An iceberg called peace 
By Yosef Goell 
Ha'aretz

(December 13) - There's only one good thing about Hafez Assad's agreeing
to reopen negotiations: The threat of a competing negotiating track might just
induce the Palestinians to speed up their own talks over the division of the
West Bank. 

Everything else is bad. Assad may have been the one to have blinked first,
tactically (though we don't know what US President Clinton may have
promised him to get him to resume talks with Israel on his terms). But so far,
all of Israel's leaders, from Rabin through Peres, Netanyahu, and now
Barak, have been the ones to blink first: They acquiesced to Assad's
condition that talks be based only on Israel's withdrawal from all of the
Golan. 

It's not that the Golan is sacrosanct as a reasonable, though wrenchingly
painful, trade-off for full peace with Syria and the entire Arab world. For
that matter, ceding the Palestinian-populated part of Jerusalem, or part of
Tel Aviv, all of Bnei Brak, or Barak's hometown of Kochav Yair, would not
be too much to surrender either, in exchange for such peace. 

All these places have much less security significance than the Golan. But
then, who needs "security" if one is talking about a "real peace"? 

That's just the point. In the case of Syria we're not talking of real peace. At
best, it's very much less, and much more dangerous, than the chilly
nonbelligerency treaty we've had with Egypt for the past 20 years. That
agreement is a significant improvement on the 30 years of intermittent and
ever-escalating wars, but it is very far from peace. 

Yet our leaders continue to extol that "peace," even though they have given
in to Egypt's determined opposition to honoring the agreed-upon
normalization clauses. Those clauses were the basis for gradually turning
long-time enemies into peaceful neighbors. 

In the case of Assad, we're not even making a pretense of talking about real
peace. Quibbling about who will man an early-warning station on Mount
Hermon and the extent of mutual demilitarization is meaningful only on the
assumption that Syria's hostility will continue unabated. 

If we were talking about meaningful peace we would be demanding that
Syria scrap its poison-gas-bearing ground-to-ground missile force, which
threatens all of Israel, in exchange for partially giving up a crucial strategic
asset like the Golan. 

Our leaders have blinked first by acquiescing to the contention that Assad's
demand for all the Golan is eminently "reasonable," while our equally painful
demands on Assad are "unrealistic and unthinkable." 

Have all our recent leaders - including those of the Labor Party, which spent
a generation assuring the country that giving up the Golan would be suicidal -
gone mad? No. They are "merely" giving in to American pressure and to
American blandishments of multibillion dollar substitutes for the strategic
advantages of the Golan, which are to be sacrificed even in the context of
continued Syrian hostility. 

The US is thus one of the major arenas in which the threat to the Golan and
to Israel must be fought. There is no better time to pick such a fight with the
misguided leaders of our most steadfast supporter than in the midst of an
American election year. 

Such a fight must center around the fatuousness and danger of negotiating
with an Assad who is not only a Saddam Hussein-type tyrant, but also one
of the world's leading abettors of the drug trade and of anti-Israel and
anti-American terrorism. 

At home, too, there is a very good chance of defeating the defeatism of our
leaders. Monthly public opinion polls since the Oslo Agreement of
September 1993 have shown that while a significant majority of the Israeli
public supports a territorial compromise with the Palestinians, a similar
majority has consistently opposed giving up any part of the Golan in
exchange for a spurious "peace" with Syria. 

So, in the referendum to which Barak is committed, there is more than an
even chance of defeating any agreement with Syria for giving up all (or even
a large part of) the Golan. And if public opinion polls indicate there is a good
chance of Barak's losing the referendum, it will stiffen his resolve not to give
in to Assad's demands. 

But the opposition to giving up the Golan must be country-wide. And the
opponents must be careful not to alienate others by resorting to the
boomerang of violent demonstrations.