Israel Matzav

New pressure on Israel to surrender the Golan

After more than thirty years of peace and quiet on the Golan, we started to hear Syrian war threats over the last couple of months. Now, the Syrians are pursuing the diplomatic route. Sort of. A day after the New York Times reported that the bipartisan Iraq Study Group headed by James "F**k the Jews, they don't vote for us anyway" Baker met with Syrian officials to try to solicit their cooperation in Iraq, the Times of London is reporting that the Chinless Ophthalmologist has named his price: the surrender of the Golan Heights to Syria so that they can once again shoot down on the Jewish communities of the Galilee as they did before 1967. (Keep in mind that Assad's father turned down an offer from Ehud Barak that included all but a few hundred meters of the Golan Heights in 2000, but that would have required Syria to normalize relations with Israel).

The New York Times describes the meeting thusly:

“What would it take Syria to help on Iraq?” the Syrian ambassador, Imad Moustapha, recalled Mr. Baker asking Syria’s foreign minister, Walid Muallem, during a meeting in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria in September. Mr. Moustapha described the session as “very promising.”

During a 45-minute interview at the Syrian Embassy on Friday morning, the ambassador said he arranged the New York meeting, also attended by other members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, at Mr. Baker’s request. Separately, Ambassador Moustapha met twice with the study group in Washington.

The ambassador would not provide specifics, but said he had told the study group “in detail what actual things we can do, and what are the things that we cannot do. We were very candid with each other. We explained to them why it is in our own national interest to try to help stabilize the situation in Iraq.”

The Times is doubtful that President Bush will go along:

Mr. Baker has made little secret of his belief that the United States should negotiate with nations that it regards as enemies. He often likes to recount how, as secretary of state under the first President Bush, he traveled 15 times to Damascus in pursuit of a Middle East peace agreement. Earlier this week, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain delivered a widely publicized speech in which he suggested the West should pursue greater engagement with Iran and Syria.

President Bush, though, has not seemed open to dramatic policy shifts. During an appearance in the Oval Office on Monday, Mr. Bush called on Syria to withdraw from Lebanon and stop “harboring terrorists,” and said Iran must suspend uranium enrichment before talks could begin.

“If the Iranians want to have a dialogue with us, we have shown them a way forward,” Mr. Bush said. On Syria, he said, “The Syrian president knows my position.”

This morning, the Times of London says that the price has been named:

SYRIA is to demand American help in securing the return of the Golan Heights from Israel as the price of co-operation over Iraq. With the White House under pressure to talk to its adversary, President Bashar al-Assad has resolved that his assistance will not be cheap.

Assad has been considering how to respond to an American overture following reports that the Iraq Study Group will recommend that the United States engage Syria and Iran in talks on Iraq, a position backed by Tony Blair last week.

The Syrian president wants America and Britain to use their influence with Israel to raise the return of the Golan Heights, seized by the Israelis in the 1967 war. “It will be the top demand,” said Ayman Abdel Nour, a leading reformer in the ruling Ba’ath party.

Assad has ruled out co-operating with the Americans in return for the promise of unspecified benefits. “The Syrian leadership is fed up with the Americans and does not trust their word when it comes to future aid for Syria,” Abdel Nour said.

“Syria will not do anything unless it has secured guarantees from Washington and London that every action Damascus takes to help them will be reciprocated. It will be a step by step scenario: these actions for those actions,” he added. Assad also insists that any help must be dependent on a timetable for US troop withdrawals, a move resisted by President George W Bush.

DEBKAfile has been all over this story, and reports that although President Bush may not be in favor of a policy shift on Syria, Tony Blair - who may still be eligible to stand for re-election in the UK - is in favor of such a shift, and he is the one who is trying to back President Bush into a corner, in cooperation with Condi Rice and her State Department hacks:

As a down-payment for buying Syrian president Bashar Asad’s cooperation on Iraq, Blair will try and coerce Israel to accept talks with Syria for the return of the Golan captured in the 1967 war.

Last Monday, Nov. 13, prime minister Ehud Olmert rather naively claimed he and President George W. Bush were of one mind that Israel must not sit down and talk to Syria until the Asad regime had abandoned its sponsorship of terror.

As he spoke, three high-ranking US officials - David Satterfield, the state department’s coordinator for Iraq,J.D. Crouch, deputy national security adviser, and Condoleezza Rice’s assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, David Welch - were deep in arrangements for the Blair visit to Damascus, which they see as the key for opening the door to direct US-Tehran talks.

The fresh US-European Middle East momentum on the Palestinian issue is being crafted as a positive counterweight to the negative effect of the impending American-British withdrawal from Iraq. The groundwork for this ploy was laid by Blair’s senior political adviser Nigel Sheinwald, when he met Asad in Damascus in late October (as first reported by DEBKAfile).

He brought back welcome tidings from his meeting: Damascus and Tehran did not see eye to eye on Iraq; Asad said he felt no compulsion to stick to the Iranian line in the embattled country. Reporting this, DEBKA-Net-Weekly also revealed that former US ambassador to Syria, Margaret Scobie, would follow Blair to the Syrian capital. Now stationed in Iraq, she was abruptly withdrawn from Damascus in 2005 at the height of the crisis between Washington and Damascus. It is hoped that her return, formally designated as a visit to take leave of old friends in the Syrian hierarchy, will occasion a meeting with the Syrian president. This would be taken as the first sign of a thaw in US-Syrian relations.

The two Damascus visits are meant to be the conduit to the start of Washington’s dialogue with Tehran.

Blair’s most recent foreign policy statements are at odds with the positions he and Bush have shared - unless seen in the context of these behind-the-scenes diplomatic feelers. Through this prism, they sound like an effort to prepare American and British public opinion for the extreme policy reversal embodied in his impending visit to Damascus in the role of appeaser. The pacifier he means to offer for Syria’s cooperation on Iraq: massive Israeli concessions.

DEBKAfile also reports that Europe's pressure on Israel is not limited to the Syrian front:

The primary object of the new Spanish-Italian-French Middle East “peace plan” is to insert European military forces into the Gaza Strip after establishing themselves in the expanded UNIFIL in South Lebanon. In furtherance of their goal, the European Union endorsed the UN resolution’s call Friday, Nov. 17, for Israel to pull out of Gaza, although its withdrawal to the UN-approved line was completed in September 2005.

European assertiveness is coming at the expense of the Bush administration’s post-election weakness. Its tenaciously-held premise that the roads to all the region’s woes lead back to the Israel-Palestinian issue is already reflected in these two European steps, the first of a systematic campaign of crushing pressure on Israel to fall into line.

You will note that although Britain is not formally a part of that 'peace plan' it voted in favor of the General Assembly resolution on Friday.

Get used to it folks. As Europe becomes more and more Muslim, it will become more and more hostile to us. The percentage of Muslims in Europe is only increasing, and the native Europeans are becoming more and more scared. The native Europeans are likely to try to make the Jews (and specifically Israel) pay the price.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:12 AM