Syrian President Bashar Assad reacted very differently than Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Yasser Arafat to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's proposal that the Arab world collectively normalize relations with Israel in exchange for its complete withdrawal from territories it occupied in June 1967. Arafat, believing that the prospect of 22 Arab states normalizing relations with Israel might enable the Palestinians to extract concessions that they would not be able to secure on their own, as well as elicit greater American involvement in the peace process, enthusiastically endorsed the proposal and publicly lobbied for it.

One might have expected a similar reaction from the Syrians, who also seek Israeli territorial concessions that they are manifestly unable to secure unilaterally. In contrast, however, Assad relentlessly worked to sabotage the proposal through the most intensive flurry of Syrian diplomatic activity in recent memory. Syrian officials fanned out across the Middle East in advance of the March 27-28 Arab League summit in Beirut, pressing other Arab states to water down the promise of normalization, add explicit conditions to it that virtually no Israelis are willing to contemplate and simultaneously declare their support for the suicide bombings taking place in the Jewish state.

As this anamalous reaction vividly illustrates, Assad has fundamentally different motivations than his Palestinian counterpart. Arafat ostensibly seeks to attain a favorable settlement with Israel in order to survive politically, whereas Assad seeks to avoid one in order to survive politically. While the most dangerous threat to Arafat's rule emanates from Islamist radicals bent on "liberating" Jerusalem, Assad is challenged by a loose coalition of secular intellectuals and businessmen pressing for political and economic liberalization. Opposition to the Syrian regime is not spawned by Assad's failure to reach an acceptable settlement with Israel - it is contained by the absence of a settlement. The Syrian regime relies upon the conflict with Israel to justify its bloated security forces, intrusive intelligence agencies and intolerance of dissent. Moreover, normalization of relations with Israel would increase pressure for a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, both in Lebanon and internationally.

Syria's drive to emasculate the Saudi peace proposal, a heavily amended version of which was approved on March 28 at the Arab League summit in Beirut, may have been successful in dooming the initiative, but at the cost of straining relations with the United States, which quietly lobbied Arab states to preserve its integrity. American Vice-president Dick Cheney conspicuously excluded Syria from his recent 12-day tour of the region. With the Bush administration hoping to use the initiative as a launch pad for more active American involvement in the peace process, Syria's continuing attempts to thwart accommodation between the Arab world and Israel may result in further diplomatic isolation.

The Saudi Initiative

During an off-the-record conversation in mid-February with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Crown Prince Abdullah mentioned that he had drafted a speech to deliver at the Arab League summit which would offer Israel "full normalization of relations" in exchange for "full withdrawal from all the occupied territories, in accord with UN resolutions, including Jerusalem." Although the Saudi prince quickly added that he had decided against delivering the speech due to the escalation of Israeli-Palestinian violence, Friedman ostensibly persuaded him to go on the record with the proposal. The next day, Abdullah's office carefully reviewed the quotations and gave the go ahead for the paper to publish his remarks on February 17.¹

Although the idea of Arab recognition of Israel in return for its complete withdrawal from disputed territories is not new, Abdullah's proposal was nevertheless unprecedented. The most significant aspect of the proposal was its use of the term "normalization," which connotes friendly, rather than merely non-hostile, relations and was apparently intended to appeal to public opinion in Israel. As if to underscore that Abdullah's use of the term was not an accident, Saudi Arabia's UN Ambassador, Fawzi Shobokshi, declared that the proposal offered Israel peace and "good neighborly relations" in a speech before the UN Security Council on February 27.

That the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, was willing to explicitly advocate normalization of relations with Israel under certain conditions (however unlikely) and openly campaign for it was a surprising development. The late King Faisal once declared that Saudi Arabia would be the last state to recognize Israel. Although the Saudis presented a peace initiative at the 1982 Arab League summit in Fez, Morocco, the proposal did not offer Israel recognition by all Arab states. Significantly, Crown Prince Abdullah has a reputation as the staunchest Arab nationalist within the Saudi royal family and the one of the least tainted by corruption.

Initially, the proposal garnered little attention in the Arab world. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was decidedly unenthusiastic about it, proposing instead that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Arafat come to Egypt to iron out their differences. In the weeks that followed, however, the proposal steadily gained American and European backing, leading Arab-League Secretary General Amr Moussa to endorse the initiative.

The proposal outraged the Syrians for several reasons. First, although Syrian relations with the kingdom have been close over the last decade, Abdullah did not consult or even inform Damascus about the proposal beforehand. Indeed, the Saudis may have chosen the unusual, indirect manner in which the proposal was released so as to avoid prior coordination with Syria. Second, Abdullah did not specifically mention the Golan Heights. The fact that Jerusalem was mentioned, while Syrian territorial claims were not, implicitly gave priority to the Palestinian track of the peace process.

The most far-reaching of Syria's objections to the proposal, however, concerned Abdullah's promise of "full normalization" of relations with Israel, which implied that peace would entail more than just a formal end to Syria's state of war with the Jewish state - Damascus would be expected to sever its ties to anti-Israeli extremist groups, end its boycott of companies trading with Israel, open trade barriers, and perhaps even permit Israeli tourists to visit. Whereas a cold, tense (and hence easily discarded) peace would be acceptable in return for every inch of the Golan Heights, a warm peace would lead dissidents in Syria to press harder for an end to the state of emergency, censorship and other authoritarian practices justified by the regime for national security purposes.

Syria has long refused to accept any association between the concept of normalization and its intermittent negotiations with Israel, despite considerable prodding from Israeli and American officials. During the latest round of talks in Sheperdstown, Virginia in January 2000, Syrian delegates even insisted that one of the four technical committees established to carry on different aspects of the talks be called the Committee on Normal Peaceful Relations, rather than the Committee on Normalization, as the Israelis had requested. Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shara refused persistent American requests that he have a private face-to-face meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Damage Control

Although the Syrians made no official comment on Abdullah's proposal for over two weeks, efforts to undermine it were soon evident. On March 3, Assad made the first official visit to Beirut by a Syrian head of state in over fifty years [see Assad in Beirut in the current issue of MEIB] in an apparent effort to solidify Lebanon's continued deference to Syria on foreign policy. During his visit, Assad and Lebanese President Emile Lahoud released a joint statement which, while not mentioning the proposal, emphasized that a comprehensive settlement with Israel must allow the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel and require the removal of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza (neither of which was mentioned by Abdullah).

Two days later, Assad arrived in Saudi Arabia to press for changes in the proposal. Following the visit, Syria's state-run news agency issued the regime's first official statement regarding the plan, claiming that Assad and Abdullah shared "identical views" on the matter. After Assad's visit, the Saudis quietly dropped the term "normalization" from public statements concerning the plan. On March 10, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal characterized the proposal as offering Israel "complete peace" in return for a withdrawal to the 1967 lines. This semantic change did not go unnoticed in Israel. Avi Pazner, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, stated that dropping the reference to "full normalization" would deprive the proposal of any significance. "The only new element was the offer of normalization as part of a peace agreement," said Pazner. "If there is no further mention of this, nothing will remain of the initiative."

The Syrians quickly realized that weakening the reference to normalization could doom the initiative and began openly lobbying for it. In a series of interviews, Syrian Information Minister Adnan Omran repeatedly declared that the Saudi peace plan does not offer Israel "normalization" of relations, a term he called "an Israeli invention" designed to "gain advantages and privileges meant to make the Arab side feel beaten and defeated." He added that, when Assad flew to Saudi Arabia to seek clarification on this matter, the Crown Prince "assured our leader . . . that the plan stipulates a total Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab territories in return for peaceful relations, not normalization." Omran even went so far as to deny that Abdullah ever mentioned the phrase "normalization of relations" in his discussion with Friedman. "The plan or, let me call it ideas, were twisted by the newspaper." ²

Meanwhile, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shara flew to Cairo for the biannual meeting of the Arab League Council and managed to secure a commitment from his counterparts to withhold declarations of support for the initiative until after the Arab summit meeting in Beirut. Moreover, at the end of its deliberations on March 10, the Council released a statement specifically calling for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. On March 20, Assad flew to Cairo for private discussions with President Mubarak regarding the proposal.

However, Syria's pre-summit efforts to convince Arab governments to officially reject the concept of normalization generated mixed results. Not surprisingly, Iraq and Libya backed Syria's position, but the Jordanians were insistent that the Arab League officially endorse the term, arguing that this "magic phrase" would moderate Israeli public opinion - a view shared by the Saudis. The Egyptians, whose diplomatic clout derives largely from the absence of a broader Arab-Israeli settlement, felt upstaged by the Saudi peace initiative and were more ambivalent.

Just three days before the summit, the Syrians orchestrated a massive demonstration against normalization with Israel, apparently designed to signal to other Arab leaders the depth of popular opposition to the vision of peace proposed by the Saudis. The demonstration, which drew hundreds of thousands of protestors into the streets of Damascus, was a rather unusual spectacle in the Syrian capital, where even state-sponsored rallies have been relatively modest in size since the ascension of President Bashar Assad, for fear that they will morph into anti-regime protests. On this occasion, however, the regime shut down all government offices in Damascus so that employees in the bloated civil service could attend en masse and closed all schools to encourage student participation. Thousands of riot police were stationed around Umayyad Square to ensure that the crowds remained focused on officially-sanctioned targets of indignation.

"We reject normalization with Israel," proclaimed Maj. Gen. Ahmed Abdul Karim in a speech before the crowd. Karim, who chairs the Syrian Permanent Popular Committee for Supporting the Uprising (a "fundraising" organization backed by the ruling Baath party) called upon the Arab heads of state expected to attend a summit meeting in Beirut three days later to "abolish all peace accords and sever any Arab contact with the Jewish state." Amid the usual slogans of hatred for Israel and support for the Palestinian intifada, the demonstration exhibited unmistakable hostility to the United States with the burning of an American flag and banners calling for a boycott of US imports.

While a petition handed in by the protestors managed to accumulate only 183 signatures³ (reflecting an understandable reluctance to sign anything that might later grace the desk of a Syrian intelligence officer), the demonstration served its intended purpose.

In order to thwart Syrian attempts at sabotaging the proposal, the Bush administration lobbied pro-American Arab leaders to attend the summit in person. The Lebanese daily Al-Safir cited "well-informed sources" as saying that the United States had been urging several Arab heads of state to attend the summit so as not to "leave the place for Syria and Lebanon."⁴ Ironically, however, the fact that the location of the summit made it, for all intents and purposes, a Syrian summit was precisely why many Arab heads of state were reluctant to attend.

In the end, only 10 of 22 Arab heads of state showed up. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak chose not to attend, at first saying that he had domestic obligations and then spinning it as a protest over Israeli conditions on Arafat's attendance. King Abdullah of Jordan canceled at the last minute, the official explanation being that he had the flu. Interestingly, while Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Moasher declined to discuss the monarch's absence, he acknowledged that King Abdullah's motive was the same as that of Mubarak (whatever that means).⁵

The Summit Resolution

The Arab League summit transformed Abdullah's simple declaration of principles into a more convoluted resolution that is less likely to achieve a breakthrough with Israel. Although Syrian efforts to replace the term "full normalization" with "complete peace" were unsuccessful, they were able to reduce it to the watered-down phrase "normal relations" (alaqat tab'iyya), which carries a very different connotation in Arabic - meaning the establishment of relations that are not unusual, rather than a process of improving political, economic, and cultural ties.

A far more critical amendment to the Saudi proposal concerns the status of Palestinian refugees from within Israel's pre-1967 borders. The resolution added the demand for a "just solution to the Palestinian Refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194" and, at the insistence of Syrian and Lebanese delegates, a phrase affirming "the rejection of all forms of Palestinian patriation which conflict with the special circumstances of the Arab host countries." The reason for this added amendment was that Resolution 194 refers to compensation for refugees "choosing not to return," implying that they should be given a choice. The phrase "special circumstances" refers to the Lebanese constitution, which bans the patriation of refugees. Thus, with respect to the 350,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, the Arab League resolution calls not for their "right of return" (as the Palestinian delegation lobbied for), but mandates that they must be settled in Israel.

Related Articles

The Real Negotiations Behind the Israeli-Syrian Talks, Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, January 2000.

Notes

  ¹ Thomas L. Friedman, "An Intriguing Signal From the Saudi Crown Prince," The New York Times, 17 February 2002.
  ² The Daily Star (Beirut), 21 March 2002; Gulf News, 22 March 2002.
  ³ Associated Press, 25 March 2002.
  ⁴ Al-Safir (Beirut), 22 March 2002.
  ⁵ The Daily Star (Beirut) 29 March 2002.