Just before his visit to Paris for the Mediterranean Union summit, Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, said that economic relations between the countries of the Mediterranean could not be developed while there were ongoing regional conflicts, starting with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
We talked for two hours. He thinks that if there is no political dialogue and peace between Arabs and Israelis, the region will move towards conservatism and extremism. Terrorism, he said, is a state of mind and has no borders: Syria now has homegrown al-Qaida terrorism, not related to the organisation but to a state of mind. If peace is not achieved, all the reforms the Arabs need (economic development, education, culture) will fail to come about and the whole region will be destabilised. When the United States and Israel dismiss the idea that Syria really wants peace, they forget this real concern. The Syrian leadership knows that if the chance of peace is lost again, a new channel will open up for the extremists. Syria's indirect negotiations with Israel are within this context. After 2003, Assad stated more often the need to restart negotiations with Israel. After the 2006 war in Lebanon, he clearly distanced himself from the statements of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "I do not say that Israel should be removed from the map. We want peace, peace with Israel," he told an interviewer for Der Spiegel, September 24 2006 [article no longer available online].
Ariel Sharon, and then Ehud Olmert, were deaf to these wishes, and others (particularly in Washington) refused to trust Assad's regime. In May, however, Israel and Syria announced the opening of indirect negotiations, with the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as intermediary.
The war in Lebanon, explained Assad, taught everybody that you cannot solve the problem by war. Israel is the strongest military power in the region and Hizbullah is smaller than any army in the region. What did Israel achieve?
Assad thinks it is necessary to wait for a new US administration in 2009 before Syrian-Israeli talks will get anywhere, since their success will need a powerful intermediary, which Assad believes can only be the US. Even so, there has to be progress during the waiting period, which is the point of the current indirect talks. After eight years of paralysis (since the end of negotiations between the two countries in 2000), after the war in Lebanon, and two attacks on Syria, there is no trust between the two countries. Syria now wants to test Israel's intentions and understands that Israel, too, wants to test Syria's.
During the talks between the late Hafez al-Assad and Ehud Barak (then Israel's prime minister) in 1999-2000, several breakthroughs were made on the most tricky issues – including security, mutual recognition and water. Syria wants to start from where Assad père and Barak left off. It will be easier and avoid wasting time. Except on his insistence on recovering the whole of the Golan, Bashar shows great flexibility, and he reminded me that during 1999-2000 his father was flexible, too: Israel had demanded that it keep a warning post on Syrian territory – an unacceptable condition since Syria cannot accept any Israeli military presence on its soil. An agreement was reached, to station US military personnel in the post.
It is clear that Assad will not break his relations with Iran as a precondition for negotiations. After all, Iran is one of the countries that supported Syria for all these years. But Assad understands that peace with Israel will change the whole region, because it will also bring peace between Lebanon and Israel and this will solve the Hizbullah problem, helping to transform this organisation into a political one. The alliance between Syria and Iran never stopped Damascus from having its own policy: participation in the 1993 Madrid conference or in this year's Annapolis conference.
The point of departure for Assad's policy goes back to his perception of the dangers of extremism and conservatism. He seems convinced that a failure, this time, will mean chaos in the region – and chaos is already spreading from Afghanistan to Iraq.