Melodramatic Politics and Uneasiness

Though Syrian President Hafez Assad has been dying for as long as anyone can remember, his sudden fatal heart attack has stunned Israelis because of its awkward timing. Coming mere weeks after Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, Assad’s death intensifies anxiety here about the stability of the Lebanese-Israeli border. The great fear of the Middle East is anarchy, and historic events now are occurring with such rapidity that no one seems in control.

Israelis are hardly mourning Assad’s passing. Unlike Egypt’s Anwar Sadat or Jordan’s King Hussein, Assad will have no streets named for him in Israel. Instead, Assad will be remembered here as the man whose intransigence and exaggerated caution led him to reject the most generous peace deal offered by Israel since it returned all of Sinai to Egypt in 1982. Assad managed to alienate even the Israeli peace camp by demanding more concessions from Israel and offering fewer goodwill gestures in return than any other Arab leader. Assad, after all, insisted that Israel surrender territory beyond the recognized international border, which Syria had seized by force and then lost to Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. And he not only declined to negotiate with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak face-to-face, but he instructed Syria’s foreign minister, Farouk Shareh, to refuse to shake Barak’s hand.

If any doubt still lingered, Assad’s death ensures that an Israeli-Syrian deal won’t happen during Bill Clinton’s remaining months in office. Just recently, Barak had hinted that efforts were being made to revive negotiations with Syria. Now those efforts will be put on indefinite hold pending the outcome of the power struggles that will inevitably intensify in Damascus.

Assad’s legacy to his heir, son Bashar, is a continued stalemate. Bashar, unknown and untested, won’t dare to be more forthcoming in negotiations with Israel than his father was. Though only a narrow strip of territory around the Sea of Galilee remains contested, Bashar is stuck with the line his father drew. Only Hafez Assad could have taken the risk and offered the minimal concessions that Barak needed from him to sell a Golan withdrawal to the Israeli public. Now even that remote possibility is gone.

Appropriately, Assad, who cultivated a sense of mystery around his every move, leaves behind only uncertainty. Will Bashar be a force for modernization within Syria, or will he need to prove himself by provoking Israel on the Lebanon border? Will he manage to coalesce his authority, or will the Assad family disintegrate into warring factions? Will the Alawite minority to which the Assad family belongs continue to rule, or will Syria unravel in ethnic war?

Syria remains one of the world’s most closed societies; access to the Internet, for example, is restricted to a handful of government loyalists. For Israelis, who live in a society where every flaw is dissected and every secret exposed, the renewed encounter with Syrian impenetrability is a reminder of the difficulty a democracy faces in trying to make peace with a dictatorship. Watching the weeping newscaster on Syrian TV extol Assad as a demigod, followed by scenes of hysterical demonstrators supporting Bashar, has only reinforced Israeli unease about living in a region dominated by melodramatic politics and orchestrated passions.

Even those Israelis who supported withdrawal from the Golan in exchange for peace must now have second thoughts about Barak’s haste in trying to reach a deal with Assad. After all, had Barak succeeded, Israel now would be handing over the Golan to a nation whose most basic stability is uncertain. Now, at least, we can test the nature of a post-Assad Syria before forfeiting the Golan’s strategic heights and precious water sources.

Still, Israelis can be grateful to Barak for having tested Assad’s willingness to end the conflict. If former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been in power today instead of Barak, world opinion would almost certainly be blaming Israel for having squandered a historic opportunity for peace with Syria. Today, after Barak devoted his first year in office to a futile pursuit of Assad, it is clear that Israel went as far as it possibly could to reach a deal. For Israelis facing a summer that offers more dangers than opportunities, even that meager political victory offers comfort.

Hafez Assad leaves his son a bankrupt country occupying an increasingly restless Lebanese colony without a coherent strategy for dealing with the new reality created by Israel’s withdrawal. According to Israeli intelligence reports, Assad senior was cultivating Palestinian groups for attacks on the Galilee. Assad junior inherits a volatile situation that would test even experienced leaders. A wrong move could provoke the next Middle East war.