Al Jazeera (Qatar) : "Syria key to regional power shift" par Mark Levine, historien

Syria key to regional power shift

 By Mark Levine, Middle East historian

Three senior US officials are the Middle East in a bid to kick-start peace talks  [GALLO/GETTY]

It is hard not to feel like it is déjà vu all over again. A US Middle East peace envoy travels to Damascus and then to Israel in an effort to jump start Israel-Syrian negotiations over a land for peace deal involving the Golan Heights, which Israel annexed in 1967. At the same time progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front seems stymied and the US remains reluctant to impose a final solution on the two parties.

The push towards Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations fits a familiar pattern in the larger Middle East peace process, one that returns to the first years of the Oslo peace process in the mid-1990s.

The logic is simple: while Israel could never achieve peace without an historic compromise with Palestinians, it could never achieve security without reaching a peace agreement with its last remaining front line confrontation state since it signed peace agreements with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994.

Indeed, while ideologically committed to an anti-Zionist, Baathist foreign policy, and despite its support for Hamas and Hezbollah, Syria has been reliable in................




http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/07/2009727105.......