Moscow may host further Middle East talks

WASHINGTON – Russia and the United States are tentatively planning a second Middle East peace conference, in Moscow in early 2008, with major parties hoping to begin a comprehensive peace effort that would include direct talks between Israel and Syria, according to U.S., Russian, Arab and European officials.

Syria’s delegate to this week’s talks in Annapolis, Md., said Wednesday that Damascus wants the Moscow gathering to begin negotiations between Syria and Israel over the Golan Heights, a border region seized by Israel during the 1967 war.

“It is our hope that we can revive the Syrian track in Moscow,” Syria’s Deputy Foreign Minister Fayssal Mekdad said before departing Washington.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert indicated that he hoped at some point to resume talks with Syria, but cautioned that the time is not yet ripe. He said Syria must change in its behavior, notably it support for Lebanon’s Shiite militia Hezbollah.

“Conditions have not yet matured to the point where we can … start a meaningful dialogue,” Olmert said Wednesday in a small roundtable with journalists. “They know exactly what I think.”

But the presence of a Syrian delegation in Annapolis “may be the beginning of a reconsideration” on the part of Damascus, he said. Olmert said Bush indicated privately that he has no objection to an Israeli dialogue with Syria if Israel determines such a move is in its own interest. Bush’s only admonition to the Israelis, he said, was “don’t surprise us.”

Defense Minister Ehud Barak and the Israeli defense establishment are more enthusiastic about reviving talks with Syria, U.S. officials and former envoys said. Barak “sees the strategic advantage vis-a-vis Iran and dealing with a government that can deliver, in contrast to the Palestinian Authority, which can’t,” said Martin Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel who now heads the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

Olmert has exchanged messages with the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad over the past three months, including before and after the Sept. 6 Israeli airstrike on what experts say was a site of a nuclear program, Israeli and U.S. officials said.

The Syrian-Israeli track may be easier to solve than the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, analysts said, because it is limited to one issue: the Golan Heights. The last peace effort conducted by the Clinton administration in 2000 came within 50 meters of settling control of the territory. “The delicious irony is that a process designed to launch the Palestinian-Israeli track is likely to launch talks between Syria and Israel, and if you had to judge which process would have more chance of success it’d be the Syrian track,” Indyk said.