(H/T – Allahpundit)
Haaretz reports on a 2-year secret effort by a former Israeli Foreign Ministry director general and former Israeli ambassador to Turkey, a Syrian-Alawite businessman with close ties to Syrian President Bashar Assad (both acting with the knowledge and approval of their governments), and a European mediator to create peaceful Israeli-Syrian relations. One of the tidbits from the Haaretz background story –
“Farouk Shara (the Syrian Vice-President) told me radical Islam constitutes a threat to Syria and that peace is the only way to halt it,” the mediator said. He said the Syrians told him that in a few years, they would lose their oil sources and need significant amounts of foreign currency to purchase energy from external sources. The Alawite regime realizes, the European mediator said, that in order to survive, it has to bring foreign currency into Syria, and that no sane businessman would invest his fortune in a country that is not at peace with its neighbors.
They got as far as drafting a “non-paper” (that linked version is one of the early versions). If it were to have been adopted, it would have returned the Golan Heights to the Syrians as a demilitarized zone, with much of the area turned into a park where Israelis could enter without a Syrian visa, introduced a zone of reduced military presence on either side of the Golan (with a larger zone on the Syrian side), secured the Jordan River water for Israel, and ultimately resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Syria.
Alas, the effort died in the midst of the Israeli-Hezbollah fighting in August, 2006. Syria demanded to make the talks official (but still secret) at that point, with C. David Welch, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, also involved, but the Israelis balked.
I’ll have to sleep on this and try to figure out what’s what, who all got played here (I’m smelling something), and all that good stuff.
