Washington Institute
January 18, 1996
As I look at the faces of some of the journalists who have accompanied
this process from the outset and some of whom have been on the recent
trip, I feel that I could always get up and say that we have had
constructive talks and serious engagement, and this would be a short and
safe way of describing the status of the negotiations, but this is not the
purpose of the exercise.
At the same time, I think that the Washington Institute is precisely the
middle ground at which one can look at the negotiations like this and in a
somewhat reflective mood, remember that we are not strictly in an academic
seminar dealing with a negotiation that is over or took place 20 years
ago; we are looking at an ongoing negotiation. And of course we'll discuss
about -- discuss it in the flesh, but I think the mode would be to look at
this in some perspective and to deal with it with some reflection and not
to focus exclusively on what exactly did the secretary of State produce in
his stay in Damascus.
There is a level of detail that we will not be able to get into. I think
we all understand that. I will try to be as forthcoming as I can within
the boundaries of diplomatic decency and the rules of the game that we
have all established.
I vividly remember my previous presentation at the Washington Institute
seven months ago on the eve of the resumption of the Syrian-Israeli
negotiations in the summer of 1995, a negotiation that then took the form
of the second meeting between the Syrian and Israeli chiefs of staff. The
purpose of my presentation then was to try to put that negotiation and
what could be expected in it and of it in some perspective.
As you will recall, we had first established a format in which delegations
negotiated face to face in the State Department building. The first
Israeli delegation was formed and led by the Likud government, and then
there was a change in the delegation after the election of the late
Yitzhak Rabin as the prime minister of Israel, and the new phase began in
August 1992.
We then shifted to smaller meetings between heads of delegations in which
Ambassador Mualem, Ambassador Allaf and myself met in the winter of '94.
There was an important breakthrough in the negotiations in the spring of
'94 when a fresh lease on life was given to the negotiations. The Israeli
position was then couched in terms of the famous table and its four legs.
This led to another change in format, the so-called 'ambassador's
challenge', in which Ambassador Mualem and myself negotiated throughout
the summer and part of the fall of 1994. We then both reached a conclusion
and recommended to our governments, as well as to our American partners,
that we needed to talk to the security component of the negotiation, and
recommended that high-ranking military officers be sent to Washington to
try to build a dialogue between the Israeli military and the Syrian
military as what we all thought was a prerequisite for a successful
negotiation.
This led to the first meeting of the chiefs of staff in December of 1994.
The Israeli chief of staff then was General Ehud Barak, who is presently
the Israeli foreign minister. He met with General Shihabi, who still is
the Syrian chief of staff. That meeting had no follow-up. It was followed
by a Syrian-Israeli disagreement over the next step and the meaning of the
meeting and a hiatus in the negotiations.
It then led us to negotiate a short paper called "The Aims and Principles
of the Security Arrangements," in which a number of general principles
that should govern a Syrian-Israeli agreement on security arrangements was
agreed upon between us, and it served as the foundation for the second
meeting of the chiefs of staff, in which the same General Shihabi, but no
longer General Barak, but General Shahak, participated on the Israeli
side. That was the event ahead of which I came and addressed this
forum.
We all felt at the time, certainly the Israelis, that the meeting between
the two chiefs of staff was actually a good meeting. No major agreement
was reached in the meeting, but our feeling at the end of the meeting was
that both chiefs of staff identified in each other partners and that the
ground was laid for further work. This clearly was not the feeling of
President Assad, who defined the meeting subsequently as an unsuccessful
meeting. The trip by the U.S. peace team in the region that followed the
meeting ended with an impasse, and it led both President Assad and the
late Prime Minister Rabin to what I can define as a crisis in confidence.
Both suspected each other of not really seeking an agreement before the
Israeli elections of 1996. And that remained the case for several
months.
In the weeks and days preceding the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin,
an attempt was afoot to renew the negotiations that I believe would have
been successful, at least technically, mainly in setting up a new
mechanism for negotiations on the security issues. But that effort was of
course cut short, like so many other things, by the assassination.
We now are in the midst of an entirely new phase defined by the
assassination and by the formation of a new Israeli government, headed by
Prime Minister Peres, but not just by this. I think it would be erroneous
to define the present phase as formed only by the assassination or by the
formation of new Israeli government. There are at least two other elements
at work, and let me say something about them.
The first is the time element, as an objective factor at work. We are in
1996. It was one thing to speak about the elections of 1996 -- let me
emphasize, both in the United States and in Israel -- from the certain
perspective at 1994 and 1995 before this, but time did go by, and as we
have entered the year of 1996, this is something that everybody has to
figure into his or her calculus. I don't think I want to speculate at any
length on how that calculus operates, either on the Israeli or on the
Syrian side, but let us accept it as a fact, and an important one, that
this is a factor at work and it has affected and does affect the
negotiations.
Secondly, events in progress on other tracks of the Arab-Israeli peace
process. The Syrian-Israeli track has never been conducted in isolation
from other tracks, and events on other tracks have affected the
negotiations -- first and foremost, the conclusion at the end of September
of Oslo 2, the Israeli-Palestinian agreement. We are on the eve of the
Palestinian elections, and on the whole, these developments have had a
very beneficial effect on the Syrian-Israeli negotiations. They
facilitated the development of the concept of comprehensiveness, on which
I will dwell later, and they have created a better atmosphere for the
negotiations. They have freed the Israeli calendar or agenda from the need
to deal in any great detail with other tracks, and it has enabled us to
focus on the Syrian track.
The fact that there was a very successful economic regional conference in
Amman last November, the fact that there is another such conference
planned for next November in Cairo also facilitates the Israeli-Syrian
negotiations. I will elaborate on the comprehensiveness and the economic
dimension later.
So these are the two other variables that I wanted to mention in creating
the environment within which this new phase in the negotiations is taking
place. Let me now move to that third variable with which I began, namely,
the formation of the Peres government and the new accent that Prime
Minister Peres has given to the Israeli approach to the negotiations.
Let me liken it to a two-story structure. The first story: we have the
original package, the famous four legs of the table, and let me mention
them or recite them once more. According to that original package, in
order for an Israeli deal to take place, four elements need to be
addressed and agreed upon: first is peace, second is withdrawal, third is
an agreement on security arrangements, and fourth a time structure -- both
the agreement on a time frame and an agreement on the interface or the
synchronization of the element of withdrawal on the one hand and the
element of peace and security on the other. In the original scheme of
things, when conditions were to be met on all four, an agreement was to be
in place, or a breakthrough was to have occurred.
Now, Prime Minister Peres was a partner to formulating the original
package, and of course he sustains the original package, but he added
several accents when he became prime minister and when he began to lead
these negotiations. One element is an emphasis on comprehensiveness, the
comprehensiveness of the agreement or the linkage between the
Syrian-Israeli agreement and an end to the Arab- Israeli conflict, or a
virtual end, to use a well-liked term in this town, a virtual end to the
Arab-Israeli conflict. The prime minister has made it very clear from the
outset that this is very much an important priority for him.
Secondly, an emphasis on the quality of peace and an explicit disinterest
in a cold peace or in a formal or in a hollow peace with Syrian. Given the
nature of the Syrian-Israeli relationship and given its place in the
scheme of things -- this is not the first Arab- Israeli peace treaty to be
concluded when it is concluded; it's going to be the third, and it's going
to happen almost 20 years after the first. And what was good and
sufficient in 1979, in 1996 hopefully will be less than satisfactory. And
therefore in order to be attractive to us and acceptable to us, peace
between Israel and Syria needs to have a quality, quality as distinct from
being a formal or a cold or -- choose the term -- a peace that is less
than a qualitative peace.
Thirdly, an emphasis on the economic dimension of peace to embed a new
Syrian-Israeli relationship in an economic context about which I will
elaborate some later. The concept or the notion is that in order to be
durable, a Syrian-Israeli peace, and durable not in terms of the next few
months or the next year, but durable over time, the Syrian-Israeli peace
will have to be embedded in a regional economic package that will endow it
with the richness and durability that we all want it to have.
Fourthly, I know I have sent word and an appeal to the United States to
become even more active than it has been. If previously we all -- or we
both, Syrians and Israelis, understood that this was, in a way, a
three-way negotiation, that parallel and not less significantly than its
negotiations with Israel, Syria was negotiating not peace, but a new
relationship with the United States, and the United States therefore has
been not just a cosponsor, but in a way a partner, the third partner to
these negotiations, and has acted in certain ways that flowed from it,
then the prime minister has encouraged the United States to take an even
more active role in the negotiations.
This was accompanied by a number of signals to Syria in an attempt to
improve the atmosphere that were reciprocated or responded to by the
Syrians. There has been a response to that, and let me speak briefly about
the Syrian response to this new Israeli initiative.
The response has taken the form, first, of a reciprocity in atmosphere.
Since November we have had better music, better signals coming out of
Damascus, both in reference, direct reference to Israel and the peace
process by the Syrian principals and the Syrian media. To give one
example, the statement by the foreign minister, Faruk a-Shara, on the
premium that needs to be put on keeping peace and quiet on the
Lebanese-Israeli border was an excellent illustration of a positive
statement that was very well received and registered in Israel. That was
the first component.
The second component was in a response and agreement to resume the
negotiations without preconditions and with elements of flexibility in the
form of those negotiations. The Syrians decided not to raise the level of
negotiators to a political level, but to empower and increase the
authority of Ambassador Mualem and give him and his colleagues a larger
mandate both in terms of substance and in terms of atmosphere.
Now, of course we can overdo the discussion on atmosphere, but we have
always known that in these negotiations, the atmosphere was a part of
substance, and as long as you do not overplay it, you have to read it in
substantive terms. The fact of life was that until August 1993, there were
no handshakes between the Syrian negotiators and the Israelis, and when a
handshake was offered in 1993, that was a substantive signal, and so forth
and so forth. So this has been part of the new mandate.
Thirdly, and that in operative terms may have been very important, an
agreement to deal for a while with the Israeli side of the equation. We
know the Syrian position: offer Israel full peace for full withdrawal.
Those who have been with these negotiations for a while remember the
argument ad nauseam of "I need to hear first about full withdrawal," and
the Israeli response, "You don't begin a negotiation with the bottom
line." We found ways, of course, for dealing with elements of the
negotiation over time without that commitment, but it has certainly
hampered the progress of the negotiations.
This time, consciously, the Syrians have agreed to deal until now with the
Israeli side of the equation, which is full peace -- what does full peace
mean? That's the question we have always asked. We know exactly what full
withdrawal means. We've had a very easily definable geographical
expression. Full peace is more difficult to define, it's take more time
and more space. And there was a certain disparity in that regard, and we
have always asked to redress that disparity.
The Syrians have agreed now to deal with full peace, with the elements
that from our point of view make up the notion of full peace. Now, again,
I wouldn't want for a moment to create the illusion that the Syrians have
changed, softened or removed their insistence on full withdrawal, on their
definition of full withdrawal. And they remind in the course of the
negotiations every so often that this remains the case. But in terms of
facilitating the negotiations, enabling to move forward, they are willing
to deal now with the Israeli issues: quality of peace, normalization,
water. If we will have presently an occasion or opportunity to discuss the
security arrangements, these are issues which Israel wants to discuss, and
we can discuss them.
So in terms of opening up the negotiations, the decision to choose this
formula, whereby the Syrians every so often and persistently and
consistently keep telling us that their demand to full withdrawal remains
as potent as it has always been and that without it there will be no deal,
but yet they are willing to discuss the other issues for the time being,
has made a big difference in the negotiations and then, of course, the
issues themselves.
Let me now try to assess what has happened in the negotiations thus far.
That is to say, the preparatory trips by the Secretary of State and the
peace deal, the first Wye conference, and then the secretary's recent trip
to the region. There is one issue on which we have agreement, in the sense
that we see eye to eye; we have not written down anything, so my use of
the term agreement is limited by this. We think we know that we agree on
comprehensiveness and on the components of comprehensiveness, but we have
not drafted anything, we have not written down anything, and we all know
very well that when you get down to writing and drafting and you use
precise language, you may discover that you need to invest more work
before you can say that you have agreed.
But I think that we have agreement in the sense that I described on
comprehensiveness, namely, that indeed a Syrian-Israeli agreement should
lead to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement in two respects. One is
that the Syrian definition of comprehensiveness has since 1994 been an
agreement or agreements with Syria and with Lebanon. Given the fact that
there is an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, there has been an
Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty for many years now and that the Palestinians
signed with us Oslo 1 and Oslo 2, that means the treaties or agreements
with Syria and Lebanon would complete the circle of Israeli -- the end of
Israel's conflict with the -- what used to be known in older terminology
-- the confrontation states. Let's call it the immediate neighbors or the
immediate cycle.
From the Syrian point of view, this would be it. It's been stated already
in 1994 and it's been more formalized now. It's been stated, I think in
the most eloquent and exquisite fashion, by President Assad himself when
he was in Cairo last and spoke at a press conference and spoke at some
length about this Syrian view of comprehensiveness, or why agreements with
Syria and Lebanon would complete peace in this cycle.
The second component of this is that Syria would be supportive of other
Arab states at that point recognizing Israel or normalizing relations with
Israel. We don't expect all members of the Arab League to do that at that
time, but we very much hope that the majority of the members of the Arab
League will do it in that time. And it would be in that respect, from our
point of view, an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. That is to say,
agreements with all the immediate neighbors and recognition by the
majority of the members of the Arab states for us would constitute the end
of the conflict. That is one component of comprehensiveness.
The second component of comprehensiveness would mean no linkage, that is
to say, that an agreement between Israel and Syria and between Israel and
Lebanon would have its own validity; it would not need to be endorsed by
others. And again, I think President Assad explained it very well in the
same press conference that I alluded to, and the foreign minister, Faruk
a-Shara, did that in a couple of interviews as well.
Thirdly is the regional and economic dimension of comprehensiveness. Our
assumption is that if all of this materializes, or when all of this
materializes, and Israel will have peace and normal relations with a
majority of the Arab states, then two things can happen. One is we could
have a new politics in the region of the Middle East, and the region could
start operating as a region without the elements of the Arab-Israeli
conflict. And we have seen beginnings of that. The Casablanca conference
and the Amman conference were two regional conferences, still limited by
the fact that we don't have a comprehensive agreement, but they were very
successful enterprises. The Cairo conference convenes next November, and
if we conclude before then, could already be the beneficiary of a new
state in the region. There are other regional institutions that are
already in place through the multilateral track of the peace process, and
political relationships.
I call it the politics of access, not the politics of axes. It doesn't
mean that you have to translate the new state into partnerships, alliances
and access of one against the other, but it will be access across the
region to countries that would want to formulate a new relationship.
We also believe that this should have an economic dimension to it, that
this should be the opportunity in which resources could be mobilized and
regional plans could be put together in order to transform the region and
to deal with questions of water, overpopulation, under-resources,
underdevelopment, that are the real problems of the region once the
political issues are remedied, if not totally resolved. And we hope that
the United States would lead in the international effort -- in which the
United States would be the leader and not a contributor. And it is here
that I rejoin the piece that appeared on the editorial page of "The
Washington Post," which I guess most of you have seen. It referred to a
report on Israel's state-run television. Anybody who has the slightest
familiarity with Israel and the Israeli government and the Israeli media
would smile at the notion that even though public -- television in Israel
is public and is regulated by government law, that it really listens to
the government. We -- this is not the East German television of 10
years ago. And also, a report that appears on Israeli television is just
like any other media report. It has its origins and its intentions and its
validity, such as it is.
So the figure of $12 billion that Israel would expect as a package from
the U.S. government, $7 billion for security, $3 billion for some
mysterious water projects, and $2 billion for rehabilitating the Israeli
residents of the Golan Heights, is taken out of thin air and bears no
relationship to what I have just described. When we speak about the
economic dimension of comprehensiveness, what we have in mind is something
reminiscent, but on a much larger scale, of the donor effort to the
Palestinians in which the United States is the leader of the effort, but
in terms of its actual financial contribution, is not at all the largest
actor. It would be actually -- turn to the international community and
originate within the -- in the region, in Europe, in Asia, and not
necessarily just ask to contribute. Also to invest and to take advantage
of these opportunities to transform the economy as well as the politics of
the region. This is the third component of comprehensiveness.
Now, all three components that I outlined are acceptable to both Syria
and Israel, and this is the area on which we have had the greatest
qualitative agreement and progress. Secondly, we have come closer on the
quality of peace. I cannot get into details on the discussions with regard
to normalization and quality of peace, but certainly the discussions have
generated greater agreement and brought us closer.
We have also agreed on the concept and methodology of the negotiations.
That is to say, we know that there now is a negotiating core, or group of
Syrians, Americans and Israelis who are engaged in these negotiations, who
all believe in it, who know how they want to proceed and how to build a
concept that would lead us to resolve or come to agreement on the elements
that I mentioned before, the four legs of the table and the new elements.
And when we all feel that we have reached a sufficient degree of agreement
or convergence on them, we can move from what we are doing now, which you
can term as pre-negotiations, to full-fledged negotiations with large
negotiating teams mainly engaged in ceaseless negotiations without any
interruptions until we reach agreement.
During the -- now looking at what we can expect when the negotiations
resume, at Wye and during the secretary's next visit at some point in
early February to build upon what hopefully will be achieved at Wye. As
you know, there will be a military participation, that is to say, the core
group will be joined by senior officers from all three sides, and the
security issues will be laid again on the table without preconditions from
either side.
There will not be delegates to discuss economy -- or economic issues, or
water, but the issues of water and economy are on the table and can be
discussed by us, at least conceptually. None of us is a water expert or an
economic expert in the full sense of the term, but we will be authorized
or empowered to discuss these issues and bring them to the point at which
experts could join us. I believe that our Syrian colleagues will be given
further mandate to continue the discussion on the quality of peace and to
take advantage of what we have already agreed upon in order to move the
negotiations further.
These then will be the highlights or the focal points of the negotiations.
Two new elements, security and water -- not new in the history of the
negotiations, but new in the peace phase of the negotiations, and I
believe more innovative discussions of the issues that we have already
tackled, mostly the quality of peace, normalization and the economic
dimension of the Syrian-Israeli peace.
Let me, before I conclude, emphasize a few other points that derive mostly
from my discussion of comprehensiveness. One has to do with Lebanon. I
mentioned Syria and Lebanon and the Syrian insistence that an agreement
with Lebanon needs to happen together with an agreement with Syria, and
that together they would bring us to the point of comprehensiveness.
We all recognize the fact that Syria enjoys a great deal of influence in
Lebanon, that there is a Syrian presence in Lebanon. But we the Israelis
regard and treat Lebanon as a sovereign, independent, separate state, a
state that has its government, its place in the international arena and in
the region, and we would like to resume the negotiations with Lebanon as
soon as this becomes feasible. We negotiated with the Lebanese when we
used to negotiate through delegations. That negotiation was interrupted,
it was not renewed, and from our point of view, we'd like to renew the
negotiations dealing with the government and the state of Lebanon, and
conclude an agreement with them.
We recognize the linkage between the Syrian and Lebanese tracks and we'll
not be blind to it. We also recognize the fact that there are elements in
Lebanon outside the control of the Lebanese government. The Hizbullah is,
in our perception, an arm of the Iranian government and is not under the
control of the Lebanese government, and therefore while we want to deal
with the government of Lebanon and reach and implement an agreement with
Lebanon, of course we have very important security interests, primarily in
southern Lebanon, and we will need and will make sure that they are
provided for, and that all elements, even those that are not under control
of the Lebanese government, will be resolved to our satisfaction. There
will have to be a fine balance struck in this, and we hope that we're able
to achieve it.
Secondly, with regard to Turkey, there is a Turkish dimension, a Turkish
interest in all of this, in a number of ways. First of all, if we speak
about the new politics of the region, Turkey looms large in the region;
it's a very important state. It has a European dimension, it has a Middle
Eastern dimension. It has dominated the region and has been an important
player in the region and continues to be so. Israel has a very friendly
bilateral relationship with Turkey now. We have a good dialogue. We were
visited by the Turkish deputy foreign minister recently and had very good
talks with him. And ambassadors in Tel Aviv and in Ankara talk to the
governments and there is a dialogue that goes on. We would like to keep
that partnership.
There are two elements in which Turkey is mentioned in addition to this
general regional sense. One is the Turkish-Syrian relationship. It is a
bilateral relationship and will have to be addressed and hopefully
improved and resolved by the Turks and the Syrians. It's not something
that we need to deal with. And then there is the water issue. The name of
Turkey is invoked very often when water is mentioned. Turkey has been a
partner to the Arab-Israeli peace process through the multilateral track,
and it is fully aware of the work that has already been invested on the
question of water in the working group on water. And Turkey has a point of
view in all of this. And what we all in all of these countries, in the
United States, Syria, Israel, the Turks, and so forth, we'll have to do as
the discussion proceeds in the coming weeks and months, and
comprehensiveness and water are on the table, is that Turkish point of
view, Turkish interests integrated into the equation that will have to
emerge out of this.
Thank you very much.