Jewish World Review /August 26, 1999 /14 Elul, 5759
Road to Damascus: What Netanyahu almost gave away
THE MOST DRAMATIC MOMENT of the recently completed Israeli election campaign
was not a clash between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his main
challenger, Ehud Barak. Rather, it was a TV debate in mid-April between
Netanyahu and Yitzhak Mordechai, Netanyahu's own former defense minister who
had quit to challenge his old boss on a minor-party ticket. In a discussion
of Syria, Netanyahu declared that he would not "give [Syrian President Hafez
al-] Assad what Barak is willing to give Assad." Mordechai stunned the
Israeli electorate with his dramatic reply. He coldly dared Netanyahu to
repeat his claim. "Look me in the eye, Bibi, ... look me in the eye," he
demanded. Netanyahu did not repeat his statement.
Just what was Mordechai talking about? Israeli political circles buzzed
about
the exchange. Then, in late May, government sources gave the Israeli press a
sketchy story about back-channel talks between Jerusalem and Damascus during
Netanyahu's tenure. Now, however, the full story can be told. Based on
information from several sources with firsthand knowledge of the talks, it
is
clear that, during 1998, Netanyahu became deeply involved in a secret
negotiation with Assad over the terms and conditions under which Israel
would
transfer the Golan Heights, taken from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War, back
to
Syrian control. Even more astonishing, some of those involved in the talks
make the assertion--hotly disputed by Netanyahu and his supporters--that the
prime minister, in contrast to both his hard-line image and his promises to
supporters, was ready to make big concessions to Assad for a peace agreement
from which Israel would get diplomatic recognition, trade, and other
attributes of peace.
The American-encouraged negotiating track between Syria and Israel had
stalled when Netanyahu came to office in May 1996. Assad insisted that
negotiations resume where they had left off with the previous Labor
government--namely, at an agreement in principle that Israel return the
Golan
Heights. Netanyahu saw no reason to concede this in advance. Although both
the U.S. government and Israel's Labor Party agreed with Netanyahu on this
point, Assad would not budge, and diplomacy shuddered to a halt.
For the next two years, Assad continued to refuse direct or official
negotiations, but, in the two-month period of August to September 1998, he
did agree to what one high-level Israeli calls "very intensive and very
unofficial" talks. These negotiations took place completely outside any
governmental framework. Rather, private American citizens went back and
forth
between the two countries. Ronald Lauder, a New York-based businessman and
friend of the prime minister's, along with his aide Allen Roth, forwarded
Netanyahu's ideas to Assad. George Nader, publisher of the Washington-based
Middle East Insight, presented Syrian views. While there may have been other
negotiating tracks, this was the only one that Netanyahu saw as possibly
leading to a breakthrough; as an aide of his puts it, this was the "most
serious and credible channel" because it involved discussions with top
officials in both countries.
The Israeli team included Netanyahu; Mordechai; Uzi Arad, the prime
minister's diplomatic adviser; and Danny Naveh, the Cabinet secretary.
Others
involved included Yaakov Amidror, an aide to Mordechai, and Brigadier
General
Shimon Shappira, military secretary to the prime minister. On the Syrian
side, Assad depended primarily on Foreign Minister Faruq ash-Shar and Walid
Mualem, his ambassador in Washington.
Syrians and Israelis never had direct contact; instead, the talks took place
in classic shuttle-diplomacy style. All told, the Americans visited Damascus
nine times, meeting with Assad on each occasion, and made a similar number
of
trips to Israel. All the participants made great efforts to keep the
negotiations secret; for example, the American go-betweens only traveled on
their own plane, always stopping in Cyprus between Jerusalem and Damascus.
Not even the U.S. government was informed.
But, beyond these basic facts, almost everything about the talks--why they
happened in the first place, which side made what concessions, and why
nothing came of them--is a matter of contention among the participants.
Netanyahu's critics, including some former members of his inner circle,
maintain that Netanyahu started the talks for two reasons. First, he feared
that the Americans would ram a deal with the Palestinians down his throat
(as
indeed happened at Wye in October 1998) unless he could produce a deal with
Syria. Second, his government was reeling from a succession of crises,
domestic and foreign, mostly of its own making. Netanyahu wanted to
reestablish himself with a major, world-shaking event. Yet drama on the
Egyptian, Jordanian, and Palestinian tracks had been used up; the only
neighbors left were Syria and its satrapy, Lebanon. The sight of Netanyahu,
the tough-talking Israeli, flying to Damascus to sign a peace treaty with an
archenemy would revitalize his prime ministry. A highly favorable world
reaction would be accompanied by howls of rage from Netanyahu's own
coalition, which would promptly collapse. But the breakthrough with Syria
would win Netanyahu a stunning endorsement at the polls and a second term as
prime minister.
Netanyahu's critics profess astonishment at the security price they say he
was willing to pay Assad in each one of the four main areas under
discussion--the extent and the timing of an Israeli withdrawal,
demilitarized
zones, and early warning stations. Rabin had informally agreed to hand the
Golan Heights to Syria, pulling Israeli troops back to an international
boundary delineated between Syria and Palestine in 1923. Shimon Peres went a
step further and, in April 1995, publicly agreed to this line as the border.
But neither of these Labor Party prime ministers, condemned as reckless
doves
by Netanyahu, ever accepted the Syrian demand that Israel go back even
farther, to the lines in place on June 4, 1967, before war broke out.
Although the 1967 lines give Syria only 25 additional square miles, they
include land with both symbolic and hydraulic significance: were Syria to
get
them, it would have much greater leverage over the Banyas, Yarmuk, and
Jordan
rivers, as well as Lake Tiberias--or nearly half of Israel's water supplies.
Sources critical of Netanyahu say he began the talks by picking up where his
Labor predecessors left off: Israel would return the territory on the Golan,
accepting the international border but not the cease-fire lines. Yet, faced
with Assad's steadfast rejection of these terms, he capitulated and, in a
stunning reversal, agreed that Israel would, indeed, return to the 1967
lines. Second, having initially demanded that the Israeli withdrawal take
place over a ten- to 15-year period, he ultimately settled on 16 to 24
months. "The years kept flying by real fast," notes one Netanyahu confidant.
To prevent a repetition of the surprise attack from Syria in 1973, Netanyahu
demanded an extensive demilitarization of Syrian territory near the Golan
and
an early warning station. This was to include no fewer than three
demilitarized zones in Syria: the one closest to Israel completely empty of
troops, a second with only lightly armed troops, and the third with troops
bearing only defensive weapons, aides say. The third of these zones would
extend well beyond Damascus, a prospect that upset the Syrians more than
anything else. According to the critics, Assad simply refused the
suggestion,
insisting that Israel would never determine how many troops he would deploy
around his capital city. Netanyahu backed off on this point, too; by the end
of the negotiations, a "semi-agreement" lacking specifics was reached that
each side would somewhat demilitarize a single zone ten kilometers wide
along
its border.
If Netanyahu was willing to give so much, why, in the end, was there no
deal?
His critics say it was not because he had any reservations about these
terms--he was eager to sign--but because he personally lacked the
credibility
to make such far-reaching concessions that so starkly contradicted the
principles of both his party and Cabinet. He needed a defense heavyweight to
endorse the deal. During the active period of negotiations, that would have
to have been Mordechai, an ex-general. Netanyahu twisted Mordechai's arm,
but
Mordechai would not (in his words) "jeopardize Israel's security."
Mordechai's reluctance, one close observer told me, "frustrated the hell out
of Bibi." So, when Ariel Sharon was appointed foreign minister on October 9,
1998, Netanyahu asked for his blessing. Sharon also balked. Lacking an
endorsement from Mordechai or Sharon, Netanyahu could not go it alone. As a
result, the agreement was stillborn.
A Netanyahu supporter calls all of this "the opposite of the truth" and "an
effort to rewrite history." The Netanyahu camp insists that his political
ambitions had nothing to do with the talks. Rather, they say, Netanyahu
signaled the Syrians shortly upon taking office that he wanted to talk but
that he needed more security concessions than Labor had required. In 1997,
he
sent what an aide characterizes as a "barrage of messages" to Damascus to
reinforce this point. The talks began in mid-'98, when an emissary came from
Damascus to Israel saying that Assad was ready.
While Netanyahu's camp concedes that he did show flexibility on the issue of
a timetable for Israeli withdrawal, it insists that he took a hard line on
the three other issues. According to Netanyahu and his aides, the Syrians
time and again demanded that Israel accept the 1967 borders but Netanyahu
said no. Until it was clear where and how the Syrian military forces would
redeploy, he insisted, Israel could not commit itself to specific lines.
"Never" did he agree to a borderline, an aide says.
Netanyahu supporters say Assad accepted the idea of three demilitarized
zones
but wanted them to be less than ten kilometers wide. Netanyahu said no, and
the Syrians acknowledged the need to make them wider. At that point, the
talks broke off. As for a high-tech listening and watching post on Mount
Hermon, Assad balked at this but did concede that Israelis would remain on
the Golan Heights for some years. Netanyahu aides uniformly characterize
this
as "progress."
Indeed, Netanyahu's supporters claim much was achieved from Israel's point
of
view, despite the ultimate collapse of the talks. They say Netanyahu forced
Assad to improve his offer over what he had given the Labor Party on such
matters; thus the talks leave his successor, Barak, in an enhanced position.
There was no deal on his watch, Netanyahu told his Cabinet recently, because
"Israel did not consent to Syria's territorial demands."
The Netanyahu faction seems especially incensed at the claim that Netanyahu
was willing to cut a deal but had to be stopped by Mordechai and Sharon. Uzi
Arad, for example, says flatly that "Mordechai supported Netanyahu's
position." Admittedly, he was "slow in acting but at no point opposed." As
for Sharon, one participant says, he did effectively block the deal by not
pursuing it--perhaps because it was not his own idea.
Netanyahu's critics contend that things really ended much earlier, when
Mordechai and Arad were tasked with drawing up a map to give to the Syrians
but Mordechai stopped the process by never providing one. The negotiations
"died because no map was produced," says a critic. For their parts, both
Mordechai and Sharon have lent credence to the critics by publicly
confirming
their role in stopping the deal. Mordechai declared in his TV debate with
Netanyahu: "More than once ... I acted as a responsible defense minister of
this country and prevented what had to be prevented. You know things would
have looked very different otherwise." Ha'aretz reports that Sharon "told
fellow Likud members ... that he torpedoed the third-party efforts with
Syria." It also quotes "government sources" saying that, when Sharon learned
about the talks in September 1998, he confronted Netanyahu and said there
was
"not enough of a basis for Israel to put forward any withdrawal map."
Other circumstantial factors seem to support the critics' case. For all its
emphatic certainty, the Netanyahu camp has seemed inconsistent and devious
ever since Mordechai's "look me in the eye" challenge. For example, right
after that dramatic confrontation, a senior official at the prime minister's
office announced that "Mordechai does not know anything about" the talks
between Jerusalem and Damascus--a clearly preposterous claim that even other
pro-Netanyahu types have contradicted. One of them told me, for example,
that
Mordechai was "in the picture throughout."
And, while Netanyahu called Sharon's claim to have "torpedoed" the talks
"nonsense" and "a false charge," the only support he offered for this
statement was the legalistic and irrelevant point that Sharon "was appointed
foreign minister only after the secret contacts ended." Netanyahu's argument
also begs the question: If the prime minister was not doing anything
contrary
to his own party platform, why does he now claim to have kept the
negotiations a complete secret from even his defense and foreign ministers?
Anyone who has followed Netanyahu's career will instantly recognize in this
episode the man's well-established pattern of speaking loudly but carrying a
small stick. For example, Netanyahu's trademark issue throughout his career
was a policy of tough antiterrorism--he founded an institute dedicated to
this goal, wrote a book on the topic, and made it the subject of innumerable
public appearances. But, when the U.S. government offered to extradite to
Israel a suspected Hamas terrorist, Musa Abu Marzook, Netanyahu took a bye
(seemingly scared of the trouble this would cause). Abu Marzook now lives as
a free man and a high Hamas official in Amman, Jordan.
Thus does the evidence point heavily to the unhappy likelihood that
Netanyahu's version is not true. More precisely, he appears to be boasting
of
his earlier, tougher positions with the Syrians but hiding the concessions
he
made as the talks went on. In fact, Netanyahu gave more to the Syrians than
did either of the predecessors he so deeply scorns, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon
Peres. And, judging by new reports coming out of Israel, he also gave away
more than Barak would.
This extraordinary episode reveals nothing new about the Syrian side, which
merely confirmed its well-established pattern, going back 25 years, of
attempting to draw maximum leverage from a position of weakness. As in the
past, Assad gave the absolute minimum in negotiations and doled out
concessions in the slowest and most incremental manner.
But the story of the secret Netanyahu-Assad channel has important
implications in two areas: Israeli politics and the future of Syrian-Israeli
relations. The negotiations reveal that Netanyahu is a leader who would do
almost anything for power. And, if Assad now demands that Barak start where
Netanyahu left off, Netanyahu's having discussed vast concessions to
Damascus
will weaken the negotiating position of his successor. Advantage,
By Daniel Pipes
As for the final issue, Netanyahu demanded that Israel maintain in
perpetuity
a high-tech early warning station atop Mount Hermon, the 9,000-foot mountain
that dominates the Syrian-Israeli border. When Assad balked at this,
Netanyahu was said to have offered Assad a deal under which the two sides
would share control over the warning station. No, again, Assad said--though
he did agree to a U.N. team manning the station. If "United Nations" meant
U.S. and French nationals, Netanyahu said, he could accept it. There the
matter was left, with Israelis looking at the prospect of access only to the
information that the American or French governments wished them to have.
JWR contributor Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and the author of three
books on Syria, most recently Syria Beyond the Peace Process. Let him know what you think by clicking here.