Syria and the Peace: A Good Chance Missed
Authored by Dr. Helena Cobban.
July 7, 1997
52 Pages
Brief Synopsis
One of the more dismaying aspects of the current peace process has been the failure of Syria and Israel to make a deal. According to Christian Science Monitor correspondent Helena Cobban, these two long-standing foes came very close to composing their decades-old quarrel. The Syrian and Israeli leaders persevered to overcome extraordinary obstacles, but in the end failed. A terrible setback, says Cobban, because so much hard negotiating work had been done up to the very last moment when the whole carefully constructed edifice of peace drifted away.
Introduction.
In late October 1991, Syrian and Israeli leaders sat down at the Middle East peace conference in Madrid and committed themselves to holding face-to-face talks to conclude a final resolution of the 43-year conflict between them. The promised bilateral negotiation opened that December: It was the first negotiation to be conducted directly between representatives of the two states.
In the 50 months of discussions that ensued, the Israelis and Syrians surmounted some quite extraordinary difficulties. They were able to overcome (indeed, they drew vital strength from) a change of government in Israel in June 1992. They survived the November 1995 assassination of Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin, numerous setbacks in the overall climate of Israeli-Arab peace-making, and several changes in the format of the talks themselves. In addition, while much of value was accomplished in the face-to-face negotiations in Washington, a parallel high-level track was kept constantly in operation, undertaken by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who made over a dozen visits to the Middle East during the first Clinton administration, and also through summit meetings and frequent letters and phone calls to the two leaders from the White House. According to several authoritative accounts, among the contentious issues that the negotiators were able to resolve were the depth of the projected Israeli withdrawal from the Golan and the nature of the envisaged peace. The talks also resulted in agreement on the text of the all important "Aims and Principles" document (full title "the Aims and Principles of the Security Arrangement"). After Shimon Peres’ favored negotiator, Uri Savir, had completed his first round in the negotiations with Syria in early 1996, officials from Israel, the United States, and Syria all expressed confidence that 1996 would see agreement on the final text of the Israel- Syria agreement.
But in early March 1996, after the Israeli population suffered 79 losses from bombs set off by Palestinian extremists, the Peres government suspended its participation in the talks with Syria. Immediately thereafter, the Israeli-Syrian relationship plunged into a rapid downward spiral of mutual recriminations and hostility which neither Israel, nor Syria--nor the United States--appeared to do anything to brake. The rhetoric of the Middle Easterners shifted quickly from expressions of optimism regarding the peace talks to increasingly gloomy prognostications. With dread inevitability, this descent into political and rhetorical confrontation between the two states became transformed (as had occurred so often in the past) into an actual confrontation in Lebanon. On the night of April 10-11, 1996, the Peres government launched a much-expanded version of an earlier (July 1993) bombing campaign against its neighbor, which this time included intensive attacks from air, ground, and sea on facilities throughout the south of the country and up to, and including, Beirut.
Also unlike 1993, the Syrian leadership seemed in no hurry to use its influence to rein in Hizballah. And when the continuing, massive Israeli bombardment of Lebanon targetted large numbers of civilians--as any bombardment so massive, conducted in an area so heavily populated, almost inevitably must do--it rapidly became clear that with this campaign Peres had over-reached himself.
The ultimate outcome of Peres’ deadly adventure in Lebanon was, from the point of view of many Israelis, very disappointing. It took the Israeli leader and Secretary of State Christopher until April 26 to persuade the Syrians and Lebanese to conclude a new cease-fire. They were able to achieve only a new (though now written) version of the status quo ante in Lebanon: under this agreement, the Lebanese resistance fighters retain their right to strike at Israeli military targets inside Lebanon; any disputes concerning this confrontation will henceforth be judged by a committee that will include Syria and France along with Israel, Lebanon, and the United States. Meanwhile if (as was widely supposed throughout Israel) Peres had also sought electoral advantage through the bombing of Lebanon, his results on this score were disappointing: Shimon Peres and Labor lost the elections of May 1996.
The Likud Bloc (under whose auspices the negotiations with Syria had been totally stalemated prior to June 1992) returned to power, this time under the youthful but no more flexible leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. The Syrian regime of President Hafez al-Asad, which just months earlier may have felt itself tantalizingly close to final conclusion of its negotiation with Israel, now faced a 180-degree turnabout in the position of its former negotiating partner. Starting from a position where he reiterated campaign promises to undertake no withdrawal at all from the Golan, Netanyahu shifted only far enough to say that he would negotiate "without preconditions" on the Golan. When pressed to spell out what this meant, he declared that he would not be bound by any of the verbal commitments undertaken by his predecessors. Meanwhile, he and his ministers announced new plans to house additional Jewish-Israeli settlers in the occupied Golan Heights.
The experience of the years 1991-96 provides considerable new material for those interested in the ill-starred interactions between Israel and Syria, and between Israel and Lebanon. How can we explain the fact that the initially so-successful Israeli-Syrian negotiation resulted, in the end, in failure? What can we learn about what a "concludable" Syrian-Israeli peace agreement may eventually look like? Can the incremental-style of negotiation pursued throughout these talks be efficacious in later negotiations-- assuming meaningful talks are ever resumed? What can we learn about the effectiveness of the styles of intervention adopted by the two U.S. administrations involved? Can we learn anything significant about the possibility of disaggregating the Israeli-Lebanese negotiation from that between Israel and Syria?
But first, the main developments within the 50- month negotiation will be recapitulated.
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