THE Israeli response to the Syrian peace proposal will have to wait. No reply will be made until the results of elections in Israel and the US are in. But President Bashar Assad’s assurance that when there is a peace accord there will be reciprocal recognition should make Israel’s eventual response a positive one. The logical next step would be for Syria and Israel to engage in face-to-face negotiations.
There is no surprise that even though the Syrian proposal has not been made public, it revolves mainly around the Golan Heights captured by Israel in 1967. The continued Israeli occupation of the Golan has upended more than one attempt to forge a Syrian-Israeli peace, going back to Bashar’s father Hafez Al-Assad. And as long as the Golan remains in Israeli hands, there will be no peace between the two sides.
As usual, Israel has demanded that Damascus end its support for the groups in battle with Israel, namely Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian Hamas. There is nothing surprising in this. This is the usual Israeli tactic to avoid making any commitments or concessions to Arabs. With an injured innocence, Israel can say it can’t make any concessions as long as Damascus associates with or helps its enemies. Again it will be Israel or its friends who will decide whether the association has ended or not.
Syria and Israel have held four rounds of indirect talks through Turkish mediation in the last year and the hope is that these will lead to eventual face-to-face negotiations. It is understandable that the Israeli reply must wait because the future of negotiations rests on whether a new prime minister in Israel will be committed to pursuing peace with Syria. Any direct talks would also have to wait until a new American administration is in place; a US presence in such efforts is traditional, although that is perhaps changing.
Credit for movement in the Syrian-Israeli track must go to the recent four-party talks in Damascus between France, Qatar, Turkey and Syria. However, Turkey alone cannot move both parties forward, which is why the French were invited to co-sponsor the talks. For the Syrian-Israeli track, another partner had to be found to provide assistance and guarantees once an agreement is reached.
In 2003 President Bush announced that Syria just had to wait until all pending issues in the Middle East were settled before the US turned to the Syrian-Israeli track. Ariel Sharon helped convince President George W. Bush to keep the Syrians on the backburner for years. But Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006 convinced many in Washington that to get results in the Middle East the US must engage with the Syrians. Taking Egypt out of Arab-Israeli equation may have averted the chances of all out wars between Israelis and Arabs but the real peace can only be achieved with full and active Syrian participation and cooperation.
