U.S. Plays Lead Role as Israel-Syria Talks Begin

Admonished by the Clinton administration that they face “a historic opportunity that may not come again,” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh opened a conference Monday aimed at ending half a century of war and animosity.

But the meeting almost immediately hit a snag when an anticipated face-to-face session between Barak and Shareh failed to occur. Instead, the Israeli and Syrian leaders spent the day in separate meetings with President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

U.S. officials had said that a three-way meeting of Barak, Shareh and Clinton was expected after dinner Monday. But about four hours after the anticipated start of the session, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said the direct talks had been postponed. He did not indicate when they would be held.

Rubin said the issues were too complex to permit a “fully scripted” meeting. “It simply did not pan out,” he said of the three-way meeting.

The talks began with Barak and Shareh meeting separately for about an hour each with Clinton, a procedure that emphasized the pivotal role assigned to the U.S. government in bringing together the Middle East rivals.

But instead of moving to the expected three-way meeting, the participants held a series of additional U.S.-Israeli and U.S.-Syrian talks. The only time Barak and Shareh were together was during a brief walk in the woods shortly after Clinton arrived from Washington.

Rubin and White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart insisted that U.S. mediators still expected direct talks between the Israelis and the Syrians. Lockhart told reporters: “I wouldn’t interpret it one way or the other. The schedule is very fluid.”

Israel and Syria had never met at such a high political level before a two-day preliminary conference last month.

“The president came out of his meetings believing they were off to a good start,” Lockhart said.

At the same time, Lockhart said, it was “quite unrealistically optimistic” to believe that Israel and Syria could achieve even the outline of a peace agreement in a single round of talks.

American mediators said the current round is open-ended, although the sides will assess their progress at the end of this week and decide then if it would be profitable to continue.

Lockhart said Clinton’s “schedule for this week is mostly clear,” permitting the president to attend the meetings here whenever his presence would be useful. But he said Clinton will not participate in every meeting, as he did in 1998 when Israel and the Palestinians met at Wye Plantation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Barak and Shareh came to this Colonial-era village in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle ready for detailed bargaining. Their delegations include senior military leaders ready to discuss Israel’s demand for ironclad security guarantees as its price for withdrawing from the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau that Israel seized from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War.

In addition, Barak and Tourism Minister Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, a last-minute addition to the Israeli delegation, are both former Israeli army chiefs of staff. Shahak was a leader of the Israeli delegation in lower-level negotiations that ended in stalemate four years ago.

State Department spokesman Rubin said both Middle Eastern countries brought along “legal experts, security experts, geographic experts [and] scientific experts” who will discuss specific issues in small groups as the week goes on.

“All of the issues will be discussed in detail,” Rubin said. “But it is too much to expect that any of them will be resolved this week.”

The basic issues are clear. Syria demands the return of all of the Golan Heights. Israel wants guarantees on security and water rights and a “normal” peace, with an exchange of ambassadors and other diplomatic trappings. Most experts believe that each side eventually will get what it wants most, but the bargaining will be tough and nothing is certain.

As in most previous Arab-Israeli negotiations, U.S. mediators vowed to impose a veil of secrecy over the talks, with official American spokespersons ladling out all of the public information. Unlike with most previous meetings, however, the Israeli side has said it will keep the vow of silence instead of trying to influence the talks through a series of carefully controlled leaks.

It remains to be seen how long that discipline will last. But an Israeli official said that Israeli delegates inside the cordoned-off Clarion Hotel and Conference Center, where the talks are being held, have turned in their cellular telephones. “If Barak says ‘no talking,’ there will be no talking,” he said.

Rubin said later that Americans and Syrians also agreed to forgo wireless communications.

Clinton landed by helicopter on the baseball diamond of Shepherd College just before noon, the last of the participants to arrive in Shepherdstown, about 65 miles northwest of Washington. He was whisked four miles from the college to the conference center in a White House limousine.

Minutes later, he joined Barak and Shareh for a stroll through the nearby National Conservation Training Center of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the trio enjoying unseasonably warm January temperatures in the low 60s. It was clear to all of the participants that the Israeli-Syrian relationship is at a crucial phase that will require far more than a walk in the woods.

“There is a historic opportunity that may not come again unless it is seized,” Rubin said.

Middle East experts say Clinton, Barak and Syrian President Hafez Assad all have important reasons for wanting to settle the dispute as soon as possible. Whether they will agree to the sort of compromises needed to reach agreement, however, remains to be seen.

“Strategically, both [Israel and Syria] need to move quickly,” a senior Western diplomat based in Damascus, the Syrian capital, said recently. “Tactically, they are playing hard to get. This is a mistake, but it is one they are both making.”

Barak needs to show some results from his peace initiative before domestic politics pull apart his governing coalition. His parliamentary majority was built around the peace process, but the coalition parties have little in common on domestic issues.

Assad, an increasingly frail 69-year-old, has indicated that he wants to complete a peace agreement with Israel in order to give a clean slate to his successor, most likely his son Bashar.

Assad is an enigmatic figure whose word is final in the Syrian government. His absence from the Shepherdstown talks creates a major complication. Barak can make firm decisions on the spot, but Shareh probably cannot.

Lockhart said the foreign minister “does have all the negotiating authority” necessary to bargain with the Israelis. But it seems clear that Assad will have to sign off on any deal, probably by communicating his decision to Shareh without actually attending the talks.

For his part, Clinton would like to preside over an Israeli-Syrian agreement as the climax of his foreign policy legacy. He will be in office for another year, but, realistically, his influence will fade after the November election.

From the standpoint of Israel and Syria, if a deal is not completed on Clinton’s watch, there could be a delay of a year or more while a new president formulates his Middle East policy.

As a practical matter, both sides expect the United States to oil the gears with substantial foreign aid payments. But U.S. officials scoffed at news reports that Israel was demanding $25 billion. The aid figure will be less than that, they said.