True Syrian intentions
By Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post

(March 17) - The Syrian foreign minister recently gave an
extraordinary speech. 

His talks with Israel had ended on January 10 and were
supposed to resume nine days later. But they did not,
because his own side put unexpected preconditions on
the next round - requiring that Israel make huge
concessions before it even started. 

Then, to knock a few more nails in the coffin of the
negotiations, Damascus published an outrageous
Holocaust-denial article and Israeli soldiers were shot at
in Lebanon (last count: seven dead). 

In this context came the speech by Foreign Minister
Farouk Shara. It has a distinctly schizophrenic quality. In
the first half he presents Israel as a regional superpower
("Israel is stronger than all the Arab states combined")
beholden to hugely aggressive ambitions to expand far
beyond its current borders. 

Indeed, Israel is so expansive and aggressive, it threatens
the very existence of the Arabs; in Shara's pungent
words, it views the Arabs "as Indians that should be
annihilated." 

Zionist power is so dangerous, in short, that Syria is
better off ending the military conflict with Israel. This both
neutralizes Israeli weapons and permits Syria to compete
in the "political, ideological, economical, and commercial"
arenas where it can do better in conflict against the Jewish
state. 

Then Shara abruptly switches gears and, in the speech's
totally different second half, asserts that Syria under the
leadership of Hafez Assad "is strong" and will never end
the military conflict unless Israel agrees to return every
meter of territory it took in 1967. 

He denies recent stories and leaks that suggest
Damascus's flexibility - that it would accept restrictions on
its military, grant early-warning stations to Israel, expel
Palestinian extremists, or make curriculum revisions. 

And should the "expansionist racists" in Israel not take
advantage of the deal Damascus is offering them, it will be
their loss, because thanks to Syria's own resources, Arab
and international support, "our position is stronger than
Israel's despite all its weapons." 

Shara goes on to threaten Israel, announcing that the
recovery of the 1967 lands is but the first stage toward
"restoring Palestine in its entirety" - code words for the
destruction of Israel. 

For anyone hoping Israel will reach a settlement with
Syria, the foreign minister's remarks would appear to be a
significant setback. He begins by accusing Israel of
seeking to eliminate all Arabs; he ends trumpeting Syrian
ambitions to destroy Israel. 

Nonetheless, in a recent article in Ha'aretz, Itamar
Rabinovich - a leading academic specialist on Syria and
Israel's former chief negotiator with Damascus - finds
good news about the negotiations in Shara's speech. 

Rabinovich acknowledges it looks like a reversion to
Syria's old rejectionist position but he finds it is actually
"an attempt, albeit clumsy, to prepare the groundwork for
a settlement with Israel." 

How so? Rabinovich explains that where Shara seemed
to be negative, he only "dug in his heels" as a bargaining
position for future negotiations. In effect, "Syria is telling
us for the second time through Shara that it wants to end
the conflict with us and to replace it with a cold peace
and with rivalry over the shape that the Middle East will
take." 

Now, I defer to no one in my admiration of Prof.
Rabinovich's academic work. I praised his 1984 study of
Lebanon as doing "an excellent job" of explaining its
topic. I then lauded his 1991 inquiry into early
Arab-Israeli negotiations for its "fine research and
sensible conclusions." And I wrote that his 1998 book on
Syrian-Israeli diplomacy is "a model of its genre." 

But now this skilled and knowledgeable analyst is not
seeing what is plainly in front of him. He has somehow
turned Shara's threat about "restoring Palestine in its
entirety" into a benign statement of a Syrian intent "to end
the conflict." It appears that Prof. Rabinovich, along with
many other Israeli leaders, is engaged in wishful thinking. 

So badly do they want an Israeli agreement with Syria,
they turn threats into concessions. 

In a similar spirit, they insist that the Palestinian Authority
has fulfilled its obligations. They even portray a unilateral
Israeli retreat from Lebanon as a threat to Syrian
interests. 

Such self-delusion is pleasant enough - until reality hits.
And it always does hit. The only question is when and
where, and how terrible the toll will be. 

(The writer is director of the Philadelphia-based Middle
East Forum and author of three books on Syria.)