Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces elections in January.
But the process was cut short by the Arab Spring uprisings that swept
the Middle East in early 2011, soon spreading to Syria, and the treaty
did not come to fruition, according to an Israeli, Michael Herzog, who
was involved in the talks.
“Nothing was agreed between the parties,” Mr. Herzog said Friday. “It was a work in progress.”
Yediot Aharonot, a leading Israeli newspaper, first published details of the American-led effort on Friday,
and Mr. Herzog, a former chief of staff to Israel’s defense minister
and an Israel-based fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, confirmed the outlines of the discussions. He said in a
telephone interview that he was called in to help with the process in
2010, although he had already retired from military and government
service.
The contacts were mediated by Frederick Hoff, who recently retired from
the United States State Department, where he had served as a special
coordinator for Lebanon and Syria, and Dennis B. Ross, who was then a
special assistant to President Obama on the Middle East.
“There was a detailed list of Israeli demands meant to serve as a basis
for a peace agreement,” said Mr. Herzog, adding that they centered on
security arrangements and the regional context. “The idea,” he said,
“was to see if we could drive a wedge in the radical axis of
Iran-Syria-Hezbollah” by taking Syria out of the equation. Next, he
said, the idea was to pursue peace with Lebanon.
But Mr. Assad apparently would not give clear signals about his
willingness to split with Iran, his patron in the region. And Mr.
Netanyahu was proceeding cautiously, as well, distrustful that Mr. Assad
would deliver.
The negotiations never came to a head. By early 2011 the region was in upheaval and the talks fell apart.
Raising one point of contention, Yediot Aharonot, which is generally
centrist but often critical of Mr. Netanyahu, said that in exchange for a
peace agreement, the prime minister was prepared to agree to a full
withdrawal from the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau that Israel
seized from Syria in the 1967 war and later annexed in a move that has
not been internationally recognized.
The prime minister’s office denied on Friday that Israel had agreed to a withdrawal.
“This is one initiative of many that was proposed to Israel in the past
years,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. “At no stage did
Israel accept this American initiative. The initiative is old and
irrelevant, and its publication now stems from political needs,”
apparently a reference to the fact that both Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu
are facing elections in the coming weeks and months.
With Israeli elections expected in January, it would not be in Mr.
Netanyahu’s interest to be seen as having made far-reaching concessions
to Syria in the absence of a deal. But it is not clear how far Mr.
Netanyahu might have gone in the talks, since he did not reach the point
of having to make a decision.
More than a year before those talks, American officials were already
apparently trying to engage the Israelis and the Syrians. In a press briefing in July 2009,
a State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, told reporters that Mr. Hoff,
who then worked in the office of former Senator George J. Mitchell, then
Mr. Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, was in Israel meeting
with senior officials, and after Israel, planned to visit Damascus.
“The visit is part of ongoing efforts by senator, or special envoy
Mitchell and his team to secure a lasting, comprehensive peace in the
region,” Mr. Kelly said.
The intensive contacts began in the fall of 2010, presumably around the time that Israel’s negotiations with the Palestinians
came to a standstill. Mr. Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud
Barak, were involved in the indirect discussions. The few Israeli
officials and experts privy to the talks were made to sign a secrecy
agreement.
Israeli leaders, including Mr. Netanyahu, have explored the possibility
of reaching a deal with the Syrians in the past, based on at least a
partial withdrawal from the Golan Heights, which overlook northern
Israel. During Mr. Netanyahu’s first term in office in the late 1990s,
contacts with Syria took place through Mr. Netanyahu’s envoy at the
time, the American businessman Ronald Lauder.
Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin conducted inconclusive negotiations
with the Syrians, as did Mr. Barak when he was prime minister. Ehud
Olmert, Mr. Netanyahu’s predecessor as prime minister, held indirect
talks with Syria through Turkish mediators; those talks broke off when
Israel opened an offensive in Gaza in the winter of 2008.
The denial by Mr. Netanyahu’s office of any agreement on a full withdrawal was reinforced by a former aide.
Dore Gold, who was an adviser during Mr. Netanyahu’s first term in
office, specifically rejected the assertion in Yediot Aharonot that Mr.
Netanyahu had agreed to withdraw all the way to the eastern shoreline of
the Sea of Galilee.
Mr. Gold said that in September 1996, he personally secured an assurance
from the United States, under instructions from Mr. Netanyahu, that all
previous Israeli statements regarding readiness for a full withdrawal
to that line “have no political or legal standing.”
Mr. Gold, who is now president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs,
a conservative-leaning research institute, said that Mr. Netanyahu “has
always viewed the Golan Heights as a strategic asset for the defense of
Israel,” and that it was “completely unthinkable that Prime Minister
Netanyahu would ever contemplate the kind of withdrawal” described by
Yediot Aharonot on Friday.
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