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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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THE MIDDLE EAST, Page 48Signals From Two Old Foes
In interviews with TIME, Syria's President and Israel's Prime
Minister discuss their hopes, fears, doubts and differences
regarding peace negotiations between nations that have been
bitter enemies for 44 years
Is it time, at long last, to be truly optimistic about
progress in the Middle East peace talks? To be sure, no one is
predicting a reprise of the Camp David negotiations, which led
to 1979's historic pact between Israel and Egypt. Yet in words
-- both spoken and left unsaid -- if not in deeds, Syria and
Israel, those two most contentious of antagonists, appear to be
sending each other tiny signals of encouragement.
Consider recent events in Lebanon, which is effectively
under Syrian control. Earlier this month, the Israelis displayed
relative restraint in reto rocket assaults on its frontier
communities by guerrillas of the militant Shi`ite group
Hizballah. Syria eventually put a clamp on the attacks.
Significantly, neither side broke away from the Middle East
negotiations in Washington.
That Damascus and Jerusalem may be ready for some progress
is perhaps no great surprise. The Syrians, unlike the
internally quarrelsome Palestinian-Jordanian delegation, have
an unchallenged leader in President Hafez Assad. His immediate
goal is regaining the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in 1967.
This mountainous region of hardscrabble farms and fields has
about 13,000 Israeli settlers, in contrast to 140,000 such
settlers in the West Bank. Despite the Golan's symbolic
significance to both sides, its importance to Israeli security
in the age of the missile has diminished. Though risking loss
of support at home, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has
pledged to return part of the Golan in exchange for peace. Syria
demands all the heights, but Assad has shown flexibility on
other issues. Both sides admit that U.S. commitment and pressure
are key to what happens next. For that reason, neither side
wants to unsettle negotiations until more is learned about the
intentions of the incoming Clinton Administration.
To determine what the principals are thinking, deputy
managing editor John Stacks and Karsten Prager, managing editor
of TIME International, joined Cairo bureau chief Dean Fischer,
correspondent William Dowell and reporter Lara Marlowe for an
interview with Assad at the presidential palace on a mountaintop
overlooking Damascus. Later, Fischer, Dowell and reporter Robert
Slater met with Rabin at his office in Jerusalem. Almost as
important as what the two men said was the moderate, relatively
rancor-free tone of their responses. That alone is progress.