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Jewish World Review June 12, 2000 / 9 Sivan, 5760
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http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
"THE DEATH of [Hafez] Assad appears to have driven the final nail of the
coffin of peace efforts between Israel and Syria." So reads a typical
assessment. But this analysis has it exactly wrong. So long as Syria's
President Assad was alive, there was never a chance of a Syrian-Israeli peace
treaty; now that he is dead, it is newly possible.
Although Assad entered into formal negotiations with Israel in 1991, he
never seriously contemplated signing a treaty with the Jewish state. Doing
so would have had, from his point of view, profoundly disturbing implications
for Syrian public life. He feared that an agreement with Jerusalem would
signal to the Syrian population that his regime had turned to the West and
abandoned its rogue ways. They then would expect life to soften: an end to
emergency law, no more jailings without charges, less censorship, less
control of every institution from the Presidential Palace. In other words,
Assad would be expected to give up the totalitarian tools on which he had
long relied.
Worse, a treaty with Israel would have raised expectations of freedom of
movement and press, the exhilarating potential made possible by modern
communications and fewer military obligations. It would have meant foreign
investment, human rights groups, political parties and a parliament that did
more than wield a rubber stamp. Assad, who for 30 years ran a regime premised
on force, had no idea how to handle the subtleties of a democratizing system
and wanted absolutely nothing to do with such innovations.
That said, after the Soviet collapse in 1991, he needed to court the
West. So he went along with the westerners' demands for a peace process,
playing at negotiations that he had no intention of ever letting succeed.
For nearly nine years, he brilliantly went through the motions of engaging in
a credible negotiating process with Israel. A quick review of that process,
however, reveals a recurring pattern: Assad made an audacious new demand on
Jerusalem, the Israelis initially resisted, then acceded to his demand. To
which, instead of saying, "Fine, let's sign," Assad came back with yet
another demand. And so it went; despite repeated concessions on the Israeli
side, the two parties never came within striking distance of an
agreement--that new demand from Assad always stymied things.
Assad's cleverness at negotiating, combined with a fervent desire among
the Israeli and American leaderships for an agreement, blinded many people to
this pattern. Thus did Assad's plan work beautifully: He got credit for a
willingness to resolve the conflict with Israel and never had to sign the
dreaded peace treaty.
But with Assad's death yesterday morning, the situation in Damascus
changes completely. While it is far too early to tell who will have what
future role there, it seems quite certain that whatever happens, the fears
and logic that drove Hafez Assad are defunct. No one else there has the
anything like the experience nor the outlook of the late dictator--certainly
not his son Bashar; nor will anyone dominate the country as he did, at least
not for a while. This has the happy implication that no one will fear an
opening up of Syrian life as did the elder Assad. The great constraint on
Syrian peacemaking is gone. Far from driving the "final nail" into the peace
process coffin, his death pries the coffin open and allows the corpse for the
first time to come to life.
That said, things could also get worse. Just as Assad studiously avoided
a peace treaty with Israel, he also made sure there was no all-out war. To
be sure, his proxies in Lebanon battled Israeli forces, but he insisted on a
total quiet across their mutual border of the Golan Heights, where things
could really get hot and quickly lead to a major conflagration. Ironically,
this made the Golan about the safest place in the Middle East. With Assad's
30-year reign now over, that could change; rivalries within the Syrian elite,
for example, might lead to war. In other words, what was a deeply static and
predictable situation has burst wide open.
U.S. policymakers are coming off of nearly a decade's worth of
frustration, caused by their having never understood the crafty game of an
old-school totalitarian like Assad. The change in personnel now underway
offers them great opportunities--precisely because the new leadership is more
Western-oriented and thinks more like Americans do. If Assad senior was
unmoved by the promise of peace with his Israeli neighbor, the return of the
Golan Heights and substantial sums of money, these benefits are likely to
weigh much more heavily in the decision-making of his successors. Thus is a
Syrian-Israeli deal more likely now than at any time in the
By Daniel Pipes
JWR contributor Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and the author of several books, most recently Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes from. He has written three books on Syria. Comment by clicking here.
