Israel may take calculated risks for peace with Syria

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "The specific balance of military forces between Israel and Syria allows the Israeli government to take calculated risks in conducting peace negotiations with Syria," said Dr. Shai Feldman of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies after the first meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shara on Dec. 15. In fact, Israel can withdraw from the entire Golan Heights without incurring any military risk -- or much political risk, either.

Ehud Barak has committed himself to a demanding series of deadlines this year for ending Israel's military occupations of Arab territories. By Feb. 15, he and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat are to agree on the framework of a final deal on the nature of the Palestinian state, the status of Jerusalem, the fate of the 3.6 million Palestinian refugees living abroad, and the future of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

By July, he has promised the Israeli electorate, he will have pulled Israeli forces out of Lebanon, where the guerrilla fighters of Hizbollah have been inflicting a steady and painful toll of casualties on the occupying troops.

And in the talks starting near Washington on Monday, Jan. 3, he is negotiating peace with Syria, the only one of Israel's Arab neighbors (apart from little Lebanon) that is still technically at war with it. The deadline for these talks is less precise, but in fact they will probably be the first to bear fruit, for the basic outline of the deal is clear and the benefits to both sides are obvious.

Barak's government still talks of withdrawing "on" rather than "from" the Golan Heights, the 744-square-mile (1,935 square kilometer) plateau that Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 war, but that is just negotiators jockeying for position. Everybody knows that Syrian President Havez Assad cannot settle for less than Egypt got in return for peace with Israel: the return of all Syria's occupied territory.

There are fuzzy bits at the edges of the map, like Israel's desire to keep its surveillance posts on Mount Hermon and Syria's claim that its 1967 border extended right to the shore of the Sea of Galilee, but these are issues easily finessed by negotiators who want to make a deal. More difficult, but still manageable, are issues like water-sharing and trade relations.

The question of military security is complicated by the fact that Asad needs to keep substantial military forces around Damascus purely to ensure the survival of the regime, even though this also puts them within striking distance of Israel. But given Israel's overwhelming military superiority, this is an area where Jerusalem can take "calculated risks". Syria will have to cut back from the six divisions Asad now has deployed around the capital, but will get to keep more than the two Israel demands.

Even the problem of Jewish settlers is relatively soluble on the Golan Heights. There are only 17,000 of them (compared to almost 180,000 in the West Bank), and few of them are religious fanatics since the Golan lies beyond the Biblical boundaries of the Land of Israel.

At the moment, the Golan settlers are swearing that they will never leave, demonstrating in the streets, forging political alliances with extreme right-wing groups, hinting that they might turn violent -- all the tactics that are so familiar among the West Bank settlers. But the Barak government's calculation is that most of the Golan settlers will go quietly in return for a generous compensation and resettlement package.

How generous? A 1995 report drawn up by former Finance Ministry head David Broded estimated that it would cost about US$200,000 per settler, but a more recent estimate leaked to the newspaper Yediot Aharonot puts the cost at over $500,000 per person: a total of $10 billion for compensation, plus another $8 billion for redeploying military bases currently on the Golan. But not to worry: Israel has already made it clear that the United States will have to bear much of these costs if President Clinton wants to go out with a diplomatic triumph this year.

If Syria and Israel manage to forge a deal in the next few months, Israel's planned withdrawal from south Lebanon will also become a lot easier, as the 22,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon can effectively deliver not only Beirut's cooperation but also Hizbollah's compliance. A full peace treaty with Lebanon could well accompany the Syrian deal.

What may stay unsettled for a long time, however, is a final deal with the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It's a far harder sell in terms of Israeli domestic politics, since it must involve moving at least some tens of thousands of fundamentalist Jewish settlers off what they see as sacred Israeli soil. And with every peace treaty Israel signs with the surrounding Arab countries, the pressure to make concessions to the Palestinians grows less.

There remains the task of selling a peace agreement with Syria to the Israeli public, since Barak has promised a referendum on any deal he makes. But Hebrew University professor Moshe Maoz, a specialist on relations with Syria, is confident that the referendum will pass: "I think Barak will give the public a nice package -- peace with Lebanon, security, and control of the water of the Sea of Galilee -- and he'll be able to say that Israel will be in a better position to face the dangers posed by Iran and Iraq when Israel has peace with the rest of the world."