Reaching for the Heights: The secret American attempt to reach Israel-Syria peace

"An American-facilitated beating of Iran and Hezbollah" is what motivated Hof to mediate peace between Syria and Israel.  

Ironically, the widely expanded Iranian influence in the region was a direct result of the American-British occupation of Iraq and the toppling of President Saddam Hussein in 2003, who since 1980, had constituted a strong buffer against Iranian expansionism in the Arab world.  

After the downfall of Saddam, the US practically rolled out the red carpet for Iran to expand its influence in the region.  

Hof's efforts were, therefore, meant in part to pick up some of the shattered pieces and somewhat try to fix the damage caused by the US, through bringing about a drastic political and military reorientation of Syria. 

Hof implies that Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez, had much more presidential legitimacy compared to his son, boldly claiming that most Syrians would agree with such a statement.

However, when one recalls the bloodbath of Hama in 1982 and other bloody developments in Syria under Hafez al-Assad, Hof's claim can be challenged. 

In reality, both father and son led repressive dictatorships. However, the main difference was that far more people died under Bashar's rule due to the civil war that began in 2011 and continues, albeit less intensely, till today. 

Trusting Bashar al-Assad  

Hof expresses his doubts about whether Bashar al-Assad was really telling the truth. Did he "truly intend to erase all threats to Israel from Syria in return for all the real estate lost in 1967?  

Or was he hoping that he could somehow fleece Israel while doing nothing over a multiyear, multi-phased withdrawal period? Did he think he could trick the US into ending sanctions with nothing in return?"  

I could not imagine al-Assad being that naïve. 

Hof adds that al-Assad's reputation "among US officials going back to the administration of President George W. Bush was such that no one was inclined to take anything he said at face value. He would say whatever he thought he needed to say at any given moment to advance Syria's interest, which he defined as identical with those of the family-based regime he headed." 

But instead of giving examples from the American side itself, Hof quotes, as a secondary source, the excellent book by Bente Scheller, The Wisdom of Syria's Waiting Game, which says: "Secretary of State Colin Powell came away from a May 2003 meeting in Damascus thinking he had secured from the Syrian president a commitment to close the offices of certain violent Palestinian groups residing in Syria."

"Bashar [according to Scheller] meanwhile chose to handle the issue in a way characteristic for his rule — complying on the surface while at the same time looking for a back door."

According to Hof, al-Assad "often raised doubts — or worse — about his truthfulness."  

Hof would have done better by giving some concrete examples from inside the US administration of which he was a part — that of President Barak Obama. 

Double standards 

Here, there is some imbalance in the book.  

Even if all of what was said about al-Assad's reliability was true, how reliable were the Americans and Colin Powell himself, when they lied about the threat of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)?  

Wasn't that used as a pretext to invade Iraq in 2003, resulting in the death of thousands and nearly two decades of bloody violence and instability?  

Hof argues that after the Syrian Revolution started in 2011, it was no longer possible to deal with al-Assad.  

He claims this to be the turning point in the negotiations, closing a chapter that cannot be re-opened anytime in the foreseeable future, because "there are no indications that legitimate governance will take root in Syria soon."  

Al-Assad supposedly lost his legitimacy as president to take decisions on the behalf of Syria and its people.  

But what about the legitimacy of American presidents whose policies in the Arab world (and elsewhere) have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths? And what about the legitimacy of Israeli political leaders who have been responsible for serious war crimes for decades.

It turns out that political legitimacy is a rather relative concept, depending on who is an ally and who is an adversary.  

In the meantime, several countries have started to re-establish relations with the Syrian regime, abandoning their earlier positions that al-Assad had lost legitimacy as Syria's president. 

If Israel really did want peace with Syria, it could easily have given up all Syrian territories it had occupied back in 1967.  

It would have been a relatively easy deal: full peace for full withdrawal, as proposed in the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, also known as the Emir Abdullah Initiative after Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia, who later became king.  

Egypt and Jordan were already militarily neutralised by their respective peace agreements with Israel (in 1978 and 1994). Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan argued at the time that if you remove the fourth wheel of a car, it can no longer drive.  

Egypt was the fourth wheel in this context, which was removed by the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement known as the Camp David Accords, which eliminated the possibility of repeating a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack against Israel, as what happened in October 1973.  

An Israeli-Syrian peace agreement would mean that the car would now be left not with three wheels, as Dayan had wanted, but only two.  

Israel plays along 

It is doubtful whether Israel was really prepared to withdraw from the Golan Heights, preferring to keep it instead of securing peace with Syria.  
But it did not seem to mind playing along with Hof's peace efforts, as long as these did not end up in obliging Israel to surrender territory that it had no intention of relinquishing.  

Abandoning the Golan Heights remains purely "hypothetical" from the Israeli side. Israel apparently wants more in return for peace than it had before the start of the June War of 1967.  

It is not Israel that wants peace with Syria. Israel wants it to work the other way around, with the US being the mediator to the advantage of both Israel and the US. 

Hof noted that during his talks with the Israelis, the hardest part of coming to an agreement with Syria was "conceding to Syria all its priorities before getting Syria to concede anything of practical value to Israel."  

When sticking to the principle that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" this should, however, not have been an insurmountable obstacle.  

Hof's final chapter is called "Opportunity Lost." In it, he argues that the violent and bloody response of the Syrian regime to initially peaceful demonstrations resulted in his "initial confidence in al-Assad's willingness and ability to act with political maturity and wisdom ... to melt away."  

Hof says that he feared "al-Assad's misunderstanding of how the United States and Israel would process Syrian state terror."  

He had "wanted to explain to al-Assad in the clearest possible language that he was killing the possibility of peace with Israel and the recovery of the Golan Heights. He may already have known that. But how could [the US] be sure?" 

Hof asks if direct engagement of Obama would help solve the gridlock, conveying a similar message to al-Assad in March and April 2011 and suggests that this would have "altered the course of what is now a horrific history," adding: "We will never know. We did not try."  

Obama never contacted al-Assad. Hof says the US president should have done so, if only to have the clear conscience that he made a "last effort" to change things for the better.  

Most probably it would have not, given that al-Assad prioritised his own personal survival over everything else. But it was never tried, constituting a missed opportunity, in Hof's view. On this, I believe he is correct, irrespective of the results — or lack thereof.  

Ever since the current Syrian regime came into power in 1963, it can be taken for granted that it would always give priority to staying in power over everything else.

And peace negotiations with Israel would not have been a way to prevent the Syrian revolution from developing into a civil war and then a regional proxy war.  

The opposition would probably even have blamed al-Assad for negotiating peace with Israel at the time — especially if this was meant to stop the Syrian revolution. Moreover, there were supposed to have been strings attached to the Syrian-Israeli peace deal, turning Syria into a kind of US vassal state. 

Naïve thinking 

Hof initially thought that al-Assad "might even be inclined to accelerate Syria-Israel peace talks in the hope of immunising Syria from the storms of the Arab Spring." But this was, in my view, also wishful thinking on his part — very far from realities on the ground.  

Moreover, the prevailing view in the 2011 White House was that al-Assad was already doomed, and that "if someone as impressive as Hosni Mubarak could not survive the Arab Spring, the White House reasoned, how could a lesser personality such as Bashar al-Assad prevail?"  

It is amazing to see how apparently poorly informed the US was about the character of the Syrian regime — including that of its president — and the realities on the ground.  

In his book, Hof honestly repeats his earlier testimony to the US Congress in December 2011, that al-Assad was "a dead man walking", even though it clearly turned out to have been wishful thinking for many, Hof included. 

While Syria continues to exercise a lot of influence over Lebanon, this does not mean that Syria can force or dictate the Lebanese and Hezbollah into doing anything against their will.  

On the one hand, the US rejects Syrian domination over Lebanon, but on the other, it expects Damascus to determine the fate of Hezbollah — which has the most powerful military in Lebanon.  

Admittedly, Hof had similar doubts about al-Assad's leverage over Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hof says that the Syrian president told him that he believed Hezbollah would "fall into line."  

When conveying the message to Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Hof said that "al-Assad believed Hezbollah would have no choice but to accept the fait accompli, because Nasrallah's dependence on Syria was significant."  

Netanyahu had doubts about this, to which Hof agreed, but kept silent about them during their discussions on the topic. 

In his "Reflections" chapter, Hof notes that he was highly surprised when "al-Assad calmly and confidently predicted Iran and Hezbollah would fall easily into line when informed that forthcoming peace with Israel would require fundamental changes in their relationships with Damascus."  

Al-Assad's "blue-sky assessments of Iranian and Hezbollah compliance" even troubled Hof.  

Wouldn't it have been better for Hof if he had shared these concerns with Israeli leaders who were equally cynical about al-Assad's words? Or did they all unrealistically pretend to close their eyes to the realities on the ground, in an effort to keep the talks going? 

It might be naïve to have expected that Israel would have been glad to have peace with its Arab neighbours. In reality, it wanted much more than that — to secure its own lasting military supremacy and domination in the region, whatever the costs.  

This was, and remains to be, far more important than a peace that would require it to relinquish its own supreme power position.  

Hof concludes with hindsight that it "was as if living the dream to negotiate Israel-Syria peace had been only a dream, something that never happened." Although it did happen, and his efforts were to no avail.  

That said, his book remains a highly interesting work of literature, both for specialists and all those who want to better understand the intricacies of Israeli-Arab peace negotiations, however difficult they may have been. 

-Nikolaos van Dam was ambassador of the Netherlands to Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Germany and Indonesia, and Special Envoy for Syria. He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Syria and Destroying a Nation: The Civil War in Syria.