Middle East: Israel's Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon recently rejected a Syrian bid to restart negotiations over a land-for-peace agreement, his aides confirmed yesterday, writes David Horovitz in Jerusalem
A detailed account of the contacts, published in the Ma'ariv tabloid, said President Bashar Assad despatched his brother, Maher, to Jordan shortly before the US-led war in Iraq began, to convey the offer to Mr Sharon's emissary, Mr Eitan Bentzur, a former director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Mr Maher Assad and Mr Bentzur held a series of meetings in the Jordanian capital, with the consent of the Jordanian authorities. Mr Assad raised what Israeli officials consider to have been "serious, deep" proposals, the newspaper said, for an immediate and unconditional return to the negotiating table, and for initial measures to be taken by both sides to ensure the new talks got off on the right foot. Ma'ariv headlined its story "Assad offered; Sharon refused".
Confirming that Mr Sharon had rebuffed a Syrian approach, his aides yesterday asserted he had "great reservations" about the seriousness of the offer and the timing, and concluded that Syria was merely trying to show a conciliatory face to Israel to avoid coming under heavier US pressure because of its support for Saddam Hussein's regime. However, the aides said, the initiative had not been dismissed out of hand, and Mr Sharon was still gauging Syria's intentions in the aftermath of the Iraq war.
There was no Syrian official comment yesterday, but US Congressman Mr Tom Lantos said in Jerusalem only last week that President Assad had assured him, too, of his desire to reopen talks with Israel. Mr Lantos said he was delivering a message to that effect to Mr Sharon. President Assad told US Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell at the weekend that he was closing some of the Damascus offices of anti-Israel groups on the State Department's register of terrorist organisations.
The last serious effort at Israeli-Syrian peacemaking came in 1999-2000, when Israel's then prime minister Mr Ehud Barak appeared to be on the brink of attaining an accord with the late President Hafez Assad, Bashar's father, having apparently expressed readiness to relinquish all or almost all of the Golan Heights. However, the talks foundered over the issue of control of the Sea of Galilee, Israel's main natural reservoir, to which the Syrians claim partial sovereignty. An effort by then president Mr Bill Clinton to finesse a deal was unsuccessful, and Mr Barak and Mr Clinton then turned their attention to attempts at peacemaking with the Palestinians.
Mr Sharon is a firm opponent of relinquishing the Golan, captured by Israel from Syria in the 1967 war, whose return to Syrian control would be the central demand by Damascus in any new negotiations.