Hafez Assad's death and Middle East peace

No peace without Syria -- that has been a pillar of western Middle East diplomacy for 30 years.

Dozens of statesmen and their underlings made the pilgrimage to the "lion of Damascus" and tried to nudge him toward making peace.

The answer was always the same: Assad can wait.

Now that the dictator's death has occurred surprisingly early, some fear that a historic chance for rapprochement with Israel has been missed.

Mistakenly, because Assad had long been dead for the peace process. His problem was the Golan trauma, the loss of the strategic plateau for which he himself was partly responsible.

Assad needed Israel as an enemy just as Fidel Castro needs his enmity to the United States, to justify rigorous repression and economic misery.

Does a new ice age await the Middle East?

It doesn't have to be so, because Assad's death smooths the timetable for regional peace.

Israeli Prime Minister (Ehud) Barak, who had mistakenly put everything into negotiations with Syria, is now forced to concentrate on talks with the Palestinians.

That is a good thing, because the solution of the Palestinian problem is -- as is often forgotten -- the key to Israeli-Arab peace.

-- Tages-Anzeiger, Zurich, Switzerland