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Jonathan Friendly is the national editor of , which owns the weekly Jewish newspapers in Detroit and Atlanta. He is a former journalism professor at the University of Michigan and a former reporter and editor at The New York Times.
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By Jonathan Friendly
January 15, 2004
It is one thing to change your mind, quite another to change your heart. We need to remember the distinction when we try to make sense of the recent statements by Libya's Col. Muammar Gadhafi and Syria's Bashar al-Assad about possible peace agreements with Israel.
In both cases, the apparent new attitude seems calculated to appease the Western world -- most particularly the hard-right coterie of President George W. Bush's advisers -- rather than to take up a role of leading the Arab nations toward ultimate acceptance of "the Zionist entity."
The presence of 130,000 American soldiers in Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein can hardly have failed to make an impression on the regimes in Tripoli and Damascus. Better for Gadhafi to surrender his weapons of mass destruction voluntarily than to risk having them taken away; better for Assad to talk peace with Israel now that this supply of Iraqi oil in is U.S. hands.
Gadhafi would surely find it easier to come to an agreement with Israel than Syria would. The colonel retains total power in Libya despite the economic stagnation that has marked his 34 years as head of the North African nation. The country is no longer a training ground for Palestinian guerrillas and it has not wasted as much effort as other Arab states in blaming Israel for all the world's ills. For its part, Israel should be glad to add another dollop of Arab recognition of its right to exist.
Israel's security no longer mandates holding onto the Golan Heights that it took from Syria in 1967, but it needs to be sure that the country is shutting down the terrorist training camps like the one Israel bombed last year. Syria needs to show its sincerity by pulling back from its emplacements in Lebanon and by cutting off the flow of money to Hizbullah and Palestinian terrorists.
It will be a measure of Assad's leadership to see if he can carry out such measures even though he lacks any political stature beyond what his late father, Hafez, conferred on him. Obviously, the disclosure of secret negotiations with Israel two months ago has made it harder for him internally, but there is comfort in the fact that he is now turning to Turkey to help him broker a deal. His words may prove empty -- a stopgap to avert new economic sanctions by the United States -- but at least Washington and Jerusalem should listen to what he has to say and should watch what he actually does.
The hardest part for Syria -- as for most of the Arab states -- will be to overcome the legacy of popular hatred of Israel and of Jews that its leaders have so widely encouraged over the last 30 years. One measure of the distance it has to go is that its defense minister, Mustafa Tlass, is the author of a book, widely distributed in the Arab states, that "proves" that Jews take the blood of Christian innocents to make matzah.
Ending the hatred will require a change of heart, something that hasn't happened even in the states that accept Israel, Jordan and Egypt. For that, the Arab world and Israel will have to wait for a leader with the courage and vision of an Anwar Sadat. In the meantime, the openings to Syria and Libya are good opportunities for Israel that, properly followed up on, could lead to a real lessening of tension in the Middle East and perhaps even effective pressure on the Palestinians to abandon the Yasser Arafat policy of confrontation at any cost.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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