After holding two meetings with Syrian President Hafez Assad over the weekend, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher returned to Israel on Monday and announced that Israeli-Syrian negotiations had entered a new, more promising phase.
“The negotiations (with Syria) have reached a new and a different substantive level,” Christopher said Monday after a morning of discussions with Israeli leaders.
“The parties,” he said, “are now talking on a broad, comprehensive range of issues.”
Christopher, who had shuttled between Jerusalem and Damascus with new proposals from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for restarting the deadlocked Israeli-Syrian negotiations, vowed that the United States would “do all it can to try to serve the parties in their pursuit of peace.”
Syria, he stressed, was committed to that pursuit as well.
Despite his optimistic words, analysts here speculated that Syria has rejected a reported Israeli offer to withdraw from the Golan Heights in stages over a period of five to eight years in return for a Syrian commitment to establish peace with Israel.
In rejecting the offer, Syria was still insisting on a one-time, complete withdrawal from the territory that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War.
Still, despite the rejection, Syria is believed to be ready for discussions about establishing security arrangements on the Golan — another key element of the Israeli proposals Christopher took to Damascus — and for negotiations that would lead to a normalization of relations between the two countries.
Speaking to his Knesset Labor Party faction on Monday, Rabin defended his recently stated willingness to give up all settlements on the Golan in exchange for peace with Syria.
“Failure to negotiate for peace with the Syrians will bring about a stalemate in relations with our northern neighbors,” said Rabin.
“A stalemate is bound to lead to a Damascus-Baghdad-Teheran strategic axis,” Rabin said. “And in five-to-10 years’ time that could lead to war, which will be fought with missiles and perhaps non-conventional weapons as well.”
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