Apparently desperate for a vote-winning, pre-election breakthrough in negotiations over peace with Lebanon and Syria, the Israeli government has reportedly sent a conciliatory new message to Damascus, effectively offering to trade the Golan Heights for a peace treaty.
Syria, in response, is said to have contacted the Clinton administration for an assessment of whether the offer is a pre-election gimmick by the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, or a serious, viable proposal.
The offer, as detailed in yesterday's Ha'aretz newspaper, comes hard on the heels of a similar, although less generous initiative, which was publicised last week and which has evidently been rejected by President Hafez al-Assad of Syria. In the earlier proposal, Israel sought a deal with Damascus and Beirut that would allow it to withdraw its soldiers from the "security zone" it occupies in south Lebanon before election day, May 17th, and then to start intensive peace negotiations with Syria after the elections.
In the new, improved offer, conveyed to Damascus via a third party, Israel goes further: it would reportedly be ready to resume peace talks with Syria from the point at which they were suspended by the previous government, headed by Mr Shimon Peres, early in 1996.
Syria has always claimed that, in those talks, Israel had agreed to relinquish the Golan Heights, the mountain ridge it captured in the 1967 war, as part of a full peace treaty.
The Israeli government has apparently been using the Russians to send messages assuring Mr Assad of the seriousness of its intentions. The Israeli Foreign Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, has made three trips to Moscow recently, and yesterday hosted a reciprocal visit by the Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Igor Ivanov.
Mr Ivanov said Russia was ready to help "on all fronts" - in talks with the Palestinians and the Syrians - and echoed the reported new Israeli initiative in saying that Israeli-Syrian peace talks should resume where they left off three years ago.
Mr Netanyahu's main rival, Labour's Mr Ehud Barak, has pledged, if elected, to bring the troops out of Lebanon within a year, presumably in the context of a wider peace deal with Syria. Meanwhile, Israeli President Ezer Weizman, a vocal critic of Mr Netanyahu's slow progress in peacemaking, was warmly received by President Mubarak of Egypt in Cairo yesterday. Mr Mubarak met the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat, on Wednesday. In both meetings, Palestinian statehood topped the agenda. Mr Arafat had spoken of declaring independent statehood on May 4th, when the Oslo peace accords expire, but now looks set to delay such a declaration.