jerusalem | Syria’s President Bashar Assad is proving to be as stubborn a character as his father.
But where Assad senior showed his obduracy by refusing to make concessions for peace, the younger Assad shows his by continually pushing for peace talks — or at least saying he wants them.
Indeed, despite repeated failures to elicit a positive response from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Assad continues to call for dialogue with Israel, using every available emissary to deliver the message. According to several Western diplomats and politicians who have met the Syrian leader lately, Assad remains ready to start talks immediately, without preconditions.
But Sharon is unimpressed, insisting that Assad is not interested in peace, only in dialogue. According to Sharon, what Assad really wants is a show of talks to alleviate U.S. pressure on him to democratize and stop supporting terrorism.
But not everyone in the Israeli establishment agrees. In the Israel Defense Forces and Foreign Ministry, calls are mounting for Assad to be put to the test.
Assad’s latest peace message was delivered by U.N. Special Envoy Terje Larsen, who met Assad in Damascus on Nov. 25.
“President Assad has reiterated to me today that he has an outstretched hand to his Israeli counterparts and that he is willing to go to the table without conditions,” Larsen declared after their tête-à-tête.
A Syrian spokesman later clarified that while it was true that Assad had no preconditions, he felt it would be a pity to waste what had been agreed on in almost a decade of negotiations his father conducted with previous Israeli governments.
Previous Israeli prime ministers reportedly agreed to return all of the Golan Heights to Syria, but the talks ended over Syria’s insistence on keeping Israeli land it took by force after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
“About 80 percent of the issues have already been resolved,” the spokesman claimed.
Assad had sent the same message with Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, in September; Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., in early November; several European diplomats over the past few months; and the Syrian ambassador to Washington, Imad Mustafa, a few weeks ago.
In an early November briefing to a small audience, including the Israeli consul in New York, Mustafa claimed that Israel and Syria had been on the verge of agreement three times, and that each time Israel pulled back because of a lack of political power or will.
The implication was clear: If Israel could muster the political will today, a peace deal was there for the taking.
Officially, Israel says that if Assad wants peace, he first must stop supporting terrorism. The Syrian leader should close down Palestinian terrorist offices in Damascus and stop supporting the radical Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said in late November.
Assad claims the terrorist offices in Damascus deal only in public relations and that, in any case, he is willing to discuss their continued presence on Syrian soil, as well as the Hezbollah question, during peace talks.
Everything would be on the table, he says, and — just as Syria doesn’t have preconditions — neither should Israel, Assad says.
Israeli officials say the demand to close terrorist offices is not a precondition but a call for a signal that Assad is serious about peace.
The Israeli army believes Assad is serious. According to military intelligence, if Israel would be ready to go back to its pre-1967 borders, Assad would be ready to make peace.