ISRAEL: In a case of "like father, like son," Syria's President Bashar Assad yesterday brushed aside a surprise invitation from the Israeli President, Mr Moshe Katsav, to come to Jerusalem and open peace negotiations.
Mr Katsav, whose position, unlike Mr Assad's, is largely ceremonial, apparently issued the invitation because the true powerbroker in Israel, Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon, has proved loath to respond constructively to a series of public overtures from Mr Assad for a resumption of peace talks between the two countries, still formally in a state of war.
The last peace efforts broke off four years ago - shortly before the death of Bashar's father, President Hafez Assad - with the sides apparently close to an accord under which Israel would have relinquished the Golan Heights as part of a peace treaty with both Syria and its client state Lebanon.
Mr Assad now wants to pick up the negotiations where they left off, something Mr Sharon opposes.
Instead, he is demanding that Syria first evict Hamas and other groups on the US State Department list of terror organisations from their Damascus headquarters, stop arming and sponsoring Hizbullah gunmen in southern Lebanon, and then restart peace talks from scratch.
Israel's Channel 2 news reported last night that even in such ideal circumstances, and at the price of scuppering any peace accord, Mr Sharon would oppose a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan.
Certainly, he has evinced no particular interest in Mr Assad's overtures, asserting that Syria is simply trying to win international public relations points, at a time when the United States is levelling unprecedented criticism at Damascus for its support of Saddam Hussein, Hamas and other groups on the wrong side of the US war on terror.
In a move his aides said had not been co-ordinated with the prime minister, Mr Katsav declared that he was inviting Mr Assad "to come to Jerusalem to meet with the country's leaders and conduct serious negotiations, if that is his wish".
The late Hafez Assad rejected years of American pressure to emulate the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by flying to Jerusalem and offering a peace treaty in exchange for territory captured by Israel in the 1967 war. Mr Sadat's "no more war" speech to the Knesset in 1977 kick-started a process that led to full Israeli-Egyptian relations and Israel's return of the Sinai to Egypt.
Hafez Assad would tell his American interlocutors that he would not follow Mr Sadat's example because he wanted to avoid Mr Sadat's fate - assassination by Muslim extremists.
Hours after Mr Katsav had issued his invitation, Syrian officials made plain that Mr Assad was upholding his late father's position. Syrian state media rejected the Israeli offer as an effort to "escape" a formal peace process.
"Partial solutions and media manoeuvres do not achieve peace in the region," said the official Syrian news agency, SANA.