Syria, long one of Israel's most intransigent enemies, entered face-to-face negotiations with Israel at the 1991 Madrid Conference, with subsequent bi-lateral negotiations held at the State Department in Washington and at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland. No public negotiations have been conducted since February 1996. With the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Wye Memorandum in October 1998, the United States declared the hope of progress on the Israel-Syria track and has expressed a willingness to reengage in these negotiations.

Should Israel and Syria return to the negotiating table, the basis of the talks will be territorial compromise by Israel in return for Syria establishing normalized relations with the Jewish State. Following the precedent set in the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, and the interim agreements

Syrian Daily Al Baath, October 21, 1998

with the Palestinians, such normalized relations will include a commitment to speak out against and prevent anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incitement in the government-controlled Syrian media. (There is no independent media in Syria.)

There are frequent anti-Semitic articles and caricatures in the Syrian media, including classical anti-Semitic stereotypes, comparisons of Israel with the Nazis and Holocaust denial. After Roger Garaudy, the French Holocaust denier, was invited to Damascus by the Ministry of Information, the government-owned newspaper Tishrin praised Mr. Garaudy for "exposing the lies of the Zionist movement which exaggerated what happened to Jews during the Second World War for political purposes." A recent theme is the "international Jewish conspiracy" behind the Lewinsky affair. Commenting on the situation in August 1998, Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass (the author of the widely available book The Matza of Zion, which attempts to prove the 1840 blood libel against the Jews of Damascus) declared, "it is a plot fabricated by worldwide Zionism." Mr. Tlass claimed a "Jewish lawyer" told Kenneth Starr about the Lewinsky affair, concluding "all this definitely proves that worldwide Zionism and particularly American Jews are in the service of Israel."

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