"As long as I am prime minister, the Golan Heights will remain in our hands eternally," said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The statement drew justified criticism, and not only because it contains an inbuilt fallacy, as writer Meir Shalev noted in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth ("eternally" contradicts "as long as"). Since for Syria, the return of the Golan is a condition for making peace, the meaning of the statement is: "As long as I am prime minister, there will not be peace with Syria."

Syrian President Bashar Assad has repeatedly called for starting peace negotiations "from the point at which they stopped four years ago," and promises that it will be possible to conclude the talks in half a year. One need not be a rejector of peace to understand why Olmert did not respond to this call. The condition of opening the negotiations from the point at which they broke off means, in Syria's view, Israel's prior agreement to leaving the entire Golan Heights and returning to the June 1967 line.

This not only means leaving the Golan; it also means Syrian control over the northeastern shore of Lake Kinneret, and in practice, over part of the lake itself, at Hamat Gader, in a strip of about 300 meters from east of the Jordan River, including the river's entire descent through the mountains and the slopes of the Banias - areas that Syria seized after the signing of the armistice agreements. Even Professor Moshe Maoz, who supports negotiations and peace with Syria, once described this Syrian demand as "illegitimate and fraught with problems." The practical significance of this would be a serious blow to Israel's water sources in the North, with no certainty that this could be prevented in negotiations.

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A peace agreement with Syria entails risks. There is cause for concern that even in a situation of peace with Israel, Syria would not reduce its ties with Iran and Hezbollah, and when push came to shove, would join them in a campaign against Israel, in the hope of realizing its longtime pan-Arab vision. Israel's evacuation of the Golan Heights would bring in its wake a tidal wave of hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees and new residents who would inundate the Golan and be able to create a "Lebanese situation" on Israel's border.

To overcome all these concerns and doubts - as well as its wish to avoid a confrontation with the United States, which, for global reasons, is seeking to isolate Syria - Israel must be persuaded not only that Assad wants peace, as he says, but that such a peace would justify the loss of the strategic advantage inherent in control of the Golan Heights (even in the age of missiles, the fact that Israel can threaten a ground-based attack on Damascus is meaningful as part of its deterrence against Syria), the evacuation of tens of thousand of residents at a cost of tens of billions of shekels, and the abandonment of the economic assets that have been created since 1967.

Has Israeli public opinion been prepared for the concessions entailed in negotiations with Syria? There is no chance of finding 61 Knesset members in the present Knesset who would vote to annul the Golan Heights Law, and it is doubtful that a majority of the public favors talks that would lead to a withdrawal from the Golan under any circumstances, but particularly not on Syria's terms.

Assad says that if peace talks are not held, only one other possibility remains. He is thereby hinting at hostilities, whether along the lines of Hezbollah since 2000 or along the lines of Anwar Sadat in 1973. However, there is another option, which Assad is ignoring: taking a public step that would persuade Olmert - by means of the public pressure that it would generate - to change his stance and declare that under the new circumstances that have been created, he is willing to examine the possibility of embarking on negotiations. Here is what Assad could do, in whole or in part, to affirm his declared aspiration to make peace:

* Shut down the offices of the Palestinian organizations in Damascus and ban their members' activity.

* Announce that he agrees to meet with the prime minister of Israel in one of the two capitals or in a neutral place, as a first step toward peace negotiations.

* State that Syria, recognizing that no territorial gains should accrue from war, will respect in negotiations the international boundary between Syria and Palestine as it existed in May 1948.

* And, at the very least, announce that the peace negotiations will begin without mediators and without preconditions (i.e. not from the point at which they stopped four years ago, and without the "guarantee" that Yitzhak Rabin gave the Americans in 1994, which ostensibly contained a commitment to withdraw from the entire Golan Heights to the 1967 boundary), and that each side will be able to put forward its territorial, political and security demands.

Such moves would probably foment a change in Israeli public opinion, which, beyond general declarations, has seen no evidence that Syria is truly interested in peace. On the contrary, Syria's support for Hezbollah and the Palestinian terrorist organizations shows that it is interested in continuing the struggle with Israel.

A conciliatory move of this kind would require a great mental effort by Assad, who does not like to make efforts. But if he really and truly wants negotiations, he will have to do more than keep repeating rigid formulas that four prime ministers before Olmert were unable to swallow.