TEL AVIV, 3 December 2004 — Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday he was willing to meet Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad on “certain conditions”, an offer which Damascus swiftly turned down as unacceptable.
It was Sharon’s first response to a peace overture from the Syrian leader almost five years after negotiations collapsed in acrimony over the fate of the Golan Heights.
But Damascus dismissed the offer because it came with strings attached.
“I am ready to meet President Assad under certain conditions,” Sharon told a press conference in Tel Aviv, without elaborating on his terms.
But he said he did not see “any real sign” that Syria wanted peace. “I have heard the peace calls coming from Syria. If Syria’s intentions are serious, we will examine them. If Syria is serious, it will see that Israel wants peace.”
Syria dismissed Sharon’s comments.
“We have proposed a resumption of negotiations without conditions. I now notice the Israeli prime minister is setting conditions on Syria, and that is unacceptable,” Foreign Minister Farouk Al-Shara told reporters.
Syrian state radio accused Israel of deliberately trying to sabotage peace efforts.
“Israel is allowing opportunities for peace to slip by and blocking international efforts by setting defective conditions which sabotage the peace process and raise tension in the region,” said Damascus Radio.
Bashar is ready to reopen negotiations with Israel “without conditions”, visiting UN Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said on Nov. 24 after talks with the president.
Damascus said this week that Syria wants the negotiations to restart from the point where they were broken off in January 2000, when according to Damascus the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to a full Golan pullout.
The sticking point has long been the fate of the strategic Golan Heights, which the Jewish state seized from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War and later annexed.
The plateau, a little over 25 kilometers wide at its broadest point, overlooks Israeli villages in the north of the country and Israel’s largest water resource, the Sea of Galilee.
Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom acknowledged on Wednesday there were secret contacts with Syria last year.
“There was a preliminary meeting with close associates and relatives of President Assad a year and a half ago but to our great regret they were stopped when they were revealed,” he said.
But he has insisted there could only be renewed contacts when Syria stops bank-rolling “terrorists” such as the Palestinian movement Hamas and the Lebanese Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah.
Sharon said he considered that the “greatest threat” faced by the new Palestinian leadership was from Damascus, “where terrorist organizations like Hezbollah are based and where the orders to attack Israel come from.”
Observers doubt that the hawkish Sharon will ever let Israel get bogged down in peace talks with Syria or contemplate any withdrawal from the Golan while he tries to deal with next year’s planned pullout from the Gaza Strip.
Some Israeli officials dismiss Bashar’s offer as nothing more than a maneuver to alleviate international pressure after Washington imposed sanctions on Damascus in May.
Syria is in a tight spot following the November re-election of US President George W. Bush, who accuses Damascus of not only supporting terrorism but also seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction and destabilizing Iraq.
