Is peace possible between Syria and Israel? That question has taken on new urgency after the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered to negotiate with the Syrian president Bashar Assad “anytime, anywhere” – and Mr Assad rebuffed the approach.He is correct in assuming that a meeting with Mr Netanyahu at the moment would be nothing more than a photo-op. But that should not discourage the administration of the US president Barack Obama from pushing for renewed Syrian-Israeli negotiations. Instead of a direct meeting with the Israeli leader, Mr Assad has suggested that the two sides continue indirect negotiations through Turkey (Israeli and Syrian officials held a series of meetings last year through Turkish intermediaries, but Mr Assad broke off the talks after the Israeli invasion of Gaza).
The Syrian-Israeli track can move faster than Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, in which the two sides are still far apart on the central issues: Israeli settlements, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the final status of Jerusalem. By contrast, the Syrians and Israelis need to negotiate mainly over the return of the Golan Heights (strategic terrain that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war) and related security guarantees and water access issues.
Unlike the weak Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Mr Assad can actually deliver on a peace deal. Such an agreement is possible during Mr Obama's presidency, but it will not happen without the deep involvement of his administration. The US has much to gain strategically from renewed Syrian-Israeli dialogue: Damascus could be pressed to play a more constructive role in the region, instead of being a spoiler. To achieve peace, the US must strongly push Israel back to negotiations and be willing to dispatch US personnel as monitors of any final agreement.
There is a well-established framework for an Syrian-Israeli deal – and one of its architects is Frederic Hof, who currently serves as deputy to George Mitchell, the Obama administration's special envoy for Middle East peace. Over the past decade, he has proposed some of the most concrete ideas for solving this conflict, including a draft Syria-Israel peace treaty.Just before he joined the administration in March, Mr Hof wrote a report for the US Institute of Peace in which he laid out the idea of creating a nature reserve on the Golan Heights and parts of the Jordan river valley that would be returned to Syria. The reserve, which would be administered by Syria, is based on existing parks and nature reserves created by Israel during its occupation. The area would be accessible to both Syrians and Israelis to encourage informal, people-to-people contacts that could solidify a peace agreement.
Syria has consistently said that full peace is possible, but only if the entire Golan Heights and small tracts in the Jordan river valley are returned. In Januar
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document.write(''); Why the road to peace may run through Damascus
Mohamad Bazzi
Last Updated: December 18. 2009 1:25AM UAE / December 17. 2009 9:25PM GMT
Is peace possible between Syria and Israel? That question has taken on new urgency after the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered to negotiate with the Syrian president Bashar Assad “anytime, anywhere” – and Mr Assad rebuffed the approach.He is correct in assuming that a meeting with Mr Netanyahu at the moment would be nothing more than a photo-op. But that should not discourage the administration of the US president Barack Obama from pushing for renewed Syrian-Israeli negotiations. Instead of a direct meeting with the Israeli leader, Mr Assad has suggested that the two sides continue indirect negotiations through Turkey (Israeli and Syrian officials held a series of meetings last year through Turkish intermediaries, but Mr Assad broke off the talks after the Israeli invasion of Gaza).
The Syrian-Israeli track can move faster than Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, in which the two sides are still far apart on the central issues: Israeli settlements, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the final status of Jerusalem. By contrast, the Syrians and Israelis need to negotiate mainly over the return of the Golan Heights (strategic terrain that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war) and related security guarantees and water access issues.
Unlike the weak Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Mr Assad can actually deliver on a peace deal. Such an agreement is possible during Mr Obama's presidency, but it will not happen without the deep involvement of his administration. The US has much to gain strategically from renewed Syrian-Israeli dialogue: Damascus could be pressed to play a more constructive role in the region, instead of being a spoiler. To achieve peace, the US must strongly push Israel back to negotiations and be willing to dispatch US personnel as monitors of any final agreement.
document.write('');
There is a well-established framework for an Syrian-Israeli deal – and one of its architects is Frederic Hof, who currently serves as deputy to George Mitchell, the Obama administration's special envoy for Middle East peace. Over the past decade, he has proposed some of the most concrete ideas for solving this conflict, including a draft Syria-Israel peace treaty.Just before he joined the administration in March, Mr Hof wrote a report for the US Institute of Peace in which he laid out the idea of creating a nature reserve on the Golan Heights and parts of the Jordan river valley that would be returned to Syria. The reserve, which would be administered by Syria, is based on existing parks and nature reserves created by Israel during its occupation. The area would be accessible to both Syrians and Israelis to encourage informal, people-to-people contacts that could solidify a peace agreement.
Syria has consistently said that full peace is possible, but only if the entire Golan Heights and small tracts in the Jordan river valley are returned. In January 2000, the US president Bill Clinton led marathon talks between Hafez Assad (Bashar's father) and the Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Those discussions collapsed over a sliver of land, about 500 metres wide, that would have given Syria access to the Sea of Galilee, a major source of water for Israel.
In his report, Mr Hof lays out in detail how these thorny disputes over access to water can be resolved. He writes that the plan “embodies a fundamental trade-off: Syria gets the land and regulated access to the water, and Israel gets the water and regulated access to the land”.Despite his rhetoric, Mr Assad has shown a willingness to negotiate and he revels in the idea of proving to the world that Syria holds the crucial cards to peace and stability in the Middle East.
There is even an Arab framework for resuming talks, and Syria has signed on to it. The Arab Peace Initiative proposed by Saudi Arabia at the 2002 Arab League summit in Beirut offers a peace deal between Israel and all Arab states. The plan calls for Israeli withdrawal from all Arab lands captured during the 1967 war, the creation of a Palestinian state with sovereignty over East Jerusalem and a “just solution” to the problem of more than 3.5 million Palestinian refugees.
Yet even without a regional settlement, Israel has much to gain from a deal over the Golan. It would mean not only a peace treaty with Syria, but the end of Syrian aid to what is now Israel's most dangerous enemy: Hizbollah, who did surprisingly well in their war with a far superior Israeli army in the summer of 2006.Israel has exchanged occupied land for peace and security before: after the 1978 Camp David peace agreement with Egypt, Israeli forces withdrew fully from the Sinai peninsula and Israel was able to neutralise its most dangerous military rival at the time. In the end, it was a good bargain for Israel – and for the US, which now counts Egypt among its most important strategic allies in the Arab world.
If there are serious negotiations, the US can demand that Mr Assad's regime stop interfering in Iraq, carry out domestic reforms, respect human rights, and drop Syrian support for Hamas and other Palestinian groups that reject peace with Israel.There is an opening to revive this long-dormant track of the peace process. The Obama administration should not squander it.Mohamad Bazzi is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a journalism professor at New York University
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Is peace possible between Syria and Israel? That question has taken on new urgency after the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered to negotiate with the Syrian president Bashar Assad “anytime, anywhere” – and Mr Assad rebuffed the approach.He is correct in assuming that a meeting with Mr Netanyahu at the moment would be nothing more than a photo-op. But that should not discourage the administration of the US president Barack Obama from pushing for renewed Syrian-Israeli negotiations. Instead of a direct meeting with the Israeli leader, Mr Assad has suggested that the two sides continue indirect negotiations through Turkey (Israeli and Syrian officials held a series of meetings last year through Turkish intermediaries, but Mr Assad broke off the talks after the Israeli invasion of Gaza).
The Syrian-Israeli track can move faster than Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, in which the two sides are still far apart on the central issues: Israeli settlements, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the final status of Jerusalem. By contrast, the Syrians and Israelis need to negotiate mainly over the return of the Golan Heights (strategic terrain that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war) and related security guarantees and water access issues.
Unlike the weak Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Mr Assad can actually deliver on a peace deal. Such an agreement is possible during Mr Obama's presidency, but it will not happen without the deep involvement of his administration. The US has much to gain strategically from renewed Syrian-Israeli dialogue: Damascus could be pressed to play a more constructive role in the region, instead of being a spoiler. To achieve peace, the US must strongly push Israel back to negotiations and be willing to dispatch US personnel as monitors of any final agreement.
There is a well-established framework for an Syrian-Israeli deal – and one of its architects is Frederic Hof, who currently serves as deputy to George Mitchell, the Obama administration's special envoy for Middle East peace. Over the past decade, he has proposed some of the most concrete ideas for solving this conflict, including a draft Syria-Israel peace treaty.Just before he joined the administration in March, Mr Hof wrote a report for the US Institute of Peace in which he laid out the idea of creating a nature reserve on the Golan Heights and parts of the Jordan river valley that would be returned to Syria. The reserve, which would be administered by Syria, is based on existing parks and nature reserves created by Israel during its occupation. The area would be accessible to both Syrians and Israelis to encourage informal, people-to-people contacts that could solidify a peace agreement.
Syria has consistently said that full peace is possible, but only if the entire Golan Heights and small tracts in the Jordan river valley are returned. In January 2000, the US president Bill Clinton led marathon talks between Hafez Assad (Bashar's father) and the Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Those discussions collapsed over a sliver of land, about 500 metres wide, that would have given Syria access to the Sea of Galilee, a major source of water for Israel.
In his report, Mr Hof lays out in detail how these thorny disputes over access to water can be resolved. He writes that the plan “embodies a fundamental trade-off: Syria gets the land and regulated access to the water, and Israel gets the water and regulated access to the land”.Despite his rhetoric, Mr Assad has shown a willingness to negotiate and he revels in the idea of proving to the world that Syria holds the crucial cards to peace and stability in the Middle East.
There is even an Arab framework for resuming talks, and Syria has signed on to it. The Arab Peace Initiative proposed by Saudi Arabia at the 2002 Arab League summit in Beirut offers a peace deal between Israel and all Arab states. The plan calls for Israeli withdrawal from all Arab lands captured during the 1967 war, the creation of a Palestinian state with sovereignty over East Jerusalem and a “just solution” to the problem of more than 3.5 million Palestinian refugees.
Yet even without a regional settlement, Israel has much to gain from a deal over the Golan. It would mean not only a peace treaty with Syria, but the end of Syrian aid to what is now Israel's most dangerous enemy: Hizbollah, who did surprisingly well in their war with a far superior Israeli army in the summer of 2006.Israel has exchanged occupied land for peace and security before: after the 1978 Camp David peace agreement with Egypt, Israeli forces withdrew fully from the Sinai peninsula and Israel was able to neutralise its most dangerous military rival at the time. In the end, it was a good bargain for Israel – and for the US, which now counts Egypt among its most important strategic allies in the Arab world.
If there are serious negotiations, the US can demand that Mr Assad's regime stop interfering in Iraq, carry out domestic reforms, respect human rights, and drop Syrian support for Hamas and other Palestinian groups that reject peace with Israel.There is an opening to revive this long-dormant track of the peace process. The Obama administration should not squander it.Mohamad Bazzi is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a journalism professor at New York University
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Top stories Dubai moves to control its state finances IPAF final shortlist announced Fire raged with no sprinklers or alarms Obama says leaders must accept deal More thunderstorms expected in UAE Mumbai gunman recants confession Philippines' massacre suspect hearing Your View How has the British Airways' strike threat affected you?Have you been affected by the wet weather? Tell us howWhat can we do to reduce the carbon footprint of the UAE?Have you found it difficult to go back to work after the 10-day break?Should the UAE have a nationwide smoking ban? Most popular stories Most read Most e-mailed Trial of Sheikh Issa adjourns for expert testimony Fire raged with no sprinklers or alarms Dubai moves to control its state finances Taking liberties Miss Palestine is shy on numbers And the Rand played on Climate talks near political accord Restaurants clean up just ahead of new law Man fined Dh2,000 for swearing Dubai turnaround may be a quick one For the Palestinians, all roads now lead to the UN Taking liberties $10bn support for Dubai World from Abu Dhabi, Central Bank Near-record rainfall hits UAE Masafi water recall 500,000 bottles from stores 100 new 'green' schools planned for Abu Dhabi The full statement from the government of Dubai Woman who dares to fight for her fair share in Saudi Two die in Abu Dhabi apartment fire In pictures: Rain in the UAE var countries=new ddtabcontent("countrytabs") countries.setpersist(true) countries.setselectedClassTarget("link") //"link" or "linkparent" countries.init() Products & Services Your View e-polls e-Paper RSS Feeds Home UAE World Business Sport About us Contact us Terms & Conditions FAQ Site map
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