Arabs Warn Israel to Reach Deal With Syria Before Quitting Lebanon

CAIRO —  Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Beirut over the weekend took an angry line against Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s government, defending as legitimate attacks on Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon and urging an overall reassessment of Arab relations with the Jewish state.

The meeting was moved to the Lebanese capital from Cairo, where the group normally convenes, as a gesture of solidarity after Israeli bombing damaged Lebanon’s electrical grid last month, and it seemed to augur a region moving not toward peace but toward heightened tension--or even renewed war.

Israel bombed power plants and other civilian structures in northern and central Lebanon in response to attacks that claimed the lives of occupying Israeli troops in the south of the country. Lebanon has claimed that its people have a right to resist the Israeli presence on its soil, while Israel calls such attacks on its troops terrorism.

Despite attempts by Egypt to soften the declaration adopted Saturday, the gist of the statement amounted to a thinly veiled threat that fighting could spread to northern Israel if the Barak government follows through on its plan to leave Lebanon in early July even if it fails to agree with Syria, the main power broker there, on an overall peace plan for both it and Lebanon.

“Israel will be the only one responsible for the consequences to the region if the chance for peace withers away,” Syrian Vice President Zuheir Masharka said Sunday in a speech quoted by his country’s state-controlled SANA news agency.

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud told the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat: “An Israeli unilateral withdrawal will not work. It will lead to another war.”

After years of enduring a guerrilla struggle in southern Lebanon waged mainly by Iranian-supported Hezbollah guerrillas acting with Syrian permission, Barak’s Labor-led coalition Cabinet decided March 5 that it had had enough, and it voted unanimously to leave Lebanon by July 7 with or without a negotiated settlement.

While the Arabs insist that they want Israel to abandon the 9-mile-deep swath of Lebanese territory it first occupied in 1978, the foreign ministers accepted the Syrian view that a unilateral, non-negotiated withdrawal by Israel would weaken the Arab negotiating position.

If the Israeli pullout from Lebanon is not packaged with a deal with Syria, that--in the Syrian view--will raise the chances that Israel will try to make its 1967 occupation of the nearby Golan Heights permanent, or at least could seriously postpone any Israeli settlement with Syria.

In addition, Lebanese officials have expressed fear that a unilateral Israeli withdrawal to a line it alone defined would allow Israel to retain some land that the Lebanese consider their sovereign territory. These officials have also said that reparations for Israeli war damage to Lebanon over the last 22 years and the future fate of Palestinian refugees need to be discussed.

Recent news reports from Israel that Israeli soldiers preparing for the pullback have been putting up new defensive positions slightly inside Lebanese territory have heightened Arab anxieties about the sincerity of Israel’s announced pullout.

Israel has said it would prefer a negotiated withdrawal but is stymied by Syria’s stubbornness. For its part, Syria maintains it was Israel that--during the last round of U.S.-sponsored peace talks, in January--refused to discuss the Israeli view of the final permanent border between the two states.

Syria has said it is willing to negotiate again, but only on condition that the goal of the talks be the return of all its land in exchange for granting Israel security guarantees and normal, peaceful relations.

According to news accounts, Barak has revealed to his Cabinet that earlier Israeli governments were willing to give back all of the Golan to Syria based on the line that existed June 4, 1967, on the eve of the Middle East War. But Barak stopped short of saying that his government would do the same.

The unwillingness of Barak to cross that Rubicon, even though he came to power last year on a platform of making peace with Syria, has been a source of severe disappointment to many Arabs.

Nevertheless, the Israeli plan to withdraw from Lebanon has found some sympathy, at least in Egypt.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa said he disputed the notion that the pullout is an Israeli trick.

“I know that others consider that it is an Israeli maneuver to . . . exert pressure on Syria, but I think it is a reaction to the [Lebanese] resistance, which is inflicting continued losses among Israeli ranks,” he said in an interview with the Lebanese newspaper As Safir.