Frederic Hof has led a distinguished career in U.S. diplomacy on a range of Arab issues, most notably, directing the Jerusalem field operations of the Sharm El-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee, and helping draft a report investigating the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine headquarters at the Beirut airport. But one of his endeavors, published in his latest memoir, is unparalleled. In Reaching for the Heights, he tells the lesser-known story of a secret attempt to reach a Syrian–Israeli peace. 

As the U.S. State Department Syria-Israel peace mediator, during Barack Obama’s first term, Hof made remarkable progress in mediating an agreement between Israel and Syria, which would have strategically reoriented Syria away from Iran, in exchange for the phased withdrawal of Israel from all territory taken in the 1967 War. Or at least, he was close. With the onset of the Arab Spring and the spiraling violence that befell Syria, the talks dramatically broke down. 

Cairo Review Senior Editor Nadeen Shaker and Assistant Editor Farah Bassyouni spoke with Hof about his diplomatic experience, and whether it was a missed opportunity for peace. 

Cairo Review: I want to start by asking you, is your book considered a memoir?

Frederic Hof: It is. In a sentence, the book is a memoir, a story of a very interesting experience I had over a two-year period where I tried to mediate a Syria–Israel peace. I guess the thing that makes this different from most memoirs is that when a memoir is written, it’s fairly easy to predict who the hero of the story is going to be. And I was very conscious, in writing this, that I was not going to come out as a hero—that my mistakes, my shortcomings, would be featured prominently in this. And that goes to one of my motivations which was to write something that diplomats, and people who are interested in diplomatic history, can draw lessons from.

CR: Yes, and the truthfulness definitely comes through. Following from that, when we talk about Arab and Israeli peace, we don’t often think about Syrian-Israeli peace. So how is it significant in larger Arab-Israeli relations?

FH: I think, you know, that the goal since the work of  Ralph Bunche in 1949 on the armistice agreements, has been comprehensive, Arab–Israeli peace with no holdouts. Egypt was obviously a pioneer in this respect. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was an important addition. Clearly, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is at the heart of the conflict, and this is something I tried to acknowledge repeatedly in my memoir, even though I was not the one principally responsible for that track. But clearly, Syria and Israel at peace, whether simultaneously with the Israeli Palestinian track, before, or after, is an important element in sealing the whole structure of peace between Israel and its neighbors, and Israel and the broader Arab region. 

CR: What was the first breakthrough, not necessarily in negotiations, but in bringing both sides together to actually talk. And since there was a history of not being able to negotiate, except on certain conditions and terms, what changed that led to that negotiation?

FH: Well, we, unfortunately, never did reach the opportunity of bringing the parties directly together. We were in the process of planning to do so. Ideally, somewhere in Eastern Europe, we were thinking in terms of Budapest or Prague, starting perhaps with proximity negotiations in the same city, or even in the same hotel. But, we certainly hoped we would be able to bring the parties together and if we had I would have been reasonably optimistic that more serious progress would have been made because even in just shuttle diplomacy, we had managed to narrow the differences considerably, particularly on the key issues of territory. And a serious eventual strategic realignment. 

CR: Could you talk a little bit about those key issues and how both perspectives were brought closer together?

FH: Sure. On the territorial issue, the recovery of all territory lost in 1967 was the Syrian objective. Both Hafez Al-Assad and his son Bashar Al-Assad were consumed with the idea that Syria should perform no less efficiently in recovering all territory lost during the 1967 War. During the course of this mediation, we made serious progress and further defined the term that Syria always used in connection with its territorial objective, meaning the line of June 4th, 1967. The Israeli side worked very hard, very diligently, with me in trying to define this line in as much exactness and precision as possible. So, when the mediation eventually went into suspension and then termination, all of the major issues had been resolved with one exception, and that was the northern course of the Jordan running into Lake Tiberias; there was still a difference between the parties on some basic questions, like sovereignty over the waterway rights to the water where an eventual boundary should be. The differences were only a matter of a very few meters but still very important. And this would have had to have been worked out. 

On the territorial side on the Israeli side, the key objective was serious geopolitical realignment away from Iran. Hezbollah, and at the time an important factor, Hamas, and the Israeli side were consistently very skeptical, perfectly understandable skepticism, about Syria’s willingness to do this. And finally, the prime minister of Israel asked that I have a one-on-one meeting with President Bashar Al-Assad to pose the most difficult questions, specifically to get his answers so that Israel could make a reasonably informed judgment about Al-Assad’s readiness to essentially break military relations with Iran and Hezbollah and pull Lebanon into a peace process with Israel and therefore dissolving all threats to the state of Israel emanating from Syrian territory. This was the Israeli objective and it was the only thing in the Israeli mindset that would justify something so controversial and, I must say looking at it from an Israeli perspective, as painful as a withdrawal from the Golan Heights and from areas in the Jordan Valley.  

CR: Did you get a chance to pose these questions to Bashar Al-Assad? 

FH: Yes, I suppose I posed the question to Bashar Al-Assad during a one-on-one meeting on the last day of February in 2011. It was a meeting that lasted about 50 minutes, and we got very specifically into the questions of Iran and Hezbollah in particular. And President Al-Assad took the position that dissolving the military aspects of these relationships, and bringing Lebanon into peace with Israel was perfectly consistent with his idea of peace. The only real difference we had, and we didn’t dwell on it, but it was something that really made me think after the meeting broke up, was president Assad’s breezy optimism that Iran and Hezbollah would willingly go along with all of this, and that they would willingly see their influence in the Levant reduced significantly by Syria going into peace with Israel and Syria dissolving some very key military and security relationships. 

I had, and to this day, have profound doubts that Iran and Hezbollah would have so easily agreed to such a thing. But at the time, my job was to try and move this agreement forward, and if that was the position of the president of Syria, if we were going to succeed, he would have to face this problem head-on and we would ultimately know the answer to the question of how these parties would have reacted. 

CR: Did you discuss the border issue with Al-Assad in that meeting? What was his reaction? 

FH: I think both sides emerged from this mediation with a more precise idea of what the line of June 4th, 1967 was. We know from history, from the Geneva summit of March 2000, when a dying Hafez Al-Assad made his way to Geneva to meet with the U.S president, he was presented with a map that in no way resembled the actual disposition of Syrian and Israeli forces on the eve of war in 1967. President Al-Assad looked at that map and his reaction was that if this is the line we’re talking about, there will not be peace.

Apparently, historians tell us that President Clinton may not have been fully aware of it at the time, but he was presented by prime minister Ehud Barak, with a very special idea of what the line of June 4th looked like. That kind of game playing did not take place during my mediation, never. The Syrian side agreed, somewhat to my surprise, that the eventual boundary along the north-eastern sector of Lake Tiberias would be the invisible ten-meter mark, from mandate and armistice days, thereby acknowledging that Tiberias was fully Israel.

In terms of sovereignty, I had no doubt that when it would come to the actual demarcation of the boundary, there would be disputes, mostly petty disputes, but disputes nonetheless as we would get down to the meter by meter detail, of where that line would go nowadays. 

CR: Do you think Syria was asking for too much from Israel? 

FH: It had been the consistent policy of Syria that in terms of recovering territory lost in the June 1967 war, Syria would do no worse than Egypt’s Anwar Sadat in terms of recovering every meter lost. To Israel, this was something that the two presidents of Syria, both named Al-Assad, considered to be very important. Syria had invested a great deal of time in the seventies and through the eighties condemning Egypt for what it described as a shameful, separate peace with Israel. The rhetoric that was used as serious leadership in getting the headquarters of the Arab League moved, and having Egypt expelled for a time from the Arab League, absolutely dictated to the leaders of Syria that they could not be seen either domestically or in the context of inter-relations as reaching a deal less territorially favored than that reached by a president Anwar Sadat. So, this was a steady part of the Syrian policy line of June 4th, 1967 portions of which still needed to be defined, but nothing less than that. This was a cardinal principle of Syrian policy.

CR: The big turning point in your memoir is the onset of the Arab Spring and how that overturned the talks, especially because of Al-Assad’s reaction and violence. Could you talk about how that went down?   

FH: Yes. I must say that after my one-on-one discussion with Al-Assad on the last day of February 2011, and a very detailed discussion with prime minister Netanyahu and his team a couple of evenings later, I was feeling reasonably certain that we were on the path to a more substantial progress toward an eventual treaty of peace. I never let my optimism get completely out of control because the unexpected sometimes happens, and that throws things off course. On top of that, I was never a hundred percent sure that the two leaders would really pull the trigger. 

My White House partner, Dennis Ross, and I were in the process of planning, as I mentioned, for proximity talks and inviting both parties to an Eastern European capital to move things forward. Then, around the 17th or 18th of March, we received the first reports of Syrian government violence directed against peaceful protesters, both most notably in the Southern city of Deraa but also in Damascus itself.

And I was mildly alarmed by this, but not necessarily feeling as though the mediation itself was in jeopardy, not at first, because, frankly, the Bashar Al-Assad I had met and spoken with did not impress me as a mass murderer. He did not impress me as someone who was necessarily addicted to violence as the first response to peaceful dissent.

But as the days and weeks went on this process, this violent government reaction that peaceful protests began to spread all over Syria. In places like Deraa and Damascus, Syrians were all of a sudden beginning to think, what is going on here?

Dennis Ross and I realized that we would not be able to continue this mediation if Al-Assad was determined to wage war on his own people. There was a basic question of political legitimacy arising: does this man have the right? Does he have the objective ability to speak for the people of Syria on matters of war and peace? And we were rapidly reaching the conclusion that the answer to both questions was no. What we decided would be very effective. And Dennis Ross carried the ball and was in the White House to try to persuade President Obama to pick up the telephone and call Al-Assad and say, in essence, “look if the violence continues, a very promising mediation, one that is making excellent progress and setting the stage for you to recover all of the land loss by Syria in 1967, will go away.” 

Dennis Ross and myself thought that it was important for the president of the United States to make an attempt, to reach out just in case Al-Assad was under the illusion that the mediation could continue under these violent circumstances. Just in case the president of Syria could have been persuaded to take a step back and try diplomacy and politics, as opposed to violence. The president declined to do this. Ultimately the president would decline to authorize my return to Damascus to make the same points in-person to Al-Assad. It was a big opportunity missed, perhaps ten or eleven years later, when we look at the condition of Syria and the Syrian people, it just seems to me, very frankly, to be inexcusable that we did not at least try. Even if the chances of success were less than 50 percent, we should have tried. And all I can say is that Dennis Ross did his very best to persuade the president, but it fell short.

CR: Was this because the White House did not know how the events would unfold? Or was Obama fundamentally against Al-Assad’s violence? 

FH: I think there was an element of shock in the White House at the level of violence that the Syrian government was inflicting on the Syrian people; I think, as you mentioned, all of this did take place in the context of the Arab Spring. And I was told at the time, and I have been told since that there was a strong sense in the white house, perhaps in the oval office, in the person of President Barack Obama, that if a political figure as impressive as Egypt’s Mubarak could not survive the Arab Spring, then certainly Bashar Al-Assad was not going to survive. The view of Al-Assad in the White House was not necessarily positive in any respect.

Al-Assad had a history of lying to official American interlocutors about serious relationships with Hezbollah and Iran, and with supporting Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The view in the White House was that it was probably only a matter of time before Al-Assad is pulled off the stage. I did not agree with this, I thought at the time that Al-Assad has key elements of his security forces and military police intelligence in his corner. And given the fact that he was willing to use violence, he was not necessarily going to go the way of president Mubarak. But again, I was told that President Obama was already thinking deeply about his eventual 2012 campaign for reelection as president. And in that context, he did not view outreach to Al-Assad, which he thought would inevitably leak, as beneficial to his domestic political prospects. So I think all of these things worked into the decision, but again, I thought at the time that it was a horrible mistake. And my feelings about that have not lessened over the years.

CR: You mentioned that the president of Syria did not necessarily speak for his people; I think that a lot of people in the Arab World are in agreement that peace with Israel is not the goal. Do you think that the Syrian-Israeli conflict and the inability to reach peace is reflective of the Arab World’s opinion on peace with Israel as well?

FH: We’re seeing now, in the Arab world, a trend mostly through the Abraham Accords for Arab states to normalize relationships with Israel. And I suspect over time this will broaden. I think the challenge here is similar to a challenge that Egyptian leaders and Israeli leaders have faced in the context of Egypt-Israel peace, and that is the challenge of peaceful relations at the leadership level; penetrating deeply into the end of the population base of a given country. I think, for example, that the leaders of the United Arab Emirates in Abu Dhabi and Dubai are probably aware that their willingness to go forward with normalization with Israel does not necessarily resonate positively among the citizens of the Emirates. And I think some reason for that goes back to the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, which is still totally unsatisfactory in terms of either side exhibiting much in the way of understanding and empathy toward the issues of the other side. So I think this will always be a limitation. I am one of those who still believe that the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is at the heart of the Arab-Israeli dispute and it’s the biggest challenge to peace, something that transcends diplomatic normalization, which is full peace between Israel and the Arab world.

I would just add in the Syrian context, for what it’s worth, Bashar al-Assad made it clear to me that, in his view, Syria too had a public opinion about these matters. Quite often, people in the west, certainly Israelis, have the impression that in an authoritarian state, particularly in the Arab world, there is no such thing as a public opinion. In a place like Syria, the president of the Republic need only snap his fingers to command obedience. This was certainly not the view of Bashar Al-Assad and he seemed to be very much committed to the idea that any eventual peace agreement he would sign with Israel would have to be seen by Syrians as honorable, although Al-Assad himself never raised the Palestinian issue. There was no linkage and indeed, as far as I know, there has been no linkage in Syrian policy since the Oslo Accords. I have no doubt that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would have weighed heavily on assets and political calculations, even in the wake of a peace treaty with Israel, and that the leadership of Syria would have been concerned about public opinion, particularly if Syrians saw Palestinians as being persecuted.

CR: If we were to revive the agreement today in its final drafts, do you think it would have a shot? And if not, what would you change or what would you redraw? 

FH: Let’s just skip the bottom line here and assume that, somehow, Bashar Al-Assad approaches Israel and says, “Look, let’s take up the work as we did back in 2009 through March of 2011. Let’s put it all back on the table.” I think the problem that was becoming obvious in late March, April, and May 2011 would still be on the table today and would prevent any progress. And that is that Bashar Al-Assad lacks the political legitimacy to speak for the Syrian people on matters of war and peace.

Now, I can’t rule out the possibility that someday if Syria enjoys inclusive, legitimate governance, there could be a revival of an effort toward Syrian-Israeli peace. And I would hope the United States, and for that matter, other parties, like Turkey or Egypt, might be in a position to help mediate such an agreement.

I am not sure if in the future, the talks would have a territorial dimension—it is possible that Bashar Al-Assad, by choosing the path he chose in March, April, and May 2011, has ceded the Golan to Israel forever.  It’s also possible that that’s not the case. But the bottom line is that for there to be negotiations in which any leader of Israel has confidence that withdrawing from the Golan will not present a security crisis for the state of Israel, the leader would have to be sure about the intention of his Syrian counterpart and the legitimacy of that counterpart. Whether or not that Syrian counterpart can actually speak reliably and authoritatively for the people of Syria, and that clearly does not exist now.

CR: In terms of Israel’s security demands, I would imagine there’s the added complication of the Russian intervention and the immense involvement of Iran and Iranian paramilitary troops in the conflict. The reality of the past ten years would add more complications, right? 

FH: Well, I think so. The dependence of Al-Assad’s regime on Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia is nearly absolute. Bashar Al-Assad may try to cleverly play one party off against the other. But the prospect of Al-Assad in 2022 creating the geopolitical strategic realignment, which is at the heart of the Israeli diplomatic objective, is zero. I think even in 2011 it would have been much more difficult for him. And then he imagined at the time, or what he conveyed to me by telling me at the time that the Iranians understand that this is a matter of Syria’s interest and that they’ll go along with it. 

I was skeptical of that then…but the fact now is, it’s impossible because Al-Assad is at best a peer of Hassan Nasrallah. Iran has become very much the senior partner in the bilateral relationship with Syria, a complete reversal of the situation that existed under Hafez Al-Assad.

CR: Given this reality, is it possible at all for Israel to change its diplomatic goal? I understand how strategic alignment is important for its security but is there a world where this could change? 

FH: During my mediation, Israel was quite willing to accept peace with Syria: to sign anything; a non-belligerency agreement, a peace treaty, whatever, without strategic realignment. But there would have been no territorial dimension; there would’ve been no Israeli withdrawal from the Golan. When I began the mediation, my Israeli interlocutors told me that this was the most that could be expected. That at the most Israel might consider some minor adjustments on the Golan, enabling more of Arab Druze residence on the Golan to be under the rule of Damascus, which was apparently the preference of many. 

But even today, I think Israel would probably be willing to entertain some kind of peace initiative, but there would surely be no territorial dimension. And the prospect of such an initiative coming from someone in Damascus, in the presidential palace, someone completely dominated by Iran and Hezbollah, the prospect of that I think is nil.