Haaretz
Tevet 28, 5767
Senior American government officials received
regular reports of the secret meetings that took place in Europe between a
former Israeli official and a Syrian representative, Haaretz has learned.
Senior officials in Washington told Haaretz that U.S. Vice
President Dick Cheney was kept in the picture about these indirect talks
between Syria and Israel. Ibrahim (Ayeb) Suleiman, the Syrian
representative, also said this at his meetings with former Foreign
Ministry director general Alon Liel, adding that Cheney had made no move
to stop him from participating in the talks. Suleiman is a Washington
resident.
A document that Dr. Nimrod Novik, a former political
advisor to Vice Premier Shimon Peres, disseminated last October to members
of the Council for Peace and Security also said that Washington knew about
the talks. "While the administration is taking care not to broadcast a
U-turn in its approach as long as the president has not given it an
explicit green light, the signs of a change in direction are multiplying,"
Novik wrote. "During the fighting in Lebanon, former senior [U.S.]
officials were authorized to speak with Damascus, within a narrow mandate,
while Pentagon and State Department officials support a change in the
policy toward Hamas and quote the president in this context."
Geoffrey Aronson, of the Washington-based Foundation for Middle
East Peace, who helped arrange the secret meetings, also participated last
year in meetings organized by Alastair Crooke, the European Union's former
security envoy to the territories, with key Hamas and Hezbollah members.
These meetings, which took place in Beirut, were also attended by two
former senior Central Intelligence Agency officials. Haaretz reported at
the time that Cheney also know about the existence of these meetings, and
received regular reports from the American participants.
Novik
wrote that "during secret talks via a third party a few years ago, the
Syrians already demonstrated much more flexibility than they did at
Shepherdstown on matters such as the pace of the withdrawal,
implementation of normalization and creative solutions ('a peace park')
for the area north of [Lake] Kinneret. Then, too, it was Israel that
refused direct, official talks."
The Shepherdstown talks were
formal Israeli-Syrian negotiations started by Ehud Barak's government.
Meretz-Yahad Chairman Yossi Beilin said in media interviews
yesterday that the European mediator in the secret talks was Nicholas
Lang, head of the Middle East desk at the Swiss Foreign Ministry. Lang
also played a key role in organizing the Israeli-Palestinian meetings at
which Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo drafted the Geneva Initiative, their
proposal for a final-status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Liel, who was the driving force behind the secret meetings with Suleiman,
is one of the people closest to Beilin.
Raviv Drucker, of Channel
10 television, reported last night that Lang met not long ago with Shalom
Turjeman, Ehud Olmert's political adviser, and presented him with the
draft. According to Drucker, Turjeman told Lang that Israel has no
interest in the understandings. Drucker also said that Lang visited
Damascus several times during the talks, met with Syrian FM Farouk Shara,
and reported that he believed the Syrian leadership genuinely wanted a
deal.