Assad Holds Out a Hand.(Bashar Assad)

Benn is the diplomatic correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Bashar Assad, the Syrian president, scored a diplomatic coup with his proposal to renew peace talks with Israel. While peacemaking or even mere negotiations appear unlikely, Assad's initiative has shaken the Israeli leadership, and exposed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a peace refusnik. This is no small accomplishment in the Middle East political playground: the Palestinians have tried in vain to outmaneuver Sharon. The young and relatively inexperienced Assad succeeded with little effort, through a New York Times interview.

In his interview, published Dec. 1, Assad begged the United States to resume Syrian-Israeli negotiations, which broke down in 2000 several weeks before the death of Bashar's father, President Hafez Assad. Describing what Israel would get in return, Bashar pledged normalization, "like the relations between Syria and the United States."

Bashar did not suddenly fall in love with Israel. He had a more obvious motive: fending off American pressure. The list of American grievances is long--from assisting Saddam Hussein to aiding postwar terrorism in Iraq, not to mention its long support of Palestinian terrorist groups and the Lebanese Hizbullah. The Syrian Accountability Act, signed recently by President George W. Bush, mandates U.S. sanctions. Following his late father's example, Bashar tried to walk the surest way to Washington, via Jerusalem.

Syria and Israel talked periodically between 1991 and 2000. The discussions revolved around a simple formula: Israel should withdraw from the Golan Heights, which it captured in 1967, in return for security arrangements and normal relations with Syria and its satellite, Lebanon. Successive U.S. and Israeli governments viewed the Syrian track as a tempting alternative to an emotionally and politically sensitive Palestinian deal. After all, there are no holy places in the Golan. But the Syrians refused any public gesture that might have stirred Israeli public opinion in their favor--and the talks came to nothing.

Since taking office in 2001, Sharon has simply ignored Syria, focusing on the Palestinian conflict. The Israelis mocked Bashar's immaturity and portrayed him as an anti-Semitic, worthless puppet of his dad's cronies. Ephraim Halevy, ex- head of the ...