Israel, Syria Snipe Over Summit Failure

Israel and Syria traded accusations Monday over the failure of a Geneva summit at which President Clinton had hoped to win agreement for an early resumption of deadlocked peace talks between the two Mideast nations.

Israeli officials also warned that Clinton’s inability during the meeting Sunday with Syrian President Hafez Assad to find a formula for renewing stalled talks could lead to new violence in southern Lebanon, where tensions between Israel and Syria are often played out.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who did not attend the Geneva summit, said the results showed that Syria--despite on-and-off talks and contacts with Israel that date back nearly 10 years--is not prepared to make the decisions necessary to reach a peace accord with the Jewish state.

“The positions have been clarified,” Barak told a meeting of his One Israel faction in parliament. “The masks have effectively been removed.”

In its official media and in statements by Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh to a Beirut newspaper, Syria blamed Israel for the talks’ failure, saying Barak’s intransigence kept Clinton from offering anything new.

“We were surprised that the U.S. president was not carrying anything new from the Israeli side but was asking Syria to help Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak get out of his difficult [political] position,” Shareh told As Safir, a pro-Syrian daily. “We think he put himself in that position.”

Israel and Syria insisted that the door to negotiation remains open, but there was widespread gloom about the chances of resuming the talks any time soon.

Barak has pledged to withdraw Israeli forces by July from a 9-mile-deep strip of southern Lebanon that they have occupied for two decades. He had hoped to carry out the pullout in the context of an agreement with Syria, the main power broker in Lebanon, but he now says it will take place even without a peace deal. Such a move would risk increasing the likelihood of cross-border attacks by guerrillas fighting Israel, along with massive Israeli retaliation that could draw in the Syrians.

Searching for ways to proceed despite the setback, U.S. envoy Dennis B. Ross arrived in Israel from Geneva on Monday to brief Barak on the summit and explore possibilities for getting the talks going. But many close to the process said it was hard to imagine how.

“Things look pretty grim,” said a U.S. diplomat who requested anonymity. “The thinking was that there was an opening that needed to be tested, to see if the gaps could be bridged. Now all that’s on hold.”

The U.S. and Israel had tried to downplay expectations before the summit. But many on all sides had believed that Assad, 69, a reportedly ailing leader who rarely travels abroad, would not be heading to Geneva unless a deal was all but done.

Israel and Syria, which share a border and decades of enmity, restarted their troubled peace talks in December after a break of nearly four years. But the U.S.-sponsored negotiations foundered a month later over a familiar sticking point: Syria’s insistence that Israel commit itself in advance to a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East War, and Israel’s refusal to do so.

Israel said it could not make such a pledge without knowing that Syria was willing to commit itself to other aspects of a comprehensive peace accord, including security guarantees and full diplomatic relations.

Now, according to several accounts, Assad has made clear that a withdrawal to the frontier that existed between the two countries before the June 1967 war broke out must include Syrian access to the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, which provides much of Israel’s drinking water. Barak says this is unacceptable and wants a border that is set several hundred yards back from the edge of the freshwater lake.

One result of the setback with Syria is likely to be accelerated efforts on the Israeli-Palestinian peace track, which several of Barak’s ministers have been urging him to make anyway. On Monday, Justice Minister Yossi Beilin said the Geneva talks were “not a failure” because they paved the way for intensified talks with the Palestinians.

In Washington, Clinton is scheduled to meet today with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to discuss how to overcome the impasse that blocked progress in Geneva. They plan a joint news conference after the White House meeting. But it is not clear what either president could do to bring Assad to the table.

The failure of the Geneva meeting was especially embarrassing to Mubarak, who had predicted publicly that an Israeli-Syrian deal was all but ready for signature. The Egyptian optimism was too much even for U.S. officials, who had insisted that nothing was set.

*

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington and Aline Kazandjian in The Times’ Cairo Bureau contributed to this report.