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| Volume X, Fall 2003, Number 3 |
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| EXCERPT: I Told You So: Syria, Oslo and the Al-Aqsa Intifada |
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| Christopher Hemmer |
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Dr. Hemmer is an assistant professor in the Department of Strategy and International Security at the Air War College. The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Air War College or any other U.S. government department or agency.
Approximately one month into
the outbreak of the al-Aqsa
intifada, Syrian Foreign Minis-
ter Farouk al-Sharaa was asked whether the Syrian government was acting in coordination with the Palestinian leadership. In response, Sharaa stressed that Syria stands fully behind "the Palestinian people and their cause," but not necessarily with the Palestinian leadership. Coordination with that leadership would be useful, Sharaa maintained, only if Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority followed Syria's direction. If not, then coordination "would be like helping Israel rather than the Palestinian people."1 This, in a nutshell, has been Syria's response, not only to the al-Aqsa intifada, but also to the Palestinian question more generally. As Patrick Seale concisely put it, for Syria, the Palestinian question is "too important to be left to the Palestinians."2 Syria objected to the Oslo peace process from the start, has welcomed its collapse, and now argues that its failure vindicates Damascus' claim for leadership of the Arab cause against Israel.
Syria's relationship with the Palestinians and their leadership is best understood as a product of three forces: the ideological ties that exist between Palestinians and Syrians, the domestic political needs of the Asad regime in Syria, and Syria's desire to assume a position of regional leadership. Although analysts differ over the precise weight that should be attributed to each of these factors,3 all three are needed to understand Syria's reaction to the collapse of Oslo, the al-Aqsa intifada and to current peace efforts like those embodied in the recently issued Roadmap.
1 "Al-Sharaa on Intifadah, Lebanon, Says ‘Syria Cannot Return to Negotiation Table Now,'" Foreign Broadcast Information Service (hereafter FBIS), Source-Date: November 26, 2000.
2 Patrick Seale, Asad of Syria: The Struggle For The Middle East (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 348.
3 For studies that highlight the importance of ideology, see Ghada Hashem Talhami, Syria and the Palestinians: The Clash of Nationalisms (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2001); Daniel Pipes, Greater Syria: The History of An Ambition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and "Palestine For The Syrians," Commentary, Vol. 82, No. 6, December 1986, pp. 30-36. For studies that stress Syria's regional interests, see Barry Rubin, "Israel, the Peace Process and the Arab States," Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 4, December 1997, pp. 1-18; Revolution Until Victory? The Politics and History of the PLO (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 123-145; Rashid Khalidi, "The Asad Regime and the Palestinian Resistance" Arab Studies Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 4, Fall 1984, pp. 259-266; Itamar Rabinovich, Waging Peace: Israel and The Arabs at the End of the Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999), pp. 73 and 197; and Yaha Sadowski, "The Evolution of Political Identity in Syria," Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East, eds. Shibley Telhami and Michael Barnett (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). Moshe Maoz also stresses the importance of Asad's domestic calculations along with his regional ambitions, see Asad: The Sphinx of Damascus: A Political Biography (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988), pp. 119-120. All these studies, while stressing one variable over others, ultimately come to accept the need to focus on the interaction of each of these three factors. For an excellent recent discussion that explores the interaction of these factors, see Raymond Hinnebusch, "The Foreign Policy of Syria," The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, eds. Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), see especially pp. 141-143, 149, and 156.
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