Syria Loses Importance in Israel’s Strategic Planning

JERUSALEM —  U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s meeting Monday with Syrian President Hafez Assad earned barely a shrug of the shoulders from Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who once set peacemaking with Syria as his government’s top priority.

“It repeats itself,” Rabin said when reporters asked what he thought of Christopher’s first meeting with the Syrian president since June. “Every time Christopher is on his way to Syria, the Syrians set preconditions for continuing the peace negotiations.”

Rabin said before the three-hour session in Damascus that he did not expect it to produce an agreement to resume military-level talks with Israel, last held in June. And he seemed unalarmed that the negotiations are deadlocked over security arrangements on the Golan Heights, the plateau Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

Two events over the weekend underscored the increasing marginalization of Syria in Rabin’s strategic planning.

One was the revelation that Damascus-based Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shikaki was shot to death on the island of Malta last week. The other was the opening of a regional economic conference in Amman, Jordan, that Syria refused to attend.

Choosing to harbor Shikaki--an ideologue dedicated to destroying Israel and building an Islamic Palestinian state--and to boycott the economic conference made Assad look like a man increasingly out of step with a region that has grown tired of holy wars and eager for economic prosperity, said Uri Dromi, spokesman for the Israeli government.

“Syria is speaking for all those voices of the past that are becoming more and more obsolete,” Dromi said. “People in the Middle East are finally starting to turn away from those things that brought so much devastation, and they are turning toward those options that will bring prosperity. Except the Syrians. So they look obsolete.”

If Islamic Jihad is right and Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, killed Shikaki, then the assassination can be read as Israel’s blunt way of warning the Syrians that they are in danger of becoming obsolete, said Hebrew University professor Moshe Maoz.

“It was a message to Assad,” said Maoz, a specialist on Syria. “The message was: Killing can be a two-way street.”

Israel has long complained that Assad continues to harbor an array of Palestinian rejectionist factions that are violently opposed to the September, 1993, peace accord signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. It has bitterly complained about Syria’s support of Hezbollah, the militant Muslim militia keeping up a guerrilla war against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon.

Although he just published a book on Israeli-Syrian peacemaking, Maoz said gloomily that he now believes his expectations of a treaty between the two enemies were too optimistic.

“Rabin has simply made the political calculation that he has enough on his plate,” Maoz said. “He believes that giving the Golan Heights back to Syria now would not help him in the elections and that he must focus now on implementing the West Bank phase of the peace accord with the Palestinians.”

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Rabin is likely now to wait until after the Israeli national elections next November to make a serious new attempt at peacemaking with Damascus, Maoz said.

“It frustrates me, because I think that a peace between Israel and Syria is truly the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Maoz said. “But I can see Rabin’s point.”

The point was made in Amman on Sunday, when more than 1,000 business people and senior government leaders from the Middle East, Europe, the United States and Asia gathered to plan regional development projects and lobby for business investments.

Syria and Lebanon stayed away, arguing that relations between Israel and the Arabs should not be “normalized” until Israel withdraws from all occupied territory and signs peace treaties with each Arab state.

But those objections were ignored by the many Arab states that attended the conference. Economic deals and at least low-level diplomatic ties with Israel are being pursued, and Syria no longer holds the veto power it did when it was backed by the Soviet Union and considered a major military power.