Global Policy Forum

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Tuesday he expected the United States would invite Syria to a U.S.-led conference on Palestinian statehood, calling the participation of Israel's long-time nemesis appropriate. Olmert made no mention of any preconditions for Syrian attendance but appeared to issue a cautionary note to Damascus not to try to push the future of the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in a 1967 war, onto the meeting's agenda. "I hope Syria and other Arab countries will participate," Olmert told reporters. "Naturally, the issue at the centre of the agenda for this meeting is our relations with the Palestinians, which are part of the general relations in the Middle East," he said.

Syria, which hosts leaders of Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist movement that violently took control of the Gaza Strip in June and opposes President Mahmoud Abbas's peace efforts with Israel, has not decided whether to attend the conference. No precise date has been set for the meeting slated for Annapolis, Maryland, but Olmert, echoing U.S. officials, said it would be held sometime in the last week of November. "As far as we are concerned, Syrian participation in this meeting is definitely appropriate. The Americans are the ones issuing the invitations and I suppose they will invite them, as well as many other countries," Olmert said. "I hope very much that if the process between the Palestinians and us succeeds, it will encourage a similar process between the Syrians and us in the future," he said.

Israel and Syria last held peace talks in 2000 but failed to reach an agreement in the United States on the future of the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau that overlooks the Sea of Galilee, the Jewish state's largest reservoir. Tensions between the two countries rose after an Israeli air raid on Syrian territory in September which analysts speculated may have destroyed a nascent Syria nuclear reactor. Syria denied having such a facility.

Timeframe

Olmert made the comments a day after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joined Israeli and Palestinian leaders in voicing hope they could reach a peace agreement before President George W. Bush leaves office in January 2009. But Rice offered no details on how Israel and the Palestinians might settle their deep divisions over core issues they have pledged to tackle after the conference: borders and the future of Jerusalem and millions of Palestinian refugees. In an indication of difficulties ahead, Israel has also put the Palestinians on notice it would not implement an agreement until its security concerns, spelled out in a U.S.-backed peace "road map" formulated in 2003, were met.

The Palestinians have called on Israel to meet its commitments under that blueprint and halt settlement expansion and uproot outposts established in the occupied West Bank without Israeli government permission. "We are prepared to accomplish all our commitments and one will not hesitate to expect that the Palestinians will do precisely the same in order to move forward to implement the understandings that we will reach with them," Olmert reiterated in English-language remarks on Tuesday. He did not say when Israel might begin to take steps to put the road map into motion.