Who's Rejecting Syrian-Israeli Peace?

April 19, 2011 Topic: Post-Conflict Region: IsraelJordanPalestinian territoriesSyria Blog Brand: Paul Pillar

Who's Rejecting Syrian-Israeli Peace?

Netanyahu is the obstructionist now. Regime change in Damascus is not a cure-all.

Last month I wrote about the consequences that would—or would not—flow from a change of regime in Syria, an objective that has been the subject of increasing agitation on the American right. I pointed out how the agitators are likely to be disappointed because much of what they find objectionable in Syrian policies and behavior has less to do with Bashar Assad or Baathists or Alawites than with Syrian national interests that would continue to shape Syrian perspectives no matter who was in charge in Damascus. While the benefits of regime change are thus overestimated, I also noted, “There is underestimation of how much worthwhile business could be conducted with the incumbent regime, however distasteful it may be.” In a full-throated call for regime change, Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal refers to that last statement, along with further remarks about Syria by the secretary of state and other members of the “U.S. foreign policy establishment,” as “fellow-traveling” and “making excuses for the Assad regime,” which he finds “distasteful” and “absurd”.

Stephens addresses neither the overestimation nor the underestimation side of what I discussed, preferring instead just to compile a list of Syrian behaviors he doesn’t like. But the one assertion in his piece that caught my eye was that “Hafez Assad turned down multiple offers from several Israeli prime ministers to return the Golan Heights.” Perhaps, as with Jon Kyl’s remarks about Planned Parenthood, Stephens did not intend this to be a factual statement. But before too many misimpressions get formed about the reasons for deadlock over the Golan, it would be useful to review the relevant historical facts. One meticulously researched treatment of the subject, by Jerome Slater, appeared several years ago in the journal International Security.

Slater goes back to the first round of Israeli-Arab combat, in 1948, in which he notes that Syrian actions were motivated far less by anti-Israeli rejectionism than by three other factors. One was inter-Arab rivalry and specifically Syria’s intention to limit expanded influence of the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. Another was to respond to the Israeli expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from territory (particularly in the Galilee region) that was supposed to be part of the Palestinian state provided for in the United Nations partition plan. The third was concern over exactly where the border between Palestine and the Golan was to be.

Following the armistice of 1949, governments in Damascus made repeated offers of peace to the new state of Israel. In 1949 the Syrian regime of Husni Zaim proposed to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion that in exchange for permanent access on an equitable basis with Israel to the waters of the Jordan River and Lake Tiberias, Syria would sign a peace settlement with Israel and would permanently resettle in its own territory 300,000 of the Palestinian refugees. Despite urgings from the United States and from U.N. mediator Ralph Bunche (and from senior Israelis such as Abba Eban), Ben-Gurion refused even to discuss the offer. Zaim was succeeded as Syrian leader by Adib Shishakli, who continued Zaim’s moderate policies (including giving high priority to improving relations with both the United States and Israel). Shishaki renewed Aim’s peace proposal, upping the offer by stating that Syria would absorb 500,000 Palestinian refugees. Again Ben-Gurion refused to negotiate.

Ben-Gurion was motivated by some of the same ideological considerations that drive obstinacy in holding on to the West Bank. Ben-Gurion believed that biblical Palestine—Erez Israel—included the Golan Heights and much of the rest of southwestern Syria. In addition to ideology, by the 1950s Ben-Gurion and armed forces chief (and later defense minister) Moshe Dayan were looking at conquest of the Golan Heights for security and strategic reasons. In an interview in 1976 that was off the record but published after his death, Dayan admitted that Israel had deliberately sought to provoke the Syrians and had instigated “more than 80 percent” of the clashes with Syria. As Dayan explained:

It went this way: We would send a tractor to plow someplace…in the demilitarized area, and [we] knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was.”

The Israelis got what Dayan had planned for, and had tried to hasten with the provocations, when Israeli forces seized the Golan Heights during the 1967 Middle East war. As for Hafez al-Assad, who took power in Damascus after a military coup in 1970, he had one attempt at trying to use military force to restore what had been lost to Israeli military conquest. That attempt, in the 1973 war (in which Syria’s war plans were limited to recapture of the Golan), failed. After that, Assad only had diplomacy left (a situation further confirmed when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union and made it clear there would be no Soviet support for radical Arab policies toward Israel). As for Israel’s posture, the Knesset—at the urging of Prime Minister Menachem Begin—unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981.

In 1992 Assad’s regime proposed “total peace” with Israel (meaning not just nonbelligerency but full diplomatic and economic relations) that would include full Israeli withdrawal from Arab land seized in 1967. After much hesitation, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to begin negotiations. By 1993, except for some details to be ironed out, a peace agreement was on the verge of completion. This included Israeli acceptance of withdrawal to the lines of June 1967. But then Rabin suspended the talks, on the grounds that Israeli public opinion could not swallow both an agreement with Syria and one with the Palestinians (the Oslo accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization were signed in 1993).

After Ehud Barak (currently defense minister) won an election and was made prime minister in 1999, Israeli-Syrian negotiations resumed. Although Barak acknowledged that the Rabin government had agreed to the 1967 borders, his government started backtracking, insisting on language that fuzzed over the boundary issue in a way that would imply only a partial withdrawal. Again, the backdrop was Israeli public opinion and its hesitation to make deals with both the Palestinians (the subject at that time of the Camp David talks led by Bill Clinton) and the Syrians. In the spring of 2000, Barak suddenly and unilaterally terminated the negotiations. That ended the last chance for Hafez al-Assad to get back the Golan Heights for Syria; he died in June.

On what Ben-Gurion and Barak could not bring themselves to do—make peace with Syria—the current rightist government of Benjamin Netanyahu has no apparent inclination even to consider doing. The stalemate over the Golan Heights and Israeli-Syrian relations is not anything that regime change in Damascus is going to fix.