If there is one failure in Israel's history for which Golda Meir will not be forgotten, or forgiven, it is not the 1973 war, but the miscalculation that led to the war.
On February 4, 1971, Egypt's president Anwar Sadat expressed his willingness to reach a comprehensive peace agreement with Israel in return for a complete withdrawal from Sinai. Golda rejected the offer scornfully, and Sadat, in response, said Egypt was willing to sacrifice a million soldiers to liberate its land. This statement was perceived as proof of the "real" intentions of the Egyptian president, as opposed to his offer of land for peace.
The change in Israel's stance came with the rise to power of Menachem Begin, in 1977, and stemmed from two main reasons: Begin was aware he lacked legitimacy among Israel's elites and the international community, because he was regarded as a nationalist.
Furthermore, his strategic-political views caused him to see, rightly from his point of view, the Palestinians, and not the Arab states, as the main enemy of the Jews.
So, when the Mossad learned that Sadat was willing to renew his 1971 initiative, Begin dispatched his foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, to Morocco for a meeting with the Egyptian deputy prime minister, Hassan Tuhami. The two met in September 1977 and agreed on the general framework of a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, an agreement that paved the way for Sadat's visit to Jerusalem and the peace agreement that followed.
That peace agreement, with all its problems, was the most significant victory for Zionism since the establishment of the state in 1948, and opened the way whose end has still not been reached to the acceptance of Israel as a legitimate political entity in the region, on the basis of the 1949 borders, not those determined by the UN Partition Plan. This agreement also set the formula for future agreements between Israel and the Arabs: land for peace.
While it is true that Ehud Barak, and even Benjamin Netanyahu, tried to further peace with Syria, Hafez Assad, the xenophobe, got cold feet as the talks moved toward the concluding stage. However, a great deal has changed, both in terms of Syria's geopolitics and in the condition of the ruling party, which relies on the Alawite minority. The end of Syria's hold over Lebanon not only undermined its prestige and its ability to maneuver politically vis-a-vis Israel but also the economic strength of the ruling sect, which relies on Lebanon's being a center of international drug trade.
The collapse of Iraq strengthened Iran, whose fundamentalist worldview is contrary to the secular inclination of the Syrian regime. Iran is becoming increasingly more powerful as a result of America's colossal strategic failure, which once more proved its utter lack of understanding of the essence of relations in the region. Proof of this is tagging Syria as part of the "axis of evil," instead of making the effort to encourage a Syrian-Israeli reconciliation as a counter to the rise of Islamic extremism.
Syria today lacks a real military option against Israel, but it can cause serious damage with its missile arsenal. To date, Syria has regarded this arsenal as serving a deterrent function, but could use the missiles out of desperation to break a status quo that has become unbearable, in a similar fashion to what Sadat did in 1973.
Bashar Assad knows that the only way he can stabilize his regime and take Syria forward is by an agreement with Israel, along the lines of the Egyptian model. Anyone who read the interview to Der Spiegel of August 29, 2005, in which Assad described Syrian society as "secular," could get a sense of his anxiety over Syria's possible deterioration into an Algerian-style civil war.
A peace accord with Syria will completely alter Israel's standing in the region and the world and will also influence the progress of reaching a solution with the Palestinians.
The way to get to that point is not through propagandist rhetoric, like the invitation Shimon Peres extended to Assad to visit Jerusalem. Someone like Peres knows full well that such a visit must be arranged in advance through talks like Dayan and Tuhami had, and that the invitation must come from the prime minister. Otherwise, we may find ourselves surprised once more.
