It’s Folly to Pursue Assad, Who Doesn’t Want Peace Anyway

No Arab leader has done more to alienate Israeli public opinion during critical peace talks than Syria’s president, Hafez Assad. Unlike Anwar Sadat and Jordan’s King Hussein and even Yasser Arafat, Assad refused to negotiate face-to-face with Israeli leaders and instead sent his foreign minister, Farouk Shareh, to meet Prime Minister Ehud Barak--whose hand Shareh refused to shake. Then Assad’s official newspaper, Tishrin, claimed that Israel had invented the Holocaust, turning Syria into the world’s first Holocaust-denial state.

Assad seemed determined to destroy Barak’s chance of convincing an already skeptical Israeli public that Syria was offering true peace in exchange for the Golan Heights. But Assad’s contempt for Barak’s domestic problems was understandable: The Syrian elder statesman routinely wins 99% of the vote, treats his country like a family estate and deals with opponents by killing them.

The real mystery isn’t Assad but Barak. He endured insult upon insult without response, not even challenging Assad’s Holocaust-denial, all for achieving a dubious peace with an ailing dictator whose regime may not outlast him. Barak mortgaged his crucial first year in office to his Syrian obsession, ignoring his own agenda for domestic reform that had won him his landslide victory. There was no need to worry about rising unemployment, he reassured nervous political allies, because peace with Syria would bring an economic boom. He reneged on election promises to curb ultra-Orthodox power by including the fundamentalist Shas Party in his coalition, hoping to win its support for a Golan withdrawal.

The result is evident in the approval polls: Barak now barely leads the discredited former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Even if Assad had offered the Israeli public more than a snarl, Barak would have had a hard time convincing voters to accept withdrawal. Most Israelis believe that their country won the Golan legitimately, in a war of survival. The notion of surrendering the strategic heights--along with its crucial water sources--to a nation that attacked us three times in 25 years and whose government media routinely indulges in the crudest anti-Semitism, strikes many here as lunacy.

Even Israelis who sympathize with the Palestinians feel little sympathy for the Syrians: The Palestinians are underdogs; the Syrians are bullies.

Assad’s final mistake was to insist that Israel withdraw to the 1967 border. On the face of it, that seems a reasonable demand; Israel, after all, did exactly that to achieve peace with Egypt. But Israel’s 1967 border with Egypt is identical with the international border, while the 1967 line on the Syrian front extends beyond the international border to include a strip of territory along the Sea of Galilee, which Syrian forces had seized from Israel after the founding of the state, violating Israeli sovereignty.

Assad’s rejection of the international border made Barak’s domestic position untenable. Indeed, no Arab leader has demanded more concessions from Israel and offered less in return than Assad. He even managed to alienate the Israeli left, which usually sympathizes with the Arab position in Middle East peace talks. Leading peace activists like Meron Benvenisti and novelist Amos Oz--both of whom support exchanging the Golan for peace--have publicly opposed a return to the 1967 line, even if that means forfeiting a deal. Shulamit Aloni, founder of the peace party, Meretz, and among the first Israeli politicians to declare that the Golan belonged to Syria, told me in a recent interview, “If I don’t accept Israel’s right to unilaterally change the international border with the West Bank, why should I support Syrian aggression?”

Not Barak but Assad has missed the political opportunity of a lifetime. He would have won the Golan, as well as American aid to modernize his bankrupt country.

But perhaps Assad didn’t really want a deal. After all, a package that would include a Syrian-endorsed Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon would deprive Assad’s own presence in Lebanon of its rationale for countering the Israeli occupation. Some Lebanese are now risking imprisonment and worse by publicly challenging the transformation of their country into a colony of Greater Syria.

And peace would have forced Assad to open his borders to Israeli tourists and perhaps even the Internet. And then Syrians might actually get the notion that there are alternatives to Mafia-style government.

Peace with Syria, the last confrontation state on Israel’s borders, is a vital Israeli interest. But that will have to wait until a leader emerges in Damascus who recognizes that peace, and not just the return of territory, is also a vital Syrian interest.