Albright Opens Shuttle Diplomacy Between Israel, Syria

With Israel and Syria so far apart that U.S. officials believe immediate peace talks would lead to sure failure, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright launched a new round of intense diplomacy Saturday involving the longtime antagonists, urging them to move beyond entrenched positions.

Syrian President Hafez Assad told Albright during a two-hour meeting at his hilltop palace here in the capital that he will not budge from his long-standing demand that Syria must regain all of the strategic Golan Heights as part of any settlement, according to a U.S. official who participated in the talks.

However, the official said Assad described Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak as “a serious and honorable man” with whom the Syrian autocrat would like to talk peace.

“Obviously, there will not be an immediate resumption of negotiations,” the U.S. official told reporters traveling on Albright’s plane. “If the basis for talks is not laid well enough, the chances of success are not very high. . . . If you brought them together now, you wouldn’t get very far.”

After her talks in Damascus, Albright flew to Beirut for meetings with Lebanese Prime Minister Salim Hoss. Although the Lebanese government is heavily influenced by Syria, Albright said that a comprehensive Middle East peace would be impossible without a separate Israel-Lebanon agreement.

Assad said that when an earlier round of negotiations broke down in 1996, Israel had already agreed to pull back to the line that divided the countries when the Six-Day War began on June 5, 1967. Israel captured the Golan from Syria during that conflict.

The prewar line would give Syria control of the Golan plateau extending to the shore of the Sea of Galilee, a freshwater lake that is Israel’s most important reservoir.

Some Israeli officials now say that even if Jerusalem agrees to return the Golan, it will insist on the international border demarcated in the 1920s between then-French-ruled Syria and British-ruled Palestine. That line stops short of the lakeshore.

“We would like to resume the peace talks, and we are ready to do so from the point where they left off and to endorse the commitments which were made by [assassinated Israeli] Prime Minister [Yitzhak] Rabin,” Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh told reporters.

“We believe that peace can be achieved within months if there is goodwill on both sides,” he added.

But because the countries remain deeply divided on key issues, both Israel and Syria sought U.S. mediation to break the impasse. The senior U.S. official said American diplomats will shuttle between Assad and Barak, delivering their assessments of the positions taken by one leader to the other.

“In the next days and weeks, we will be engaged in contacts with both sides,” the official said. Albright, who last met Assad almost two years ago, also said she plans more frequent contacts with the Syrian leader.

“It is evident that both the Syrians and the Israelis want to find a way to come to an agreement,” Albright said. “I was encouraged by my meeting, and I look forward to others.”

Although U.S. officials insisted that the attitude of Syrian leaders toward Israel is far sunnier than in previous years, Shareh made it clear that Syria was disappointed by the message Albright carried from Barak. Albright conferred with the Israeli leader early Friday.

“We expected that Secretary Madeleine Albright would bring us some good news after visiting Israel in order to resume the peace talks,” he said. “But we are still hopeful that the good news will come later.”

No agreement was signed in 1996, and Israel wants to start the new talks from scratch.

Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington and the country’s chief negotiator in the talks, says that Israel indicated a “hypothetical” willingness to return all of the Golan in response to a package of diplomatic and security measures. He says that Syria never accepted Israel’s conditions and that, therefore, the conditional proposal never became a binding commitment. Barak’s government has made it clear it endorses Rabinovich’s version of events.

Middle East experts say it will take lots of work by the United States--and by Albright personally--to nudge Syria and Israel toward peace. Assad is famous for his caution and tenacity in negotiations, including arguing about obscure points, sometimes for years. In the last round of talks, Israel made its hypothetical proposal in 1993. After three years of hard bargaining, there was still no agreement.

Later Saturday, when Albright landed at Beirut’s main airport, she became the first secretary of State in more than 16 years to do so. Since then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz landed there in 1983, the U.S. government has considered the airport, once a major battlefield in Lebanon’s civil war, too dangerous for top officials to use.

Albright visited Beirut two years ago, but she helicoptered to the fortified U.S. Embassy compound from Cyprus. Several of her predecessors used the same route.

“The security situation has improved in Lebanon,” a senior State Department official said. But he said Washington is not ready to authorize U.S. commercial airlines to use the airport.