OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 9 May 2003 — Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday he was ready to reopen peace negotiations with Syria without preconditions, three years after talks broke down over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
“I am ready to hold negotiations with any Arab nation, including Syria, without preconditions...The Syrians will of course have demands on us and we will have for sure demands on them. We are ready to sit and discuss these issues,” he said in a taped interview on Israeli television.
Syria has insisted any negotiations be based on the outcome of previous peace efforts and UN resolutions, terms rejected by Israel. Peace talks broke down in January 2000 over the future of the Golan Heights, seized by Israel from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.
On Monday, a source in Sharon’s office said Syria had secretly approached Israel about resuming peace talks before the US-led war on Iraq. Syria on Wednesday denied it had made the back-channel proposal.
Sharon said his government would wait before entering into any diplomatic initiative with Syria to give time for US pressure on Damascus to rein in Palestinian hard-liners based there, as well as Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, to bear fruit.
“We must wait a number of weeks to not interfere with American pressure on Syria for necessary steps for the security of Israel,” said the premier, who is also dealing with a new US-backed plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Israel’s Maariv daily reported earlier that a brother of Syrian President Bashar Assad and an Israeli businessmen had met in Jordan before American troops invaded Iraq on March 20.
The source in Sharon’s office said that after analyzing Syria’s alleged approach the prime minister rejected it because of doubts about its motives.
