JERUSALEM/GAZA CITY, 29 March 2008 — An Israeli Cabinet minister confirmed yesterday that Israel was trying to bring Syria back to the negotiating table.
The disclosure of Israeli efforts to engage Syria in negotiations come at a time when Israeli attempts to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians are making no visible progress despite intense US involvement.
Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer spoke about the talks with Syria just days after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hinted that Israel might be holding — or planning to hold secret talks with its northern neighbor.
“All efforts are being made to bring Syria to the negotiating table” in order to “sign a peace treaty,” Ben-Eliezer told Israel Radio, without elaborating.
“We know exactly what the price would be,” he added — namely, Israel’s return of the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war.
He would not disclose what results there have been, if any, from Israel’s efforts to resume dialogue with the Syrians.
Syrian officials were not immediately available for comment.
Israel-Syria peace talks — a centerpiece of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s political agenda — broke down in 2000 with Syria rejecting Israel’s offer to withdraw from the Golan Heights, and insisting that Israel pull back to the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.
Ben-Eliezer told Israel Radio that Barak, now defense minister, was a partner to the current efforts to renew talks with Damascus.
On Wednesday, Olmert told foreign journalists that Israel favors face-to-face talks with Syria that could result in a peace treaty, adding: “That doesn’t mean that when we sit together you have to see us,” he said, an apparent reference to the possibility of secret contacts.
A week earlier, Olmert told a joint meeting of the Israeli and German Cabinets that he was ready to restart negotiations with Syria if Damascus would end its support for Hezbollah and Palestinian groups.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due in the region today, just three weeks after her last visit, to try to bridge some of the gaps.
Usually, she meets with the two sides separately, but in a possible sign of the urgency assigned to the visit, she is to meet together with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Barak.
Meanwhile, a member of Al-Qassam brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, was killed and two others were seriously wounded in an exchange of fire with Israeli troops who carried out a brief incursion into southern Gaza Strip, witnesses and medical sources said.
The sources said an Israeli undercover unit entered Al-Qarara village and on resistance by Hamas fighters killed one and injured two others.
Al-Qassam brigades identified the deceased as 23-year-old Bilal Al-Astal.
Jaish Al-Ummah (Army of Nation), a new Palestinian group announced yesterday that its fighters shot and wounded three Israeli soldiers near the Israeli Kissufim military post located in the eastern part of Al-Qarara village.
In a statement sent to the media, the group said it carried out the attack in response to the blasphemous cartoons and crimes against Muslims in Jerusalem.
In another development, chanting “We are here to stay,” more than 1,000 Israeli Arabs yesterday marched through Jaffa to commemorate the killing of six people during a 1976 protest against land confiscations.
The demonstration, one of several “Land Day” rallies staged across the country, also aimed at denouncing alleged plans to move some 500 Arab families out of the port city just south of Tel Aviv.
— With input from agencies
