Syria - it’s the real thing?
May 23rd, 2008“Don’t expect the talk of peace with Syria to come true,” I said on this blog a couple of months ago. Well, now Israel and Syria are holding talks via Turkish mediation. But as my piece in this week’s issue of The Economist says, there are plenty of people who think Olmert is just doing it to divert attention from the Palestinian talks and his corruption investigation. And it may be no coincidence that Bashar al-Assad and Recep Tayyip Erdogan would welcome something to distract people from their own scandals.
Or it may indeed be just coincidence. The received wisdom now does seem to be that Syria and Israel have been trying to get talks going for a long while. And if they really wanted to, points out a friend of mine who follows Syria, it should be a piece of cake compared to negotiating Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The prices are well-known: Syria wants all of the Golan back to the June 4, 1967 border. Israel wants Syria to cut ties with Hizbullah, Hamas and Iran, though that will be harder to verify. Other issues like water rights are tricky but basically soluble.
The main problem I see is that even if Olmert and Assad are both totally serious, it doesn’t depend only on them. Syria wants the West to welcome it back into the community of nations. That gift is in the hands of the Americans, first and foremost, and they don’t believe Syria will play by the West’s rules. Perhaps more to the point, Condoleezza Rice has invested all her efforts in Israeli-Palestinian peace, which she claims is “the most mature track” (mature to the point of decomposition, if you ask me) and she doesn’t want to see her hard work and her legacy as secretary of state go down the drain. So even if Olmert is ready to give up all of the Golan, he can’t in fact give Syria what it wants.
Update (May 23): An Israeli lawyer is demanding that the attorney-general open a criminal investigation into Olmert for launching the peace talks without government approval. The news report I linked to isn’t quite accurate: it says no citizen may discuss the transfer of sovereign territory to another state. The lawyer’s letter, provided by the Israel Resource Review which published the report, cites a section from the 1977 penal code that forbids any citizen from, in his words, “an act leading to the removal of any area of land from the sovereignty of the state or its coming under the sovereignty of a foreign state,” unless the government approves it. According to him, launching peace talks without a cabinet decision, which seems to be what Olmert has done, comes under this rubric.
Of course, Olmert will only have committed an offence if his decision leads to land under Israeli sovereignty being transferred to Syria. If the peace talks go nowhere he’s not guilty. And I’m no lawyer, but I’m not sure that land occupied in wartime and not internationally recognised as part of your territory counts as land under your sovereignty. The things people waste their time on here…