Israel and Syria have officially been engaged in several rounds of high level peace talks since the 1991 Madrid Conference. The last round took place in December 1999, at a summit meeting in Washington, attended by U.S. President Bill Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shara. These were followed by a round of talks in Shepherdstown, West Virginia in January 2000. Among the challenging topics discussed were the Golan Heights, Syrian support for terrorism and Israeli MIAs.

A point of contention between the two countries was the “starting point” of the negotiations. President Clinton had announced that the talks were to begin from the point where they left off in 1996. However, Israel and Syria have different perceptions of what this point was. The late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad claimed that in the 1995-1996 negotiations, the governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres had agreed to a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights as the basis for any peace agreement with Syria, and that this understanding must be the condition for further negotiations. Israel, however, as well as American officials intimately involved in negotiations with Syria, maintains that there was no such understanding, and that Prime Minster Rabin had agreed only hypothetically to a withdrawal from the Golan Heights, in phases and in conjunction with full normalized relations with Syria. Syria, though, had refused the Israeli condition of normalized relations. Furthermore, there was a disagreement as to whether a “full withdrawal” meant to the 1967 lines, as Assad claimed, or to the international border, which is the mandate border of 1923.

Although during these negotiations Israel moved closer to Syrian demands, and even agreed to a withdrawal on the basis of the 1967 lines, as long as it could keep a small amount of land off the coast of the Sea of Galilee (Israel’s major source of water), Assad refused to accept this extremely generous offer and negotiations ended unsuccessfully.

In 2004, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad called to resume direct negotiations with Israel, although Syria has flipflopped on whether or not it is seeking preconditions. In response to these statements, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stated that he would be willing to meet with Assad only if the Syrian government showed one true sign that it is truly interested in peace with Israel.

Syria has kept the Golan Heights quiet since 1974, deterred by the IDF presence within artillery range of Damascus. But it is still a hostile neighbor. It supports Hizbullah’s terrorism towards Israel and supports numerous other terrorist groups that attack Israel. In addition, Syria still deploys hundreds of thousands of troops on the Israeli front near the Heights. For Israel, relinquishing the Golan to a hostile Syria without adequate security arrangements could jeopardize its early-warning system against surprise attack.