Israel's president today invited Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to visit Jerusalem for negotiations with Israeli leaders, but Damascus rejected the offer as "not serious".
"I invite the president of Syria to come to Jerusalem and meet with the heads of the state and hold serious negotiations," President Moshe Katsav said on Israel Radio.
Although Mr Katsav has largely ceremonial powers, his appeal added to pressure within Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government for the right-wing leader to respond favourably to Mr Assad's recent call to resume peace talks broken off in 2000.
Responding to the invitation, Syrian Expatriates Minister Buthaina Shaaban told CNN: "We need a serious response, this is not a serious response." She said Israel needed to say it was interested in resuming peace talks where they stopped four years ago.
Those talks in the US state of West Virginia, ended without any agreement on the future of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights overlooking the Sea of Galilee, Israel's biggest reservoir.
But officials have said the two sides, still technically at war, were divided only over the issue of control of a narrow strip of land at water's edge.
Agreement to resume the talks at the point at which they were suspended would effectively force Mr Sharon to agree, even before sitting down at the negotiating table, to a pullout from almost all of the Golan Heights.
Mr Sharon has long opposed withdrawal from the strategic heights, seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in 1981 in a move not recognised internationally. Some 17,000 Jewish settlers and 20,000 Druze live on the Golan.