TEL AVIV, 12 January 2004 — Syria must end its support for Palestinian groups and the Hezbollah militia if it wants Israel to respond positively to its peace overtures, Israeli officials said yesterday.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told a meeting of his Cabinet that he “was in no hurry to respond to the Syrian overtures as long as Damascus continued to support ‘terrorism’,” public radio reported.
Syrian President Bashar Assad last month called for a revival of the talks that broke down in acrimony in January 2000 over the fate of the Golan Heights plateau, which Israel had then agreed to partially hand back to Syria.
The EU’s Middle East envoy Marc Otte said in Damascus yesterday that the European Union was ready to help revive the negotiations. “We are of course ready to help in any way possible for this talks to resume,” Otte said after meeting Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Al-Shara.
“We don’t want to negotiate in place of the parties. We think there will be no comprehensive peace in Middle East without a peace between Syria and Israel.”
Damascus has also urged the United States to use its influence with Israel to push for a resumption of the Syrian peace track even though Washington has threatened Damascus with diplomatic and economic sanctions, accusing it of sponsoring terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction.
But a senior Israeli military intelligence official said he believed that reaching a peace treaty with Israel was not one of Assad’s main objectives.
Assad has said the negotiations should resume at the point where they broke off four years ago, but Sharon has said he wants talks to start from scratch and last month Israel announced plans to increase the Jewish population of the Golan Heights by half.
During the previous talks with former Syrian President Hafez Assad, Bashar’s father, then Israeli Premier Ehud Barak agreed to an almost total withdrawal from the Golan Heights, save for a narrow strip of land bordering the eastern bank of the Sea of Galilee.
But Damascus rejected the proposal, wanting the return of all of the strategic plateau Israel occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and annexed in 1981.
“Sharon, who claims to want to resume negotiations without preconditions, has this time set out irrational and totally unworkable terms,” Syrian government newspaper Tishrin said yesterday.
The Israeli intelligence official said the apparent softening of Assad’s position came about because Damascus was “under pressure from the regional situation”, he said, citing the US-led war on Iraq, US pressure and moves to forge relations between Israel and Libya.
Israeli Health Minister Danny Naveh said: “We would be happy if Syria rejoined the peace camp, but to start peace talks with Israel it must halt its support for Hezbollah and for Damascus-based Palestinian organizations,” he told Israeli radio.
