Akiva Eldar’s leak about Syrian-Israeli contacts

There are many interesting aspects of the story that HaAretz’s Akiva Eldar published today, telling about some back-channel negotiations pursued– somewhat indirectly– between Syria and Israel, from September 2004 through July 2006.
First, of course, is the content of the not-officially-endorsed “draft agreement” the participants had reportedly arrived at.
Second is the story of who the participants were and how they pursued their contacts.
Third is the reported reason why the initiative became blocked last summer. (Eldar writes: “the Syrian … called for a secret meeting at the level of deputy minister, on the Syrian side, with an Israeli official at the rank of a ministry’s director general, including the participation of a senior American official. Israel did not agree to this Syrian request.” So the contacts ended.)
Fourth is the question of the timing of having this news leaked now, in January 2007, five months after the contacts in question ended. Is this part of an attempt by Israeli or American officials to embarrass Syria while at the same time trying to indicate– especially to other, more fearful Arab governments– that in the event of a big confrontation between the US and Iran even the Syrian regime may secretly be happy not to side with Teheran?
As you may imagine, since Syrian-Israeli relations is something I’ve published two books about, I have quite a lot of thoughts on this topic. Indeed, if I have time this evening I might try to make one of my annotated-table thingies based on Eldar’s reporting and published documents, as a way of organizing these thoughts.
However, I want to dwell a little first on this question of the timing of the leak.
Eldar is far, far coyer than most US journalists would be about the circumstances of his acquisition of the documents and reports in question, and he does nothing whatever to speculate on the motivations of the person or persons who provided them to him.
Maybe in tomorrow’s paper?
You can find HaAretz’s summary of the talks, and the descriptions of the main dramatis personae in this timeline article.
Regardless of who it was who first tipped Eldar off to this story and slipped him the “draft agreement” produced through this channel, he (then or later) succeeded in getting a terse confirmation from lead Israeli participant Alon Liel, a former director-general of the country’s Foreign Ministry, that the contacts in question had taken place… But he got few further comments from Liel.
He wrote that Liel,

refused to divulge details about the meetings but … [said] that meetings on an unofficial level have been a fairly common phenomenon during the past decade.
“We insisted on making the existence of meetings known to the relevant parties,” Liel said. “Nonetheless, there was no official Israeli connection to the content of the talks and to the ideas that were raised during the meetings.”

Eldar got a lot more information from Geoff Aronson, who is Director of Research and Publications at the Washington DC-based Foundation for Middle East Peace:

According to Geoffrey Aronson… who was involved in the talks, an agreement under American auspices would call for Syria to ensure that Hezbollah would limit itself to being solely a political party.
He also told Haaretz that Khaled Meshal, Hamas’ political bureau chief, based in Damascus, would have to leave the Syrian capital.
Syria would also exercise its influence for a solution to the conflict in Iraq, through an agreement between Shi’a leader Muqtada Sadr and the Sunni leadership, and in addition, it would contribute to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the refugee problem.
Aronson said the idea of a park on the Golan Heights allows for the Syrian demand that Israel pull back to the June 4 border, on the one hand, while on the other hand, the park eliminates Israeli concerns that Syrians will have access to the water sources of Lake Kinneret.
“This was a serious and honest effort to find creative solutions to practical problems that prevented an agreement from being reached during Barak’s [tenure as prime minister] and to create an atmosphere of building confidence between the two sides,” he said.

Eldar then has another para there, unattributed, in which he writes:

It also emerged that one of the Syrian messages to Israel had to do with the ties between Damascus and Tehran. In the message, the Alawi regime – the Assad family being members of the Alawi minority – asserts that it considers itself to be an integral part of the Sunni world and that it objects to the Shi’a theocratic regime, and is particularly opposed to Iran’s policy in Iraq. A senior Syrian official stressed that a peace agreement with Israel will enable Syria to distance itself from Iran.

Well, obviously Eldar’s not telling us who he got that from, precisely…
This is all very reminiscent of what I was writing about back in my 2000 book on the Syrian-Israeli negotiations of the 1990s, where I wrote “The general effect of the Syrian-Iranian link on the Israeli-Syrian negotiations of the mid-1990s can be viewed in a number of different (and not mutually incompatible) ways… ” Buy the book and go to pp. 179-80 to see how I characterized those ways… Or if I have time I’ll look for my old floppy disks of the text and see if I can retrieve that chunk.
So okay, Eldar is telling us that he has talked to Liel and to Aronson. It’s not certain if he has talked to the unnamed “senior official” of an unnnamed “European country” who also– along with Aronson– played a mediating role during these contacts, and whose government provided, apparently, all the logistics for at least one phase of them. I would say, from reading Eldar’s articles there, probably not. Things he reports that are attributed, in a general way, to “the European mediator” could as easily have come from the detailed reporting that this mediator presumably gave to Liel and his two other (unnamed) Israeli colleagues in the venture.
You ask about the attitude toward these contacts of official Washington? Well according to Eldar, back near the beginning of this channel, in 2004, the key Syrian-American “Mr. Fix-it” involved, Abe Soleiman, told a Turkish diplomat who had helped to open up the channel that year, 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.

In my judgment, if the Sharon government at that time had really wanted to sit down and negotiate with Syria, it would not have been deterred by any signs of displeasure from Washington. However, I don’t doubt that there were signs of such displeasure from the Bushites– then, as there would be now if any official, authorittative peace talks with Syria were being proposed by Olmert. (Which they aren’t– though his FM, Tzipi Livni, has made some remarks expressing interest in the idea.)
But anyway, back to Eldar, and the circumstances of, and possible motivations for, this latest “leak”.
Firstly, it seemed to come much more evidently from the Israeli side than from the Syrian side.
Secondly, in that paragraph full of “unattributed” material, in particular, it looks as though there’s a manipulative and quite possibly intentionally mendacious political hand at work. In “one of the Syrian messages to Israel… the Alawi regime [asserted] that it considers itself to be an integral part of the Sunni world and that it objects to the Shi’a theocratic regime, and is particularly opposed to Iran’s policy in Iraq”?? This is crass and barely believable stuff. Is it just Eldar’s unfamiliarity with the details and context of what he is writing about there? Or did somebody else give him explicitly this message that he should try to get into his article?
What is not credible in that report is that anyone representing the Syrian regime would use that particular kind of sectarian discourse (“part of the Sunni world”) rather than continuing the use of the secular Arab-nationalist discourse with which it has always sought to disguise its minoritarian sectarian status. Also, I don’t find it believable that any Syrian official would say straight out to someone communicating with an Israeli interlocutor that Syria “is particularly opposed to Iran’s policy in Iraq”.
There are a number of possibilities here. The possibility of sloppy “reporting” of Damascus’s position or words by Abe Suleiman can’t be ruled out. (On the other hand, his reporting was also being paralleled by the European mediator for most of the relevant time.)
Well, I’m not close enough to that whole story any more to do any independent digging into it of my own. (Though h’mmm, maybe I should go to Damascus sometime next month, when I’ll be in Cauiro, anyway? In 1998, when I was working on my 2000 book, I did some really interesting interviews with officials there and with former officials in Israel who’d participated in the relevant diplomacy…)
Maybe Eldar will give us more of the details we need, in follow-up articles.
Next up, if I have the time: just a few further questions into the status of the quite amazing map that Eldar published with his piece. It quite clearly conveys that the whole of the area of Syrian Golan that is now occupied by Israel will be included in the “Peace Park” that is a key device used by those unofficial negotiators to try to resolve some outstanding issues of borders and water access.
However, the text of the (still completely unoffical) “Draft Agreement” that the “negotiators” had come up with states clearly (Art. VI-1) that “The park will extend from the agreed upon border [that is, the long-agreed June 4, 1967 line between the two countries] eastward to a line to be determined by mutual agreement.”
It notably does not say it will extend from the June 4 line eastward to the present disengagement line, which is the picture that Eldar’s map there clearly conveys. The half-million-plus Syrian citizens who are the people displaced/”cleansed” from this occupied area in 1967-8, and their offspring, will no doubt look at Eldar’s map with its park-like tree icons dotted all over their former towns, villages, hamlets, and farms with some dismay. (As always, you can read about the human dimensions of the Golan question here.)
Anyway, now I truly need to run.