As usual, the Palestinian-Israeli relationship is attracting most attention. News reports are dominated by such questions as: Who represents the Palestinians? What is their relationship to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)? How are the Israelis responding?
In contrast, the Arab states almost disappear from the scene. Some analysts go so far as to see the Palestinian-Israeli issue as separate from the state conflict. Amos Perlmutter for example, foresees a resolution of the Palestinian question only on condition of "decoupling it from the whole Arab-Israeli conflict."[1]
But this is a mistaken approach. Palestinians have for four decades been the pawns of Cairo, Baghdad, Amman, Damascus - and not the other way around. Arab states are in most respects more fundamental to the conflict than the Palestinians: States armies made war on the nascent Israel in 1948 and, on losing, decided kept the issue alive by preventing the Palestinian refugees an opportunity to resettle. To control the Palestinian movement, Arab presidents, kings, and emirs founded the PLO in 1964. Arab states, not Palestinians, fought the 1967 and 1973 wars. States transformed a local communal conflict into an issue of international import, one touching on religion, oil, the United Nations, and great power relations.
Of the states confronting Israel, Egypt was long the most important, due to its military power, its size, its active leadership, and its geographic centrality. Under Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar al-Sadat, Egypt led both in war and in peace. This primary role came to a sudden end in 1979 with the signing of a peace treaty with Israel, which had the effect of removing Egypt from the fray; since then, Cairo has essentially been on the sidelines of Arab-Israeli conflict.
The two other neighbors of Israel cannot take the lead. The Lebanese learned this lesson when they signed an American-sponsored accord with Israel in May 1983, only to abrogate it less than a year later under Syrian pressure. The Jordanians don't need to have this lesson spelled out, for they know that openly recognizing Israel would provoke Syrian anger, and possibly jeopardize the Hashemite monarchy. As for the PLO, its strength lies in the media, not on the battlefield, and it has learned to defy Damascus only at its peril.
Action central, therefore, has moved to Damascus. Militarily, the Arab-Israeli conflict boils down to a Syrian-Israeli confrontation. President Hafiz al-Assad makes the key decisions of war and peace. So long as he refuses to come to terms with Israel, the conflict continues. Were he willing to do so, the international dimensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict would rapidly shrink; the Palestinian issue would become a local problem, terrible for those immediately involved but of minor importance to the outside world.
Asad has a proven record of scuttling diplomatic initiatives which run contrary to his interests, and he can do so again. Were the other Arab leaders to negotiate with Israel against Assad's wishes, they would fear him more than the other way around. and Israeli governments. Contrarily, as Damascus's role in the current round of peace process diplomacy suggests, a positive answer from Syria allows the other Arabs to go forward.
Israelis who see the Palestinians as the key interlocutor point to Syrian negativism as a reason not to give Damascus a veto. Former prime minister Yitzhaq Rabin, for example, argues that Israelis "only reached agreements with the Arabs when we followed two basic principles - starting with Egypt and leaving Syria to the end." Including Syrians, he argues, only forces the Palestinians and Jordanians to look over their shoulders at Damascus.[2]
But Rabin ignores the fact that even if Assad is excluded, weak actors such as the Palestinians and Jordanians must still worry about his reactions. Ominously but accurately, Damascus claims that "there can be no peace without Syria." Nor should he overlook that Asad consistently rejects a Palestinian state not under his control. Damascus has not recognized the PLO's November 1988 declaration of statehood; indeed, it has hardly ever mentioned it. In short, the Syrian leadership sees itself, rather than the Palestinians, as the key party to any negotiations with Israel.
And Assad has shown no willingness to close the conflict with Israel. At best, he will grant the Jewish state a non-belligerency agreement in return for complete return of the Golan Heights, won by Israel from Syria during the 1967 war. He has never expressed willingness to sign a peace treaty with Jerusalem. Herein lies the crux of the Arab-Israeli dispute.
Syrian and Israeli interests do coincide in several minor ways. In Lebanon they have worked out "red lines" which are rarely breached. Both governments despise Yasir Arafat and seek an alternate Palestinian leadership. A number of secondary issues could be settled through negotiation. The Israelis, for instance, are eager to work out the sharing of the Litani River water. Arms control agreements µ confidence-building measures, demilitarized zones, or troop and arms reductions µ offer another arena of potential cooperation.
The Golan Heights presents more of a problem, though even here some tacit accord exists. Israelis are deeply reluctant to part with the territory, while Syrians demand it as an absolute condition of diplomatic progress. Several factors explain Israel's position. To begin with, Syrian guns on the Golan Heights shelled the farms of northern Israel from 1948 to 1967. They also point to the vital buffer role the area played in 1973. Then again, Israel pays little price for keeping the Golan Heights. The border is quiet, and Syrian nationals in the region are few (about 16,000) and untroublesome. They are nearly all Druze - members of a sect deriving from Islam but not recognized by mainstream Muslims - and so fit about as well in Israel as in Syria.
These factors tempt Israelis to see the Golan territory as their own. Polls show that over 90 percent of the Israeli electorate consistently favors retaining the Golan, and the Israeli leadership, both Likud and Labor, is firm on this issue. On the Syrian side, though Damascus occasionally calls for the Golan Heights to be returned, it never makes this the core issue with Israel, and with good reason. Israeli control of the Golan Heights serves Asad by deflecting discontent from him to an external enemy. Asad's weak domestic base means he depends on anti-Zionism to reach out to the majority Sunni population, and Israeli occupation of the Golan keeps him on the front line of confrontation with Israel.
What can outside powers do to encourage flexibility in Damascus? They can concentrate on Asad's weak spot, the Syrian economy. Stalled for years in the grip of socialist senescence, over-centralization, huge military expenditures, cronyist corruption, and a very high population growth of 3.8 percent a year, Syria has been for almost a decade in the throes of a severe economic crisis.
As Patrick Clawson has shown, to pay for Syria's huge military, Asad has long relied on income from outside Syria. Outside income, in other words, has subsidized the regime's aggressive foreign policy, including that directed against Israel. The West exerts a much greater potential influence than before over Damascus, now that the Soviet bloc no longer supplies funds as it used to and the oil-rich Middle East states are mostly cooperating with Washington.
Accordingly, if the West seeks to press the Syrians to reach an agreement with Israel, the most promising approach is through Damascus's pocketbook. At the very minimum, we should not subsidize the Syrian economy; more ambitiously, investment and trade with Syria can be reduced, pending Damascus's willingness to reach a peace agreement with Israel.
The road is long and Asad is a formidable opponent; influencing Syrian policy requires a steady hand and a willingness to endure setbacks. But the rewards are great, for herein lies the only solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Daniel Pipes, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, is the author of Greater Syria (Oxford University Press) and Damascus Courts the West (Washington Institute for Near East Policy).
[1] Amos Perlmutter, "Israel's Dilemma," Foreign Affairs, Winter 1989/90, p. 132.
[2] The Jerusalem Report, 4 July 1991.
