The Brink of Peace: The Israeli-Syrian Negotiations.

• Author: Cohen, Hanan
• Position: Review

The Brink of Peace: The Israeli-Syrian Negotiations Itamar Rabinovich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) 283 pp.

The strained history of Arab-Israeli peacemaking reveals that reconciliation became possible only when the parties began to truly appreciate each other's aspirations for justice and deep-seated fears. When one reads this book's first-person accounts of the Palestinian-Israeli talks in Oslo, it is clear that negotiators for both parties came to think in terms of a just, lasting and fruitful peace. Despite the many obstacles, the accords between both Israel and Egypt and the Palestinians and Jordan have proved remarkably resilient. And the mutual empathy that helped make the original accords possible may be what drives the process forward once again.

Yet no such meeting of the hearts and minds has occurred on the Israeli-Syrian front, and a settlement between Israel and the last of the front-line belligerents in its conflict with its neighbors remains elusive. In The Brink of Peace, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Itamar Rabinovich, who led his government's negotiations with Damascus from July 1992 until March 1996 in Washington, meticulously dissects the process he oversaw. He seeks to explain why, if both sides made strategic decisions to pursue peace and seemingly understood what it would take to make it a reality, the talks did not culminate in a treaty.

This book is the clearest, most comprehensive articulation so far of the proceedings and their achievements. It comes at a time when numerous claims are being bandied about regarding where the talks left off, and by implication, where they should pick up. Members of the right wing in Israel accuse the previous Labor Party government of an unseemly eagerness to relinquish the entire Golan Heights. Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad, in turn, claims to have received an Israeli commitment to the very same. More accurate, says Rabinovich, is that the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had suggested a hypothetical possibility of an Israeli withdrawal in exchange for Syria's meeting a number of strict conditions--conditions that Asad was apparently not prepared to meet.

It has become common knowledge that in the Palestinian case, the tremendous moral and psychological burden of occupation encouraged an Israeli accommodation on the West Bank and Gaza, independent of the potential fruits of a peace agreement and despite prevailing mutual distrust. In the Golan...