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ambassador. But not for the last time in negotiations with Syria, any real
progress was blocked by an apparent combination of misunderstanding and
miscommunication. The discussions were lively. Shihabi had served as Syria’s
liaison officer with the UN force set up along the cease-fire line after the 1948
war. “Go check with the UN,” he said at our first meeting. “You'll see almost
all the exchanges of fire in the late 1950s were provoked by Israel.” I didn’t
respond directly, though I did note it was the Syrians who had tried to divert
water from the Jordan River in the early fifties. “You did it first,” he retorted.
So it continued. Only later did we learn that while Muallem had sent back a
generally encouraging impression from our garden talks, and his conclusion that
Israel was ready for substantive talks, he had neglected to convey our
expectation that any early progress would occur in informal exchanges. The
result was probably to raise General Shihabi’s expectations, which made him
reluctant to show any real engagement. After a phone call with Rabin after our
first day of talks, I became equally cautious. He agreed that we wanted to avoid
a repeat of our experience with the Golan “deposit”. We did not want to put
concessions on the record before we got an indication that the Syrians were
genuinely ready for peace talks.
Still, the fact that we’d established the precedent of a “chief-of-staff
channel” was a step forward. My successor as ramatkal, Amnon Lipkin, would
meet again with Shihabi in early 1995.
I was confident Amnon was inheriting an army stronger, better prepared and
better equipped than at any time since the Six-Day War. We also had peace
treaties not only with Egypt, but now Jordan, and none of the substantive issues
with the Syrians seemed insurmountable.
But the main security challenges were the unconventional ones. In the long
term, a resurgent Iraq, and very likely Iran, might make strides towards getting
nuclear weapons. There was every sign that Hizbollah in Lebanon; and Hamas,
Islamic Jihad and their supporters in Gaza and the West Bank, would escalate
violence and terror. As the negotiations with Jordan were entering their final
phase in early October, a further Hamas attack — this one, a kidnapping — had
brought home that threat. On Sunday, October 9, Hamas men dressed as
Orthodox Jews abducted an off-duty soldier named Nahshon Wachsman near
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