OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 13 January 2004 — Israel’s President Moshe Katsav yesterday invited Syrian President Bashar Assad to Jerusalem for peace negotiations with Israeli leaders, but Damascus dismissed the offer as a “media maneuver”.
President Katsav’s surprise move came just hours before Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in a televised speech to Parliament, reiterated a threat to impose his own solution on the Palestinians within months if a peace road map failed.
Although Katsav has largely ceremonial powers, his appeal added to pressure within Sharon’s government for the right-wing leader to respond favorably to Assad’s recent call to resume peace talks broken off in 2000. “I invite the president of Syria to come to Jerusalem and meet with the heads of the state and hold serious negotiations,” Katsav said on Israel Radio.
Syria rejected the invitation — opening the way for Israel to claim the diplomatic high ground.
“Partial solutions and media maneuvers do not achieve peace in the region...Syria’s longstanding position is to resume negotiations from where they stopped,” the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) said.
The negotiations in West Virginia ended without any agreement on the future of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights overlooking the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s biggest reservoir.
But officials have said the two sides, still technically at war, were divided only over the issue of control of a narrow strip of land at water’s edge. Israel was ruled by a center-left government at the time.
Agreement to resume the talks at the point at which they were suspended would effectively force Sharon to agree in advance to a pullout from almost all of the Golan Heights.
He has rejected any preconditions for negotiations and has long opposed withdrawal from the strategic heights, seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War and annexed in 1981 in a move not recognized internationally.
Israel has voiced concern that Syria’s peace gestures were linked more to improving ties with Washington. But some Israeli politicians said Israel should negotiate now with a Syrian leader they regard as weakened by the US invasion of Iraq.
Katsav broached the Syria proposal amid a peacemaking deadlock with the Palestinians.
Interrupted frequently by heckling from opposition left-wingers, Sharon told Parliament he was ready to impose “security” steps if Palestinians failed dismantling militant groups as required by the US-backed peace road map.
Sharon said previously such unilateral moves would cost Palestinians some of the territory they seek for a state.
Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat called Sharon’s speech “an indication that the only plan he has is for the continuation of walls, occupation and settlements”.
Sharon did not mention, as he did in other recent speeches, his intention to dismantle some Jewish settlements on occupied territory and summarily pull back to new “security lines” if the road map process collapsed.
His omission allowed him to avoid direct confrontation — for now — with nationalists in his coalition who oppose any territorial pullbacks or scrapping of settlements.
Piling pressure on Sharon, tens of thousands of right-wingers protested in Tel Aviv on Sunday against his proposal to move some settlers from the West Bank and Gaza.
— Additional input from agencies
