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International Security 27.1 (2002) 79-106



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Lost Opportunities for Peace in the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Israel and Syria, 1948-2001

Jerome Slater

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Until the year 2000, during which both the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian negotiating processes collapsed, it appeared that the overall Arab-Israeli conflict was finally going to be settled, thus bringing to a peaceful resolution one of the most enduring and dangerous regional conflicts in recent history. The Israeli-Egyptian conflict had concluded with the signing of the 1979 Camp David peace treaty, the Israeli-Jordanian conflict had formally ended in 1994 (though there had been a de facto peace between those two countries since the end of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war), and both the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian conflicts seemed on the verge of settlement.

Yet by the end of 2000, both sets of negotiations had collapsed, leading to the second Palestinian intifada (uprising), the election of Ariel Sharon as Israel's prime minister in February 2001, and mounting Israeli-Palestinian violence in 2001 and 2002. What went wrong? Much attention has been focused on the lost opportunity for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, 1 but surprisingly little attention has been paid to the collapse of the Israeli-Syrian peace process. In fact, the Israeli-Syrian negotiations came much closer to producing a comprehensive [End Page 79] peace treaty than did the Israeli-Palestinian process. Their eventual failure is the latest in a long series of lost opportunities for peace, both between Israel and Syria and in the overall Arab-Israeli conflict.

On some occasions, opportunities for peace were missed when one side in the conflict presented genuine and fair compromise proposals that took into account the vital interests of its adversary, only to be rejected when the other side either refused to enter into a negotiating process or conditioned its entry on maximal demands that effectively ended the chances for a settlement. On other occasions, serious negotiations for comprehensive settlements did take place, with the result that the distance between the two sides was so reduced that the remaining issues seemed to require only relatively small compromises. Yet in the end, because of the stubbornness of one or both sides, no agreement was reached.

Which side has been most responsible for the failure of efforts to end the conflict? The assigning of historical responsibility is not an exercise in moralism, empty finger-pointing, or hindsight reasoning devoid of contempo- rary relevance; most of the issues are still central to the ongoing conflict, the resolution of which is critical not only to Arabs and Israelis but to the entire world.

In this article I argue that although both sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict have often been inflexible, ideological, and prone to maximal demands, most observers—at least in Israel and the United States—have overstated Arab rigidity while understating Israeli inflexibility. 2 Because these perceptions are so widespread and harmful to the prospects for peace, this article emphasizes the Israeli rather than the Arab responsibility for the remaining deadlocks.

I begin with a brief overview of the conventional mythology about the overall Arab-Israeli conflict, and the challenges to it by the Israeli "new history" movement. The rest of the article reviews and analyzes the mythology of the Israeli-Syrian conflict. The main topics are the 1948 war and its immediate aftermath; the 1951-67 period; the 1967 war and the Israeli capture of the Golan Heights; the relationship between Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad and the Israeli leadership, especially in the 1990 negotiations; Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the Israeli-Syrian negotiations; and the current situation. The conclusion recapitulates the overall argument and suggests what conditions might make a settlement feasible. [End Page 80]

Myth versus Reality in the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Among the most enduring Israeli/U.S. myths about the Arab-Israeli conflict is that the Arabs bear the overwhelming responsibility for the conflict because of their refusal to accept the existence of the state of Israel and to reach a negotiated settlement with...

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