Israel: “This time they are both really serious.”

Syrians were heartened by the overwhelming mandate given Barak in May elections, believing that he would resume talks in the spirit of his mentor, assassinated Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin.

Syrian President Hafez Assad responded to the election of Barak with what for him was an almost shocking outburst of praise. He called Barak “a strong and honest man.” And in a significant gesture toward the new Israeli government, he let it be known that he had forbidden further violent activities by radical Palestinian groups based in Damascus.

But that early optimism waned due to what appears to have been an unfortunate sequence of missteps in public diplomacy. Peeved that Syria was being portrayed in Israel’s press as desperate for a deal, Damascus toughened its rhetoric. It reiterated a demand that, before talks can resume, Israel must declare its willingness to withdraw from all the occupied Golan Heights, all the way back to the lines existing on the eve of the June 1967 Six-Day War.

For Barak, who is bound to be assailed at home for giving in too easily no matter what he does, issuing such a declaration even before reaching the negotiating table seems a political impossibility. And if Israel is persuaded to pull out of the Golan, Israeli leaders want to press Syria to revert to a 1920 international border between Syria and what was then British-run Palestine that is slightly more advantageous to Israel than the 1967 frontier. (It would keep the Syrians off the Sea of Galilee, barely.)

So that is the conundrum for the moment. Each side has painted itself into a corner, with the United States the main agent now searching for a creative formula that could square the circle and get talks resumed. If started, U.S. officials believe, the negotiations have at least an even chance for success.

Prospects for an early resumption of talks also have been clouded by Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh’s emergency open-heart surgery this month in Lebanon. Shareh, a key player in peace negotiations, was rushed to a hospital shortly after returning from the United States, where he had met once with President Clinton and twice with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in the space of a week. He is now recovering.

Murhaf Jouejati, an American-educated Syrian affairs expert, said Israel should move quickly to the negotiating table.

“This may blow the last chance for peace,” he said. “Assad is not a teenager. And in Syria, he is the only one who can make compromises.”

Assad just turned 69. He is widely reported to be in poor health. (On the other hand, people have been saying that about him since the early 1980s.)

Syrian commentators stress that Assad is offering more than just peace with Syria. He can also deliver peace with Lebanon, its longtime client state, and give a green light to normalization of relations with Israel by other Arab states. In other words: an end to the half a century of Arab-Israeli conflict and a chance for Israel to live and trade with its neighbors behind secure and recognized borders.

But, as at the end of the Cold War, there seem to be many on both sides more comfortable with the old certainties of enmity than with the prospective new uncertainties of peace.

One sentiment widely held in Syria is that the country has been unfairly painted as the obstacle to peace.

For years in Israel and the United States, Assad has been seen as a dictator and terrorist master bent on suppressing his own people, spilling Israeli blood and humiliating the West at every turn: in short, a demon.

It is a view drawn from certain facts. Assad engineered the surprise 1973 war on Israel; he has repressed all opposition inside Syria; and he has foiled anyone’s control of Lebanon but his own.

U.S. officials say no terrorist act has been linked to Assad since 1986. But Syria has been kept on the State Department’s list of states that support terrorism, on the grounds that he lets violent anti-Israeli groups be headquartered in Damascus and continues to aid and abet the militant group Hezbollah’s guerrilla war against the Israeli occupation of a nine-mile strip of southern Lebanon.

These facts about Assad have colored the image of Syria in the West and obscured another facet of the Syrian leader: that in 1991, by agreeing to join the Mideast peace conference in Madrid, he dramatically changed course and made what he calls a “strategic choice” for peace.

That decision led to four years of U.S.-brokered peace negotiations that toward the end seemed to be bearing fruit. Now, among Syrians, there is a strong sense that Syria has been treated shabbily and that, unlike its Arab partners, the Israelis have refused to bargain seriously with it.

And yet, almost always, Syria is portrayed as the villain in the drama.

“Syrians suck at PR,” concluded Jouejati.

Among other things, Syria is frequently derided for having dallied and missed the chance for peace offered by Rabin. But Jouejati and others in Syria believe that Israel was just as guilty of putting off decisions.

Syrian Ambassador to the U.S. Walid Mualem has stated that an agreement with Israel could have been concluded by June 1996 if Israel’s then-prime minister, Shimon Peres, had not in effect pulled the plug that February by calling early elections.

“Things were moving,” Mualem said.

Israeli negotiator Itamar Rabinovich, in a revealing insider’s account--”The Brink of Peace: The Israeli-Syrian Negotiations”--seems to partially support that assessment. He reports that Rabin, wary of Assad’s intentions, took a go-slow approach to Syria to give priority to talks with the Palestinians and Jordanians.

When Peres succeeded Rabin, things began to fall into place more swiftly. But then came the call for early elections, followed by a devastating series of terrorist bus bombings in Israel and by Netanyahu’s defeat of Peres.

The talks never resumed. What Syria seeks now is essentially the same goal it sought in October 1991, when Assad first decided to negotiate: peace with Israel after it agrees to a full and complete withdrawal from the Golan.

As the Jerusalem Post put it a few months ago, to most Israelis, that 1991 Syrian offer sounded “bizarre . . . at the time; less so in 1996 . . . almost acceptable in 1999.”

“What has changed? To be sure, the passage of time and the prospect of peace [are] severely eroding Israel’s national consensus over the Golan. While the decade started with the almost universal view that, peace or no peace, Israel should retain the Golan at any cost, the latest polls show that Israelis are now almost evenly split.”

Since the breakdown in negotiations, Israel and Syria have been sparring over whether Rabin, in fact, ever agreed to a full pullback to the 1967 line. Israel says that no commitment, binding or otherwise, was ever made and that the two sides were dealing only in “hypothetical” issues.

Syria insists that a preliminary promise to withdraw in exchange for peace was made in August 1993 in a message carried to Assad by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and that all subsequent discussions--which covered such issues as timing, water sharing, military deployments, monitoring stations, the exchange of diplomats and opening borders--emanated from that.

Even now, a Syrian information department official said, Syrians would prefer no deal to one that does not include all the territory Israel occupied in 1967. If that condition is met, however, Syria is prepared to show flexibility on all other topics of negotiation, the official said.

Although it might not seem so from the outside, Assad is hemmed in by the popular expectations among Syrians that, after more than 32 years of waiting, they will get back their occupied territory, said one well-placed Syrian intellectual.

“Mr. Assad’s legacy will be tarnished in Syria and the Arab world if he were to accept anything less than renewal of Syrian sovereignty over all its territory,” he said.

“We will never forgive him if he gives us back less than what we think is naturally ours.”

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Daniszewski was recently on assignment in Damascus.