Israeli Minister Adds Heat to Exchange With Syria

Metal soldier cut-outs in the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau that Syria lost to Israel in 1967.

February 5, 2010
Israeli Minister Adds Heat to Exchange With Syria
By ISABEL KERSHNER


JERUSALEM — Israel’s blunt-talking foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, warned Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, on Thursday that the Assad family would lose power in any war with Israel, ratcheting up bellicose exchanges between the countries in recent days.


In a speech at Bar-Ilan University, near Tel Aviv, Mr. Lieberman said: “I think that our message must be clear to Assad. In the next war, not only will you lose, you and your family will lose the regime. Neither you will remain in power, nor the Assad family.”


That had to be the message, Mr. Lieberman added, because “the only value truly important to them is power.”

That is absolutely true.


In an effort to calm the atmosphere, an aide to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said that Mr. Netanyahu was “ready to go anywhere in the world, at any time, to open peace talks with Syria without preconditions.”


The aide, Nir Hefetz, added that Israel did not rule out assistance from any “fair third party” that could advance a peace process with Syria.


Mr. Lieberman was responding to strident comments from Syria on Wednesday. Mr. Assad told the visiting Spanish foreign minister, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, that Israel was “not serious about achieving peace” and that the facts indicated that “Israel is pushing the region toward war, not peace,” according to the Syrian news agency SANA.


Furthermore, the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, said Wednesday that “Israel should not test Syria’s determination,” adding, “Israel knows that war will move to the Israeli cities.” He implied that a conflict beginning in South Lebanon could also lead to an all-out war.


Mr. Moallem made his comments in response to a strong statement made by Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, to senior Israeli Army officers on Monday, warning that “in the absence of an arrangement with Syria, we are liable to enter a belligerent clash with it that could reach the point of an all-out, regional war.” Israelis understood Mr. Barak’s remark as a plea for the Israeli government to start new peace negotiations with Syria, but the Syrians apparently interpreted it as warmongering.

Israel’s northern borders with Lebanon and Syria are quiet, but tense. The last Israel-Syria war was in 1973; Israel last fought Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia that receives support from Syria, in Lebanon in 2006.

Israeli military officials have warned repeatedly that Hezbollah has been rearming, and they assert that Syria has been preparing its military to move from the conventional battlefield into missiles that can be aimed at Israeli cities.

Mr. Lieberman said the Syrians had issued a “direct threat” to Israel that “crossed a line.”

“We cannot continue with business as usual,” he said.


Shaul Mofaz, a former Israeli Army chief and defense minister, and now a senior member of the opposition centrist Kadima Party, described Mr. Lieberman’s statements as “irresponsible.” “They are liable to lead to verbal escalation or other types of escalation,” Mr. Mofaz told Israel Radio. Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly said that he is ready to talk to the Syrians without preconditions on either side. But Syria expects a guarantee from Israel up front that it is willing to withdraw from the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau that Syria lost in the 1967 war.

There are sharp differences within Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition, not least over whether a deal with Syria would succeed in removing Syria from the Iranian sphere. “Those who think that territorial concessions will cause a severance of the ties between Syria and the axis of evil are deluding themselves and avoiding reality,” Mr. Lieberman said Thursday, referring to Iran with a term used by former President George W. Bush. Syria, he added, “will have to give up on its ultimate demand for the Golan Heights.”


Yet with the Palestinian peace process at an impasse, there have been increasing voices in Israel for a refocus on negotiations with Syria. “Because of the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the only chance for generating change lies in the north,” wrote the commentator Ari Shavit in Thursday’s issue of the newspaper Haaretz. “There is no certainty at all that peace is in the offing,” he continued. “But if it is, it is to be found not in Ramallah but in Damascus.”


The previous Israeli government, under the lead of Ehud Olmert of Kadima, held indirect talks with Syria through Turkish mediators, but they ended when Israel started its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza. The Palestinians have refused to engage in direct talks with Mr. Netanyahu’s government unless it carries out a total freeze of settlement construction, at least for a few months, including in East Jerusalem. Mr. Netanyahu hinted on Wednesday that he was ready to engage instead in “proximity” talks with the Palestinians, via American mediation.


“In the Middle East it sometimes takes three to tango, or at least to start to tango,” Mr. Netanyahu told an audience at the annual Herzliya Conference. “Afterwards,” he said, “I assume we can go on to dance as a couple.” The Palestinians have not yet stated whether they are ready for indirect talks.

Syria Cracks Open Its Frail Economy

Syria is accelerating its economic opening – boosting U.S. hopes that its tight relationship with Iran might be weakened.

For decades, Syria has been defined by its rigid socialist economy and its military ties to Iran against Israel and the West. Trade sanctions have taken a heavy toll: More than half the 16 jets in Syria's state airline can't fly for lack of spare parts.

The Baath Socialists were connected with the Baath Party of Iraq.

But President Bashar Assad – heir to his family's political dynasty – has started unshackling the economy by permitting private banks and insurers to open shop and by letting Syrians hold foreign currency without risk of being tossed in jail. In March, he opened Syria's first stock exchange. Nearby are a Ford showroom and a KFC restaurant.

A socialist dynasty; interesting term.

President Assad's changes face pushback at home. Top members of Syria's ruling Baath Party say he is betraying the socialist agenda of his father, Hafez Assad, who served as president for three decades before his death in 2000. Liberal economists, meanwhile, say he isn't going far enough.

Sounds familiar.

With Isolation Over, Syria Is Happy to Talk

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, right, hosted the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, this month.




Only a year ago, this country’s government was being vilified as a dangerous pariah. The United States and its Arab allies mounted a vigorous campaign to isolate Syria, which they accused of sowing chaos and violence throughout the region through its support for militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.

Today, Syria seems to be coming in from the cold. A flurry of diplomatic openings with the West and Arab neighbors has raised hopes of a chastened and newly flexible Syrian leadership that could help stabilize the region. But Syria has its own priorities, and a series of upheavals here — including Israel’s recent war in Gaza — make it difficult to say where this new dialogue will lead.

At the root of these changes is Syria’s alliance with Iran. Saudi Arabia and the other major Sunni Arab nations once hoped to push Syria away from Iran through isolation, and now — like President Obama — they appear to be trying sweeter tactics. For the Syrians, the turnabout is proof that their ties with Iran are in fact useful, and accord them an indispensable role as a regional broker. Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries “have great stakes in maintaining good relations between Syria and Iran, because at difficult times they will find Syria helping them,” said Faisal Mekdad, Syria’s vice minister of foreign affairs, during an interview here

That assumes that Iran will listen, a rather big assumption. Nonetheless, it does give Syria leverage.

Israel’s recent war on Hamas in Gaza generated a tremendous popular anger that has shifted the ground of Arab politics. Even more than Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah, it put Saudi Arabia and its allies on the defensive and strengthened Syria, which hosts the Hamas leadership.

Talk about unintended consequences.

Mr. Mekdad even hinted that Syria might have hopes of turning the tables and driving a wedge between the Arabs and the United States on the question of Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

“I think the West is more concerned about the Iranian nuclear file than the Arabs,” Mr. Mekdad said. “I think our brothers in Saudi Arabia understand that the threat is not Iran, it is the Israeli nuclear capability. This policy of double standards is making all Arabs angry.”

Nice spin.

“There are some here who miss the Bush administration, because at least with them you knew where you stood,” said one Syrian analyst who is close to the leadership, but spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to come under scrutiny for exposing differences of opinion. “With Obama, the American demands have not really changed, but there is an impression of a new era and an expectation of new results from us.”

That's the socialist who palled around with terrorists.

In Iraq, Syria’s goals are now similar to those of the United States, analysts say. Despite its history of enabling jihadists to fight American troops in Iraq, Syria is now contemplating an imminent American withdrawal and is keenly aware that it might itself become a jihadist target, especially if it concludes any sort of peace deal with Israel.

“Syria increasingly sees an interest in Iraqi stability,” said Peter Harling, a senior Damascus-based analyst with the International Crisis Group . “It has borne the brunt of the Iraqi conflict’s spillover effect. It covets potentially huge economic benefits, posing as an outlet for Iraqi oil-products and a supplier for Iraq’s emerging markets. Beyond that, a key objective for Syria has been to keep Iraq in the Arab rather than the Iranian fold.”

That is an interesting twist.

“The Bush administration has left,” Mr. Mekdad said with a diplomatic smile, “and we are still here.”

A Medieval Castle in the Middle East

Listen hard and you can hear a muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayers, an ironic reminder that the tensions between the West and the Middle East date back centuries.

Why Israel Feels Threatened

The author, Benny Morris, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University, is the author, most recently, of “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.”

MANY Israelis feel that the walls — and history — are closing in on their 60-year-old state, much as they felt in early June 1967, just before Israel launched the Six-Day War and destroyed the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies in Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

Now, this next paragraph, third sentence is quite interesting.

Israelis, or rather, Israeli Jews, are beginning to feel much the way their parents did in those apocalyptic days. Israel is a much more powerful and prosperous state today. In 1967 there were only some 2 million Jews in the country — today there are about 5.5 million — and the military did not have nuclear weapons. But the bulk of the population looks to the future with deep foreboding.

I've highlighted it for emphasis. The military did not have nuclear weapons in 1967, he says, leaving the implication that they do now.

His analysis is quite dire: the Arab and wider Islamic worlds, despite Israeli hopes since 1948 and notwithstanding the peace treaties signed by Egypt and Jordan in 1979 and 1994, have never truly accepted the legitimacy of Israel’s creation and continue to oppose its existence.

Little argument can be made about that.

public opinion in the West (and in democracies, governments can’t be far behind) is gradually reducing its support for Israel as the West looks askance at the Jewish state’s treatment of its Palestinian neighbors and wards. The Holocaust is increasingly becoming a faint and ineffectual memory and the Arab states are increasingly powerful and assertive.

Ditto.

A combination of dire threats face Israel: Iran to the east, pursuing a nuclear policy, denying the Holocaust and of any domestic homosexuality, has Israel’s political and military leaders on tenterhooks; Hezbollah to the north, which would join in a war between Iran and Israel, now has an arsenal of 30,000 to 40,000 Russian-made rockets, supplied by Syria and Iran — twice the number it possessed in 2006. Some of the rockets can reach Tel Aviv and Dimona, where Israel’s nuclear production facility is located; Hamas in Gaza has a large arsenal of rockets — home-made Qassams and Russian-made, Iranian-financed Katyushas and Grads smuggled, with the Egyptians largely turning a blind eye, through tunnels from Sinai; and an internal threat: the country's Arab minority.

What is common to these specific threats is their unconventionality. Between 1948 and 1982 Israel coped relatively well with the threat from conventional Arab armies. Indeed, it repeatedly trounced them. But Iran’s nuclear threat, the rise of organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah that operate from across international borders and from the midst of dense civilian populations, and Israeli Arabs’ growing disaffection with the state and their identification with its enemies, offer a completely different set of challenges. And they are challenges that Israel’s leaders and public, bound by Western democratic and liberal norms of behavior, appear to find particularly difficult to counter.

Very dire.

Twilight Struggle

Another analysis of Bush and Cheney's policy: act first, ask no questions later. The strike inside Syria is significant, but there is more to it than violating another nation's sovereignty.

We have entered a new phase in the war on terror. In July, according to three administration sources, the Bush administration formally gave the military new power to strike terrorist safe havens outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Before then, a military strike in a country like Syria or Pakistan would have required President Bush's personal approval. Now, those kinds of strikes in the region can occur at the discretion of the incoming commander of Central Command (Centcomm), General David Petraeus. One intelligence source described the order as institutionalizing the "Chicago Way," an allusion to Sean Connery's famous soliloquy about bringing a gun to a knife fight.

Why the change in policy?

For starters, the administration is genuinely worried about al Qaeda's resurgence, not just in Pakistan, but across Asia and Africa. But with the clock winding down on the administration, it has a greater appetite for racking up victories against al Qaeda--and less worries about any residual political consequences from striking. Roger Cressey, a former deputy to Richard Clarke in the Clinton and Bush administrations, says, "[W]ith the administration in the final weeks, the bar for military operations will be lowered because the downsides for the president are minimal."

Minimal? Minimal for whom?

The big mystery now is whether the next administration will dismantle this policy or permit Petraeus to follow it to fruition. Obama has said nothing about Sunday's strikes in Syria (a silence that has rightly earned him taunting from the McCain campaign). On one level, this new policy conflicts with Obama's stated desire for opening up diplomatic channels to places like Tehran and Damascus. On the other hand, this is precisely the type of policy that he has repeatedly promised at least for Pakistan, whose territory is believed to host Osama bin Laden: If America has actionable intelligence on al Qaeda leaders, and the country housing those terrorist sits on its hands, we will act. His campaign rhetoric has now become the official war policy he will inherit. Is this a development that pleases him?

Campaign rhetoric ends the day he wins office.

Mexican mogul: a Jew

It really is amazing how anti-semitism prevails. Get this sentence from an obituary of a Mexican businessman.

His name also surfaced in Nicaragua, on a list compiled by terrorists of potential Latin American kidnap targets. Handwritten notes in the margins suggested snatching Mr. Saba wouldn't prove harmful to the left's image. "A Jew. He has no social prestige," was how the list's authors dismissed Mr. Saba, according to reports at the time, reflecting a prejudice shared by revolutionaries and reactionaries alike.

Emphasis added.

Mr. Saba was the son of Syrian Jews from Aleppo.

Hugo Chávez's Jewish Problem

Mr. Schoenfeld (who wrote "The Home-Front Battle Heats Up") is the senior editor of Commentary. So I went to look at Commentary.

Its website is described in Google as General, yet Jewish. Highly variegated, with a unifying perspective. On its front page I found this picture. A variation of the old slogan Yanqi go home, it includes the hammer-and-sickle, and the age-old anti-semitic slur. Always the Jews.

... to dismiss Chávez as a lunatic is to wish away his proven political skill. He is, without question, a powerful figure—and one who, thanks to a quirk of geography, is also in possession of dangerously large amounts of oil.

Heavy crude, high in sulfur, but an awful lot of it. 100 billion barrels, perhaps 80 billion; a lot of oil.

Chávez has made common cause with FARC, a narco-terrorist group ... Libya ... Syria, Hizballah, and Hizballah’s patron Iran. Virtually alone among world leaders, Chávez is an impassioned defender of Tehran’s right to pursue nuclear technology and has even hinted he would be willing to finance it.

Quite a cast of characters, his allies.

Assad confirms Olmert's Golan offer

Fascinating development.