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9th June 2007
The Big Question: Is Israel heading for a peace deal with Syria - or another war?
By Donald Macintyre, Jerusalem Correspondent
Published: 08 June 2007
Why are we talking about this now?
Because Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has seemingly put Syria at the top of his foreign policy agenda. He convened a Cabinet meeting this week to discuss it, insisted that Israel wanted peace and not war with Syria, and sounded warmer than in the past about the possibility of negotiations with Damascus. This was in response to a series of suggestions in interviews by President Bashar Assad that this was what the Syrian leader wanted.
At the same time, however, the Israeli military has been cranking up well publicized preparations for any possible war with its north-eastern - and until now - most unremittingly hostile neighbour. This is partly the result of what Israeli military intelligence says are movements of troops and rockets close to Israel's current north-eastern front. And part of the job Olmert gave the Cabinet committee he set up on Syria this week was to review the Israeli military's state of readiness for a war with Syria.
But if negotiations happened and worked, they would be potentially momentous, eventually involving Israel handing back the Golan Heights, the fertile stretch of Syrian territory it seized exactly 40 years ago in the Six-Day War.
But having held on to the Golan for so long, why give it up now?
Peace with Syria - and Damascus's recognition of Israel - would be a huge prize in itself, which is one of the reasons that Prime Ministers Barak and Rabin were ready to negotiate with the President's father in the 1990s - though that ended in failure. But it's a fair question. Apart from the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when Syria briefly overran the Golan and was then repulsed, Israel's relations with Syria since 1967 have been of the Cold War variety and Israel has largely lived with that, not to mention enjoying - literally - the fruits of the Heights, not to mention the excellent wine produced by some of its 17,000 Jewish settlers there.
What lends everything fresh urgency - quite apart from the important realization that war might be the alternative, with heavy civilian casualties as well as military - is what Israel might get in return. The prospect that Syria might detach from Iran and stop its support for Hamas, and even more so Hizbollah in Lebanon, has huge potential attractions for Israel.
So is Syria serious about making peace?
That is the question which has been vexing the best minds in Israeli intelligence for months now. Hawks, who at least until recently appeared to include Olmert, have been arguing that Syria is playing games, and simply wants to give itself some bogus legitimacy to deflect the impact of the international tribunal set up to investigate its role in the murder of the Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri. But the counter- arguments are increasingly persuasive, and not just because a senior Syrian official yesterday responded to Israel's Cabinet meeting by insisting that it was indeed serious. What Assad - like Olmert - wants to do is survive politically. Not only would recovery of the Golan massively help him to do that, but if it helped bring him in from the cold from the point of view of the West, he might be prepared to pay a real price in return.
Unlike Olmert, who disowned the back-channel negotiations carried out with Syria by former foreign ministry director general Alon Liel that ended two years ago, Assad has made it clear that Liel's US-based interlocutor Abe Suleiman had his blessing. And finally while Syria has always insisted on starting negotiations at the point where Rabin left off - namely a full return to 4 June 1967 borders, including on the north-eastern shore of Lake Galilee - it is not insisting that Israel must sign up to this in blood before the negotiations begin.
Ideally Israel would like a return to the British mandate borders which would guarantee it a wider strip of territory on the Galilee shore. But the informed view in Jerusalem is that Syria will never renege on the 4 June point. That said, it's less clear exactly where the border is. Bill Clinton thought he had finessed this point at the Sheperdstown talks at the turn of the century, but Ehud Barak hardened his position and the talks broke down. Syria thinks all these amount to real and important concessions, even if it is harder to convince Israeli public opinion reared on dramatic gestures like Sadat's epoch-making visit to Jerusalem in 1977, paving the way to the historic Israel-Egypt treaty.
What alternative is there to an Israel-Syria deal?
War - though when it might happen is harder to say. Syria is currently modernizing its army with state-of-the-art weaponry funded, Israel believes, from Iran, and this could take up two or three years to complete. One senior Israeli government analyst suggested yesterday that Syria had no intention of initiating a war now, before it is ready. Instead, he said, Damascus has carefully noted comments by Amos Gilad, a key Israeli Defence Ministry spokesman, at the beginning of the year that 2007 was when Israel would have to confront the choice between peace and war with Syria.
The analyst declined to say whether that choice had been resolved, but it was also clear that Syria's existing rocket arsenal - with a capability to reach much deeper into Israel than anything Hizbollah used in last summer's war - would put civilians straight into the front line.
What do the Americans think about all this?
At one point Condoleeza Rice told the Israelis that the US doesn't want them to negotiate with Syria, and there is every sign that President Bush is still, to put it mildly, very wary about anything that could legitimize Syria. Olmert has also several times in the past few months used US hostility to the idea of talks with Syria as an excuse for not embarking on the process. But the increasingly chaotic, Iraq-generated political atmosphere in Washington, coupled with the fact that Bush let Rice talk to the Syrians about Iraq, means he is in a less good position to call all the shots than he might have been.
So will Olmert talk to the Syrians?
It's still unclear. All the logic points to this being the time to test - at the absolute minimum - the Syrians' intentions through talks which have the potential to transform the region. Second, it would give Olmert the agenda he desperately needs if he is going to survive his post-Lebanon unpopularity. His right-wing opponents won't like it but talks would unite the centre and centre-left of Israeli politics behind him, rather as Gaza disengagement did for Ariel Sharon. The question is whether Olmert has the courage, the political imagination, and the sheer belief in the urgent desirability of talking to Damascus that he will need if he is to persuade Bush and other sceptics, including in the supposedly friendlier Arab countries. On all that the jury is still out.
So will Israel really negotiate?
Yes...
* It would give Olmert the political agenda he badly needs after abandoning his policy of unilateral withdrawals from the West Bank
* There's a growing view within the Israeli security establishment that now is the time for talks with Syria
* A peace treaty would be the gigantic prize that eluded Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin
No...
* Olmert is, as Damascus Radio said yesterday, too weak and unpopular to pull it off, particularly in the face of US opposition
* Negotiation would lead to a politically dangerous revolt from the Israeli right
* A failure is too big a risk, and could even bring war nearer, with high civilian casualties a likely price |
