HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011754.jpg

ministers when we’d arrived in the banqueting hall. I did have a good talk with Egypt’s Amr Moussa, and the foreign ministers of Morocco and Tunisia. When I tried to start a conversation with Syria’s Farouk al-Sharaa, however, he pointedly, though politely, said he felt that would not be appropriate. President Assad had broken off talks with us earlier in the year, insisting that we first commit explicitly to honor Rabin’s “pocket deposit” on the Golan Heights. Still, in my formal remarks at the dinner, I urged both sides to resume our effort to negotiate an Israeli-Syrian agreement. Sharaa’s response was, again, unencouraging. But I did notice, and take heart from, the fact that it was neither polemic nor overtly hostile towards Israel. When I returned to Israel, I found that Peres, too, wanted to restart the negotiating process with the Syrians. The effort took on fresh momentum after a meeting at Peres’s home in Jerusalem in early December, ahead of his visit to Washington for talks with President Clinton. Itamar Rabinovich and I had each met with him separately a few weeks earlier to brief him on how the talks with the Syrians had gone under Rabin, and why they’d reached an impasse. We emphasized Assad’s insistence on a preemptive agreement on our leaving the Golan. Peres now came forward with a plan. It was the diplomatic equivalent of what the Americans, a few years later in the second Gulf War, would call “shock and awe.” This was “dazzle and befuddle.” As Peres explained it, we would flood Assad with proposals: not just on land or security, but everything from water and electricity to tourism and industrial zones. Assad was in personal control of the Syrian side of the talks. The mere volume, range and complexity of the simultaneous engagement Peres had in mind would, he hoped, dilute his focus on the Golan. “The best results are extracted from confusion,” he said. Having watched President Assad operate for years, when I was head of intelligence and chief of staff, I said I was skeptical. I used the image of a bulldog. “It comes into your living room with one aim: to lock on to your ankle. You can throw fireworks, cookies, balloons, a tasty bone. But it’s a bulldog. It’s still going to move another step toward your ankle.” For Assad, the ankle was the Golan. I understood why Peres wanted to make a new effort to get peace with Syria. Obviously, it was something to be desired in itself. It would transform the terms of our conflict with the Arabs, and maybe even bring within reach the hope of ending it altogether. But there was a political consideration as well. For all his other accomplishments, Peres had a record of repeated electoral defeat as head of Labor. This next election would be the first held under a new set of rules. Instead of merely choosing lists of Knesset candidates, Israelis would cast two 283 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011754