When Syrian President Bashar Assad reiterated in January 2004 that he was willing to resume negotiations with Israel, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom approached Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and recommended not rejecting Assad's proposal. Sharon's response was: Is the price clear to you? He wants the Golan Heights and I am not willing.
The Israel Defense Forces agreed with Shalom. So did Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon, as did head of Military Intelligence Aharon Ze'evi-Farkash. Both of them doubted Assad's offer was serious. They knew the Iranians were pressuring him not to hold talks with Israel. But the IDF top brass believed that if it became clear Assad meant what he said, that would be good. And if the whole thing was only a gimmick to remove American pressure, well, it would be good to reveal the gimmick for what it was.
The IDF holds the opinion - also found in the recently published memoirs of former U.S. President Bill Clinton and of U.S. special Middle East envoy Dennis Ross - that Israel is at fault for the failure of the talks with the Syrians at Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in January 2000, and that at that time it would have been possible to reach an agreement with Hafez Assad, the father of the current president.
Last weekend Ya'alon did something else that raised eyebrows in the Arab world as well. He told Yaron London in an interview for Hebrew-language daily Yedioth Ahronoth that if the political leadership reaches a peace agreement Syria in which it gives up the Golan Heights, the IDF will be able to defend Israel without the Golan.
That is the opposite of what Shimon Peres was told when he took over as prime minister and defense minister in 1995. At that time, the IDF told him that if war with Syria were to break out when the Golan was not under Israeli control, we would find ourselves in a gritty fight in the Galilee panhandle. In other words, Peres received an indirect recommendation not to give up the Golan.
One of the Golan's more famous settlers, former Housing Minister Effi Eitam, responded by saying Ya'alon was hallucinating. That is the last thing Ya'alon can be accused of. Efforts to compare Ya'alon's comments on the Golan to the IDF's reaction at the beginning of talks on the disengagement plan, when he was accused of trying to torpedo the initiative, show there is no similarity between the two events. Then the IDF claimed that politicians laid out the plan to the U.S. without even bothering to inform the military in advance.
Indeed, the prime minister's bureau chief, Dov Weisglass, was sent to Washington along with political adviser Shalom Turgeman (and not, as was written here erroneously, National Security Council head Giora Eiland. In truth, the NSC was also kept in the dark about the pullout plan). Only after the Israeli delegation returned from Washington, did they explain the disengagement to the defense establishment, including Ya'alon and Eiland.
The Syrian case is the reverse, as this time the chief of staff is essentially urging politicians to negotiate and reach an agreement with Syria. The decision will be made by politicians and not by the IDF, Ya'alon says, but when discussing the "price" of peace with Syria, the IDF already says the military can deal with giving up the Golan.
This places a huge challenge before the political echelons. Former prime minister and defense minister Ehud Barak, who was also chief of staff, was deterred by that during talks with Syria. In contrast, former prime minister, defense minister and chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin was willing to adopt a proposal like that and it was the Syrians that backed away. Ya'alon is essentially recommending a return to Yitzhak Rabin's position.
