SYRIA is the Key

Alan note: As the Western world scrambles for some kind of solution to the mosaic of Islamic clash with it, various hopes and opinions proliferate. Here is one of them.


By Avi Primor - Haaretz.com


Syrian President Bashar Assad has good reasons to court Israel and ask it to return to the diplomatic negotiations that were stopped in March 2000. Israel has equally good reasons to accept the Syrian courtship. To ensure his political survival, Assad is aspiring to break out of the isolation into which he has been pushed by the United States, France and Israel.

The Golan Heights is only the second priority for him. On this issue he is exempt from the emotional approach of his father, Hafez Assad, who lost the Heights in 1967.

For the son, who was only two years old at the time, returning the Golan to Syrian control is only a means of glorifying his name and reinforcing his power. The alliance with Hezbollah and Iran serves the Syrian president in the short run. It is a passing tactical need.

Hezbollah serves Assad as a convenient means for applying pressure to Israel from inside Lebanon without fear of Israeli retaliations and allows him to continue his involvement in Lebanon's domestic affairs, whereas Iran serves Syria as something on which it can rely in its isolation in the international arena and the Arab world.

However, Syria does not have a long-term interest in a victory for Iran or for Hezbollah.

Despite the control of the Alawite minority, Syria is not a Shi'ite country, and it has nothing to gain from strengthening the Shi'a in the Muslim world. It is not a Persian country, and therefore it has nothing to gain from the strengthening of Iranian influence in the region.

Syria is also not a religious state, and, therefore, a victory by the Islamic fundamentalists is not good for the future of the Syrian Ba'athist rule. The extreme wing of Hamas, headed by Khaled Meshal, is also only a tactical tool in Syrian hands against Israel and the West.

If the Syrian president decides that he no longer needs its services, he will not hesitate to expel it, as he did with the leader of the Turkish Kurds, Abdullah Ocalan, when he decided to improve his relations with Turkey.

On September 24, 2006, the German weekly Der Spiegel published an interview with Assad in which the Syrian president answered among others the following three questions:

Do you, an ally and friend of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, agree with him that the aim should be the destruction of the State of Israel?

Assad replied: "No, I am interested in negotiations and achieving peace with Israel."

The second question was:

Hezbollah, your allies, are celebrating "the victory over Israel." What are the lessons you draw from the victory?

Assad replied: "I am happy about the glorious victory, and I, too, am celebrating. The result of this victory is the hope of conducting negotiations with Israel."

Finally, Assad was asked:

Are you in favor of the Palestinians' right of return?

And he replied: "Yes, of course. I see this as an elementary and humane right. It is necessary to allow all the Palestinian refugees who are interested in this to return to the Palestinian state that will be established in the future as the result of a peace agreement with Israel."

These remarks speak for themselves, and they certainly constitute an opening for negotiations with Syria. Israel has a great deal to gain from a peace agreement with Syria.

It will be followed almost automatically by a peace agreement with Lebanon, which will sign on the peace along with all its neighbors.

Peace with Syria will lead to Syria breaking off with Hezbollah, to its separation from Hamas and to pushing Iran well back beyond its borders.

Two questions remain for Israel, with which it will have to grapple: whether it is worthwhile to give up the Golan Heights, and whether it is necessary to take into account the objections on the part of the United States to negotiations with Syria.

Many people in Israel are opposed to an agreement with Syria, on the assumption that giving up the Golan will bring us back to the difficult situation that once prevailed in the region.

However, four Israeli prime ministers - Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak - have already conducted negotiations with Syria on the basis of the principle of returning the Heights.

A government that will dare today to enter into negotiations with Syria will indeed be taking a risk upon itself, but this is a calculated risk. It is reasonable to assume that when a detailed draft of a peace agreement is presented to the public, the negative outlook will change.

Assad has made it clear that in the framework of a peace agreement with Israel, he is prepared to accept everything to which his father committed himself in his meeting with then U.S. president Bill Clinton in Geneva in March 2000, and in the messages that he is sending, he is stressing that in negotiations with him, he will be even more flexible than his father.

It is to be presumed that he will not insist on all of the hundreds of meters on the shore of Lake Kinneret that separated his father from us, and that he will also agree to the demilitarization of the Golan under international supervision and perhaps even to Israeli oversight positions for an interim period.

He wants to transform the Golan into a national park to which the Israelis will have free access without a need for visas. The Israeli who knows that he can get into his car and drive through the national park to Damascus to spend a weekend will see the relinquishing of the Golan differently than he does today.

Top European diplomats who are talking to the Americans are reporting that the American objection to negotiations with Syria is less firm than it sounds from the official statements. The U.S. also has an interest in separating Syria from Iran and having Syria's help in calming the situation in Iraq.

Presumably the recommendations of the Baker commission, which U.S. President George W. Bush appointed to examine the situation in Iraq, will also include more flexibility toward Syria.

If we make it clear that negotiations with Syria are an Israeli interest, it is possible this will contribute even more to the moderation of the American objection. All that is needed today is a bit of courage, and an approach in which there is less domestic politics and more statesmanship on the horizon.

The author is head of the Center for European Studies at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center and formerly Israel's ambassador to the European Union and ambassador in Germany.