THE Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, yesterday confirmed that his assassinated predecessor, Yitzhak Rabin, had been prepared to return the Golan Heights to Syria as part of a peace treaty - and then immediately made clear that he was not willing to do likewise.
Rabin's readiness-in-principle to eventually trade the Golan, the mountain ridge captured from Syria in, the 1967 war, in return for normalised relations with Israel's most dangerous enemy, has been widely reported in the past. What is new is Mr Netanyahu's assertion that the late prime minister gave a verbal pledge to withdraw to the pre-1967 separation line, rather than the international border.
An Israeli withdrawal to the June 4th, 1967, line would enable Syria to demand partial sovereignty over the Sea of Galilee, whereas an Israeli pullback only as far as the international border would leave Israel indisputably sovereign over the entire sea - a crucial natural water source.
Mr Netanyahu raised the issue at a cabinet meeting yesterday, after publication of excerpts from a book that focuses on Mr Shimon Peres, the hapless successor to Rabin whom the current prime minister defeated in May's elections. The book, by an Israeli, journalist, claims that Rabin made a verbal commitment to American peace talks mediators to relinquish the Golan if Syria agreed to a package of security guarantees. Asked to put the pledge in writing, Rabin is said to have refused.
Furthermore, the book says, Rabin kept the pledge secret from Mr Peres, who was his foreign minister. When President Clinton, came to Israel for Rabin's funeral last November, he asked Mr Peres whether he would be bound by the commitment, but the new prime minister had no idea what the president was talking about.
Mr Netanyahu has made several pleas to Syria to enter peace talks with no preconditions. But the latest of these was rejected yesterday by Syria's President Hafez Assad.