Word: assad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With the Israeli-Egyptian agreement in hand, the next hurdle was a settlement on the Golan Heights between Syria and Israel. Syria's President Assad took an important step forward in February 1974 by responding to Kissinger's insistence that the U.S. would not negotiate without a list of Israeli prisoners of war. The oil embargo ended a month later, in March 1974. Even so, Sadat remained vulnerable as the only Arab leader to have dealt with Israel, and the embargo could have been reinstated at any time. So it was up to Syria and Israel, whose mutual suspicion...
...meetings with Hafez Assad, we invariably sat side by side on two easy chairs in an upstairs room of the presidential residence. We both looked left at a painting depicting the conquest of the last Crusader strongholds by Arab armies. The symbolism was plain enough; Assad frequently pointed out that Israel, sooner or later, would suffer the same fate. On this visit, when I presented the Israeli proposal to him, he said: "They are not giving back Quneitra. They have just split Quneitra...
...complicated negotiation, nuances are decisive. Assad was not hospitable to what I brought from Israel. But he did not flatly reject it. Weirdly, across
...however, there are signs that the Arabs are moving toward greater unity. Last month Syrian President Hafez Assad visited the Saudis, with whom he has often disagreed, and received some support. He and the Saudis may even have laid the ground work for a new pan-Arab summit, at which the Syrians could be expected to endorse a beefed-up version of the Fahd proposals. Assad and the Saudis also agreed to renew their efforts to end the ongoing war between Iran and Iraq, and the Saudis offered to try to mediate Syria's long-standing differences with Iraq...
Although Khaddam led the outcry against the Fahd plan at the meeting, he carefully avoided saying that Syria rejected the proposal outright. He made it clear that Assad's longstanding opposition to acceptance of Israel was more a matter of strategy. If the Arabs tacitly accepted Israel's existence, he argued, what incentive was there for Israel to return captured Arab lands or grant Palestinian self-determination? The Saudis' rebuttal was that a unified Arab position might have far-reaching effects on global public opinion, as it did in Rabat in 1974 when the leaders recognized...