“We see our brothers in Palestine being killed and
tortured.… We see Israel attacking sacred Christian and
Muslim places in Palestine.… They try to kill the principles
of religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus
Christ and tortured him, and in the same way they tried to betray
and kill Prophet Muhammad.”
Thus Syrian president Bashar Assad in a May 2001 meeting with
Pope John Paul II in Damascus. This on top of repeated attacks on
Israeli society as “more racist than Nazism” for electing the
“killer” Ariel Sharon as prime minister.
A few days later Assad’s defense minister, Mustafa Tlas, was
even less inhibited. He said on Lebanese TV: “We live in a
tradition of martyrdom. When I see a Jew before me, I kill him. If
every Arab did this, it would be the end of the Jews.”
Israeli-Syrian negotiations are in the air again, Assad having
told the New York Times a few weeks ago that he favors
resuming talks with Israel. Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom has
already called for “pursuing all options” on the Syrian track and
warns that Israel should not shun a hand stretched out in peace. A
Ha’aretz editorial says Assad has made “a serious
proposal” and that Jerusalem must respond to it with “utmost
seriousness.” According to reports, a Likud Member of Knesset has
already been invited to Syria to test the waters.
Here we go again. Recent history is rich with examples of peace
negotiations and peace deals between democratic leaders and, shall
we say, undemocratic ones. Chamberlain and Deladier with Hitler and
Mussolini in 1938. Roosevelt and Churchill with Stalin at Yalta in
1945. Nixon and Kissinger with North Vietnam in 1973. Rabin, Peres,
and Beilin with Arafat in 1993. Carter with Kim Il-Sung in 1994.
Clinton and Barak with Arafat in 2000.
The results, respectively: World War II and the Holocaust; the
enslavement of Eastern Europe; the Cambodian Holocaust, the
Vietnamese boat people, the Vietnamese “reeducation camps”; the
creation of a terror-entity next to Israel and hundreds dead in
terror attacks; the unimpeded building of one of the most menacing
nuclear capabilities in the world; a further outbreak of
anti-Israel terror reaching unprecedented levels of slaughter and
mayhem.
Not too encouraging, is it?
Do we have to do it again?
What’s the flaw? What goes wrong in these cases? It’s that each
time, the nature of the “undemocratic” partner to the negotiations
is dismissed as irrelevant. By the weird calculus of Western
appeasers, it makes no difference if the interlocutor is a mass
murderer, torturer, terrorist, racist, cheater, liar; in
negotiations all parties are equal and have equally valid and
rational aims, and can be trusted.
To Silvan Shalom, to Ha’aretz, it makes no difference
that Freedom House has rated Syria one of the eight most oppressive
regimes in the world along with Burma, Cuba, Libya, North Korea,
Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Turkmenistan (not even Iran makes that
list; Syria does). It doesn’t matter that President Bush said last
November 7 that Syria has left its people “a legacy of torture,
oppression, misery and ruin.”
The suicide bombing of the Maxim cafe in Haifa last October 4,
which killed 21 people including three children and a baby girl,
and wounded 60, came to you courtesy of Damascus. It was
perpetrated by Islamic Jihad, which Syria shelters, funds, and
supports. Just last week the Israeli Shin Bet (General Security
Service) cracked a major Hamas infrastructure in Ramallah. It had
already killed ten Israelis and was planning a kidnapping operation
against soldiers in which the soldiers would be decapitated before
being stuffed into the getaway car; the terrorists had already
acquired the decapitation tools. Again, courtesy of Damascus, which
sponsors Hamas along with Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah and a slew of
other terror groups.
Anti-Semitism? Assad and Tlas’s expressions are just the tip of
the iceberg. A new study by B’nai B’rith says that: “Hateful
attitudes continue to find expression in Syria’s national school
curricula, despite public gestures … in support of a
diplomatically negotiated end to the Arab-Israel conflict.…
Syrian school materials … include numerous blatantly
antisemitic and incendiary passages that underscore Syria’s ongoing
support and promotion of international terrorism.”
In October and November, the Syrian-produced, 29-part Ramadan TV
series, Al-Shatat, was aired by Lebanon’s
Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar channel. This series portrays the
Jews as trying for centuries to control the world via a secret
global Jewish government, which was responsible for: starting World
War I; starting World War II; dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki; helping Hitler annihilate the Jews of Europe — etc.,
etc. Broadcast to millions throughout the Arab world, courtesy of
Syria.
If terrorism, anti-Semitism, the occupation of Lebanon, and
domestic oppression and backwardness aren’t enough, there’s also
torture; Syria is one of the torture capitals of the world. Ask
Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen whom the U.S. deported to Syria
last year because of alleged links with Al-Qaeda. Released this
October, Maher said he was severely beaten with electric cables
during six days of interrogation and threatened with electric
shocks and the “metal chair,” a Syrian-invented torture device that
stretches the spine. After that he was held in a tiny basement cell
without light for over ten months, cats and rats urinating down on
him through a small grate in the ceiling. He is one of thousands,
including domestic dissidents and Israeli prisoners of war, who
have been tortured by Syria.
That’s the Hafez/Bashar Assad regime — one of the most vicious
and evil on earth.
Let’s not negotiate “peace” with Syria. Let’s skip it this
time.
If — and it’s still highly speculative — the U.S. can cow
Syria into leaving Lebanon, disbanding the terror organizations,
easing the internal oppression, scrapping its WMD, we can only
applaud. For doing those things, Israel owes Syria precisely
nothing. It does not have to hand back the strategically vital
Golan Heights, raze the Israeli villages, farms, and factories
there to the ground, as a “price” for Syria’s compliance with the
most minimal human norms — any more than it owes Qaddafi anything
for allowing U.S. and British inspectors to peek around his nuke
plants. And if America has more ambitious plans for Syria involving
regime change, Israel hardly needs to deal with a sinister regime
that’s on the way out.
It’s time to get rid of the idea of quid pro quo with
terrorists and killers. When Syria turns into a civilized country
with a decent regime, dialogue will be worth something.
P. David Hornik is a writer and translator in
Jerusalem.
