On ‘flipping’ Syria, prospects for peace

Much of the American MSM commentary on the news about the Syrian-Israeli proximity talks in Turkey has focused on the long-mentioned hope of the west (whatever that is) being able to “flip” Syria away from its 30-year alliance with Iran and its support for Lebanon’s Hizbullah and Palestine’s Hamas.
The way many US commentators use this term you’d think that Syria, population 19.3 million, is a tiny place, so weak that it could simply be treated like a fried egg or your breakfast pancakes. In this case, just slide underneath Syria enough vague promises about the return of long-occupied land and enough western aid dollars and– bingo!– you can politically ‘flip’ this little pancake over by a full 180 degrees.
Demeaning and silly as an analogy? You bet.
Maybe too many Americans think Syria is just like it was back in 1949, when CIA agents hurried into the country with bundles full of cash, which they used to bankroll the coup effort mounted by Hosni Zaim. (Or just like Iran, when the CIA mounted the coup against Mossadegh a few years later… Or like Iraq, when they supported the coup that brought the Baath Party to power in 1963… )
You just find a way to shovel money into the country and overnight it gets ‘flipped’? I don’t think so. And in case no-one noticed, none of the above efforts at “flipping” countries worked out well in the end…
Today’s Syria is nothing like the fragile post-independence entity it was back in 1949. Today’s Syria has a functioning state that has educated and brought into the modern era (with roads, electricity, irrigation, courthouses, schools, etc) a national population that largely supports the policies of its government. That’s the case whether ‘westerners’ like that fact, or not.
We should recognize, too, that the catastrophic failure of the US project to “remake” neighboring Iraq, and the widespread misery that has ensued there, have left Syrians– like probably the vast majority of the other peoples of the Middle East– with a huge skepticism that “the American path” can bring them any lasting benefit at all. As Syrians daily encounter the tragic stories and dispirited faces of the million or so refugees from the US-invented “new Iraq” who huddle in their midst, the fact that this US government is so opposed to the Asad regime probably makes Syrians more inclined to support the regime, rather than less so.
The Syrian analyst Sami Moubayed told us in this fascinating commentary yesterday that,

The indirect talks between Syria and Israel, via Turkey, are not new. Nor are they a prelude to any peace treaty—so long as George W. Bush is in the White House. They have managed to lift spirits, however, coming hours after warring Lebanese factions announced that they had reached an agreement in Doha on May 22, 2008.
There was optimism in the air in Damascus.
No more talk of summer war in the Middle East, which has haunted Syrian lives since 2006.
No more dangers of another sectarian outburst—at least for now—in neighboring Lebanon. The Syrians were pleased that Beirut—the traditional haven for all Syrians—was now back to normal and they could go there again, for education, medication, shopping, pleasure, and to see family and friends.
Peace [with Israel] would mean many things, as far as the Syrians are concerned. No more emergency laws that have been in-place since 1963. Nor more forced conscription into the Syrian Army for a draft that lasts up to 24-months. No more limited investment in Syria, and thus, much more job opportunities…

He warned, however, that any optimism about a speedy conclusion of the final-status peace agreement with Israel would be unrealistic. Comparing the present situation with the situation in Egypt just before Sadat’s launching of the big initiative that resulted in a final-status peace between Egypt and Israel, Moubayed noted that “Olmert is not Begin and George W. Bush is not Carter.” (And as one of his commenters added there, Bashar al-Asad is not Sadat, either.)
I think Moubayed’s lack of optimism is realistic and justified. Prime case in point: the embattled Ehud Olmert has nothing like the domestic-political power needed to bring Israel’s public along with him into finalization of this peace process that PM Yitzhak Rabin had when he was engaged in very serious negotiations with President Hafez al-Asad in 1994-95. And even Rabin had a very hard time of it back then, as we know.
The outstanding territorial issue between Israel and Syria is the ending of the military occupation of Syria’s Golan that Israel has maintained since June 1967. We can recall that in the period before Sadat’s ground-breaking visit to Jerusalem in 1977, many Israelis were “very attached” to the vast, Israeli-occupied reaches of occupied Egyptian Sinai. Many Israelis had developed a romantic-style attachment to those broad expanses of desert, to the fabulous skin-diving along Sinai’s Red Sea coast, to the hippy lifestyles they had developed in resorts throughout the peninsula.
Oh, and there were even a few thousand Israeli settlers who had been easily lured into the attractive deal of heavily subsidized housing in the new coastal settlement of Yamit.
In the peace with Egypt, the whole structure of Israeli control over Sinai was dismantled. The IDF had to pull completely out. Egyptian police restored Cairo’s control over the peninsula’s civilian affairs, though the all or nearly all of the peninsula was demilitarized and placed under the monitoring of a US-led monitoring force.
The settlement at Yamit was demolished, by the Israelis themselves. (It was the earliest example of Ariel Sharon undertaking a highly over-dramatized “demolition” of an Israeli settlement– that had anyway been illegal, all along… a model that he followed once again in Gaza, 25 years later.) The hippy-style resorts were turned over to Egyptian owners; Israeli tourists continued to be able to roam around Sinai, but they now did so under Egyptian sovereignty. Israel also got considerable economic benefits from Egypt as part of the Sinai handback.
Guess what. When the Syrians were negotiating a final-status peace with first Rabin and then Peres in the period 1994-96, they were looking at something exactly like that same model: a complete Israeli withdrawal back to the lines of June 4, 1967, in return for an internationally monitored demilitarization arrangement for Golan plus considerable economic benefits for Israel. If you read the large quote on p.136 of my book The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks: 1991-96 and Beyond you can see how far the chief Syrian negotiator at that time, the present Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem, felt the talks had progressed… before they were broken off by the Israeli side in March 1996.
Now it is true that in any peace agreement, each party will also generally include some serious promises about not itself undertaking or giving material support to others who undertake, acts of violent subversion against the other. In the Jordanian-Israeli relationship, Israel’s blatant violation of that clause, in 1997, when PM Netanyahu sent Mossad agents to assassinate a political figure who was in Jordan with the express permission of King Hussein, brought about a near-crisis in Israel’s relations with Jordan. (The figure in question was Hamas head Khaled Meshaal, who had promised Hussein that he would not take any actions to undermine his rule in Jordan.)
Note that Israel did not demand in its peace negotiations with Jordan, and did not get, any promise that Jordan would not even host Meshaal and his colleagues as civilian residents. Meshaal was anyway a citizen of Jordan, so it would have been hard to get that.
Similarly, Egypt, which has a much longer-standing peace agreement with Israel than Jordan, maintains relations with Hamas. (And of course, Egypt’s good offices as mediator have been very valuable to Olmert’s government as it has attempted to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas in recent months.)
So it is by no means engraved in stone that, even if Israel and Syria do succeed in concluding a peace agreement, Mr. Meshaal and his friends and colleagues from both Hamas and Hizbullah would find Syria to be completely hostile territory.
Many of the governments with which Israel maintains good relations– including, of course, Turkey– also maintain good relations with Iran and with Hamas. It is not necessarily the case that a peace agreement with Syria would require Syria to break such relations completely.
Of course, the prospect of revived peace talks between Syria and Israel has probably caused some concern to both Hamas and Iran (though maybe not as much as the Saudi daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat has breathlessly reported.) In Damascus, the government daily Tishrin has sought to reassure its allies by saying that “Damascus rejects all preconditions concerning its relations with other countries and peoples.. Damascus will make no compromise on these relations.”
No doubt the leaders in Syria, Iran, Hamas, and Hizbullah are all also looking quite closely at the prospects that the present peace process may actually arrive in the foreseeable future in a completed peace agreement. The prospects of that happening do not look good. The Syrian government, backed up overwhelmingly by its own citizenry, has always rejected any peace agreement that would involve making any territorial concessions to Israel at all. The popular version of that is that there is no way any Syrian ruler will settle for even one inch less than what Sadat won for Egypt in 1978-79…. And for now, attitudes in Israel toward any prospect of returning all or even most of Golan to its rightful Syrian owners seem even more opposed even than they were in the 1994-96 period.
Haaretz’s Lili Galili reported yesterday that,

About two-thirds of Israelis object to withdrawing from the Golan Heights even for peace with Syria – more than those who object to dividing Jerusalem for ending the conflict with the Arab world, a recent survey finds.

In addition, Olmert’s own motivations for suddenly engaging in this portion of diplomacy– and therefore, also both his desire and ability to pursue it to successful completion– are certainly open to question. The NYT’s Ethan Bronner was certainly not the only one to observe that,

It did not go unnoticed, for example, that at the precise hour on Wednesday evening that the police released damning new details of the investigation against him (prosecutors say envelopes of cash were passed to him for personal use), Mr. Olmert made a speech in Tel Aviv that started with his hopes for the Syria talks, thereby upstaging the police on the evening news.
The newspapers were filled with derisive commentary on Thursday about a prime minister who hopes to trade away the strategic Golan Heights to a sworn enemy when he is facing an inquiry into his integrity and trustworthiness.
“The Golan in exchange for an envelope full of dollars won’t be well received,” fumed Sever Plocker, a widely read columnist for Yediot Aharonot. “It is doomed to fail: Any agreement that Olmert might present to the public will appear to be stained from the outset.”

So, the news about “the Turkish track” that was revealed this week may have been basically good news (because it was about the possibility of serious peacemaking on this important front) as well as politically intriguing news– because it was done largely or wholly behind the back of the Americans. But it may not, in itself, lead directly to any sustained and successful completion of a peace agreement.
That step will probably require both a much more serious leadership in Israel and either a more seriously engaged leadership in the United States or further considerable changes in the balance of power in the Middle East. All of these changes may well occur in the months ahead, so the story is by no means finished yet.