[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA: So Dr. Alon Liel, as scores - if not hundreds -
of Israeli withdrawal supporters, decided to go on an adventure in dialogue
(some also enjoy the perks of the trips and it should be noted that very few
"dialogues" take place at 3-star hotels) and sent reports to various Israeli
Government offices as to what transpired.
Why "withdrawal supporter"?
Because the purpose of the exercise was not to determine "if" Israel should
withdraw but rather "how".
And once one picks this as the starting point the question is how to build a
house of cards that can serve as a window dressing for the withdrawal. If
that requires assuming that Israel will always have gizmos that can replace
the Golan (a favorite of assumption of the Council For Peace and Security
[aka "Brass for Withdrawal"] or that if the Syrians violate the agreement
that the "world" will stop them in their tracks so be it.]
==========
BACKGROUND: How the covert contacts transpired
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz Correspondent Last update - 08:34 16/01/2007
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/813818.html
It began exactly three years ago. In January 2004, Syrian President Bashar
Assad came to Turkey for an important visit, some say a historic one. By
complete coincidence, Dr. Alon Liel, a former Foreign Ministry director
general and former Israeli ambassador to Ankara, was in Istanbul and staying
at the same hotel as the Syrian delegation. His friends in the Turkish
Foreign Ministry hinted to Liel that Israel had a respectable spot in the
conversations between Assad and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
A few days after Liel's return to Israel, he was invited to a meeting with
the Turkish ambassador to Israel, Feridun Sinirlioglu. The Turkish
ambassador told Liel that Assad had asked Erdogan to use Turkey's good
relations with Israel to remove the rust from the negotiation channel with
Syria. Liel was asked to put out discreet feelers in the bureau of then
prime minister Ariel Sharon to find out if there were an Israeli partner for
covert talks with Syria, to be mediated by Turkey.
Liel brought Geoffrey Aronson from the Washington-based Foundation for
Middle East Peace into the picture. Aronson, who is Jewish, had wandered
among the capitals of the Middle East, including Damascus, Beirut and Amman,
and suggested bringing in Ibrahim (Ayeb) Suleiman, a Syrian-Alawite
businessman who had been living in a suburb of Washington, D.C. for many
years. Suleiman's family is from the same village as the Assad family, and
senior American officials had used his good mediation skills many times to
make contact with Damascus. Suleiman had also been involved in opening the
gates of Syria to the Jews remaining there who wanted to move to Israel.
Suleiman left for Damascus. He arrived at the home of the Turkish ambassador
to Syria in a vehicle from the president's bureau to report that the Syrians
were prepared to begin negotiations with Israel immediately: formal
negotiations, certainly not "academic talks." The Prime Minister's Bureau in
Jerusalem didn't care whether Liel and his friends sat down with the Syrians
to hear what they had to say - but no negotiations. The Israeli reason (or
excuse): The Americans are not prepared to hear about contact with Syria.
Covert meetings in a European capital
At the end of the summer of 2004, Sinirlioglu told Liel, with great regret,
that the Turkish channel had reached a dead end. But the trio of Liel,
Aronson and Suleiman didn't give up. In September, they met in a European
capital that agreed to provide cover and funding for a covert Israeli-Syrian
channel via a senior official in that country's foreign ministry. Since
autumn 2004, seven more meetings have been held. (Haaretz was provided the
details about the conversations, on condition that the identities of the
mediator and two other Israelis who participated in some of the meetings not
be published.)
Following each meeting, as soon as he returned to Israel, Liel gave a full
report to a senior official Foreign Ministry official. Sharon's bureau also
received a full situation report. Suleiman joined Liel on one of his visits
to the Foreign Ministry and personally described Syria's position to the
officials in attendance. The European mediator also shared his impressions
with the professional staff in Jerusalem.
To allow the European mediator to form his own impressions regarding the
Syrians' attitude toward the covert channel, Suleiman invited him to join
him on his trips to Damascus. Each time they landed there, an official car
awaited them near their plane. They were taken to the office of Syrian Vice
President Farouk Shara, and occasionally met with Syrian Foreign Minister
Walid Muallem and a senior official in Syrian intelligence.
The European mediator had the impression that the Syrian leadership was
treating the matter very seriously and was not wasting his time or the
taxpayer's money on "futile academic talks." He recalled that the Oslo
Accords with the Palestinians began with talks among academics, with the
assistance of a European country.
"I was convinced that the Syrians want a peace agreement with you," the
European mediator reported directly to official Israeli sources even before
the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in February
2005 and the investigation that began afterward. His impression was that the
Syrian motive for the murder went far deeper than fear of revenge from the
United States or France, which points to Assad as the one responsible for
Hariri's death.
"Farouk Shara told me radical Islam constitutes a threat to Syria and that
peace is the only way to halt it," the mediator said. He said the Syrians
told him that in a few years, they would lose their oil sources and need
significant amounts of foreign currency to purchase energy from external
sources. The Alawite regime realizes, the European mediator said, that in
order to survive, it has to bring foreign currency into Syria, and that no
sane businessman would invest his fortune in a country that is not at peace
with its neighbors.
While in Damascus, the European mediator heard about Syria's readiness to
include its ties with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas in its agenda for peace
negotiations with Israel. He even reported identical comments he heard from
the Syrian Foreign Ministry's legal adviser, Riad Daoudi, at the 'Madrid+15
Conference' on Friday.
Daoudi's refusal to befriend the Israeli delegation at the Madrid conference
is in line with the Syrians' approach in the European channel regarding
proposals for Syrian gestures toward Israel, such as the digging up the
bones of Israeli spy Eli Cohen, information on missing Israeli soldiers or a
visit to the grave of Rabbi Haim Vital.
"Israel has held onto our land for 40 years now and rejects are request to
open negotiations, and after all that, they expect confidence-building steps
from us," the Syrians argue.
Wartime meetings
The discussions dealt with all the matters that occupied the official
negotiation teams: borders, water, security and normalization. Suleiman,
representing the Syrian position, made it clear from the first moment that
it would be a shame to waste time on futile attempts to move Syria from its
position regarding the June 4, 1967 borders. Feelers regarding the
possibility of territorial exchange were dismissed out of hand.
Nonetheless, the Syrians showed surprising flexibility regarding everything
connected to a timetable for evacuating Israeli communities in the Golan
Heights, water use and primarily the concept of building a "peace park" in
the buffer zone that would be open to Israeli visitors.
The final document was formulated in August 2005, and has since been changed
slightly. The final meeting took place a year later, in the midst of the
second Lebanon war, on a day in which eight Israelis were killed by
Hezbollah-fired Katyusha rockets in the Galilee. Suleiman announced that the
Syrians had done all they could with the covert channel and were suggesting
a meeting between a Syrian representative at the rank of deputy minister and
an Israeli official at the rank of director general. They asked that C.
David Welch, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs,
also participate in the meeting.
That was the end of the story.
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