Amir Tibon/Haaretz: Kerry Reveals Details of Assad’s Secret Letter to Netanyahu in 2010/أمير تايبون من الهآررتس: وزير خارجية أميركا السابق كيري يكشف تفاصيل رسالة الأسد السرية إلى نتنياهو عام 2010

Kerry Reveals Details of Assad’s Secret Letter to Netanyahu in 2010
Amir Tibon/Haaretz/September 04/18
أمير تايبون من الهآررتس: وزير خارجية أميركا السابق كيري يكشف تفاصيل رسالة الأسد السرية إلى نتنياهو عام 2010

هآرتس: كيري يكشف تفاصيل رسالة الأسد السرية لنتنياهو
كيري: نتنياهو فوجئ بمدى استعداد الأسد للمضي في اتجاه التسوية
ار تي اون لاين/04 أيلول/18
كشف وزير الخارجية الأمريكي الأسبق جون كيري، أن الرئيس السوري بشار الأسد بعث عام 2010 برسالة سرية إلى نظيره الأمريكي آنذاك باراك أوباما، تضمنت اقتراحا للسلام مع إسرائيل.
ونقلت صحيفة “هآرتس” عن كيري قوله في كتاب مذكراته الذي صدر اليوم الثلاثاء، أنه عقد أول اجتماع مطول مع الأسد عام 2009، عندما زار دمشق في إطار جولة شرق أوسطية بصفة رئيس لجنة العلاقات الخارجية في مجلس الشيوخ الأمريكي.
وذكر كيري أنّه “واجه” الأسد خلال لقائهما الأول بملف “محطة الطاقة النووية” التي قصفتها إسرائيل عام 2007، متهما الرئيس السوري بالكذب “في وجهه” بعدما “نظر إلى عينيه” مؤكدا له أنّ المحطة لم تكن ذات طبيعة نووية.
وأضاف كيرى أنّه خلال حديثهما التالي، ضغط على الأسد بسبب دعمه لـ”حزب الله” اللبناني، فيما أجاب الرئيس السوري بأن “كل شيء يمكن التفاوض عليه”، ملمحا إلى أن هذه السياسة قد تتغير بعد المفاوضات مع إسرائيل.
وأشار كيري إلى أنه رغم فشل المحاولات للتوصل إلى اتفاق سلام بين إسرائيل وسوريا في عهد رؤساء وزراء إسرائيل السابقين، كان الأسد في ذلك الوقت لا يزال مهتما بنوع من التعامل مع إسرائيل.
وكتب كيرى: “سألني الأسد ما الذي قد يتطلبه الدخول في مفاوضات سلام جدية، أملا في ضمان عودة هضبة الجولان، التي فقدتها سوريا عام 1967”.
وتابع: “أخبرته بأنه إذا كان جادا، فعليه تقديم اقتراح خاص، وتبادلت معه الآراء وأصدر التعليمات لكبير مساعديه بصياغة رسالة منه إلى الرئيس أوباما”.
وفي الرسالة حسب كيري، طلب الأسد من أوباما دعم استئناف محادثات السلام مع إسرائيل، وأكد “أن سوريا مستعدة لاتخاذ جملة من الخطوات مقابل إعادة الجولان من إسرائيل”.
كيري: نتنياهو فوجئ بمدى استعداد الأسد للمضي في اتجاه التسوية
وأضاف كيرى أنّه بعد لقائه الأسد مباشرة، سافر إلى إسرائيل وتبادل المعلومات مع نتنياهو، الذي عاد للتو إلى السلطة بعد 10 سنوات في المعارضة، وتابع كيري: “في اليوم التالي، طرت إلى إسرائيل، حيث جلست مع رئيس الوزراء نتنياهو، وعرضت عليه رسالة الأسد. نتنياهو فوجئ بأنّ الأسد كان على استعداد للذهاب إلى هذا الحد، أكثر بكثير مما كان على استعداد للذهاب إليه سابقا”.
وحسب كيري، فإنّ نتنياهو أخبر الإدارة الأمريكية في النهاية بأنه لا يستطيع التوصل إلى اتفاق مع سوريا في ظل هذه الظروف.
وأشار كيري، إلى أنّه بعد أن عرض رسالة الأسد على نتنياهو، أعادها معه إلى واشنطن، وحاولت إدارة أوباما اختبار مدى جدية الأسد بمطالبته باتخاذ “إجراءات لبناء الثقة” تجاه كل من الولايات المتحدة وإسرائيل، تتضمن وقف بعض شحنات الأسلحة إلى “حزب الله”، لكن الأسد خيب آمال الإدارة بفشله في الوفاء بوعوده.
واستمرت سوريا وإسرائيل في المفاوضات بوساطة أمريكية منذ مطلع التسعينيات وحتى أوائل 2011، قبل عام من اندلاع الحرب السورية، لكنهما لم يتوصلا في النهاية إلى أي اتفاقات أو تفاهمات.
ويصف كيري الأسد بعبارات سلبية للغاية، ويزعم أنها تعكس سلوكه طوال الحرب الأهلية السورية الدامية، ويقول: “بإمكان الرجل الذي يستطيع أن يكذب عليك في وجهك على بعد 4 أقدام منك، أن يكذب بسهولة على العالم بعد أن قام برش الغازات المميتة على شعبه”.
المصدر: هآرتس

Kerry Reveals Details of Assad’s Secret Letter to Netanyahu in 2010
أمير تايبون من الهآررتس: وزير خارجية أميركا السابق كيري يكشف تفاصيل رسالة الأسد السرية إلى نتنياهو عام 2010

Amir Tibon/Haaretz/September 04/18
‘Assad asked me what it would take to enter into serious peace negotiations in the hope of securing return of the Golan Heights,’ former U.S. secretary of state says in new memoir.
WASHINGTON – Syrian President Bashar Assad sent U.S. President Barack Obama a secret proposal for peace with Israel in 2010, which was also shared with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Secretary of State John Kerry writes in his new memoir published Tuesday.
According to Kerry, Netanyahu found the proposal “surprising” because it showed that Assad was willing to make more concessions than in previous negotiations.
The letter was drafted by Assad a year before the start of Syria’s civil war; Syria and Israel did engage in American-mediated negotiations up until early 2011, but eventually did not reach any agreements or understandings.
In his book “Every Day is Extra,” Kerry writes at length about Syria, which he describes as an “open wound” left behind by the Obama administration and an issue that he thinks about “every day.”
According to Kerry, in 2009, while he was chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he visited Damascus as part of a Middle East tour and held his first long meeting with Assad, who by then had been in power for a decade.
“In our first meeting, I confronted him about a Syrian nuclear power plant that Israel had famously bombed,” Kerry wrote, referring to the Syrian nuclear reactor that then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government destroyed in 2007.
“The fact that this was a nuclear facility had been well established publicly. It was beyond dispute,” Kerry explains. Yet Assad, according to Kerry, denied those facts, even when the two men were left alone. “Assad looked at me in the eye and told me it wasn’t a nuclear facility, with exactly the same affect and intonation with which he said everything else. It was a stupid lie, utterly disprovable, but he lied without any hesitation,” Kerry writes.
During their next conversation, writes Kerry, he pressed Assad on his support for the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, and the Syrian president replied that “everything is to be negotiated” – hinting that this policy could change as a result of negotiations with Israel.
Kerry notes that previous attempts to reach a peace agreement between Israel and Syria under the governments of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Olmert and Netanyahu (during his first term in the 1990s) had all ended in failure, but Assad was still interested in some sort of deal with Israel.
“Assad asked me what it would take to enter into serious peace negotiations, in the hope of securing return of the Golan Heights, which Syria had lost to Israel in 1967,” writes Kerry. “I told him that if he were serious, he should make a private proposal. He asked what it would look like. I shared my thoughts. He instructed his top aide to draft a letter from Assad to President Obama.”
In the letter, writes Kerry, Assad asked Obama to support renewed peace talks with Israel and stated “Syria’s willingness to take a number of steps in exchange for the return of the Golan from Israel.”
Kerry notes that “Assad’s father [Hafez Assad] had tried and failed to get the Golan back, so he was willing to do a lot in return.”
According to Kerry, immediately after the meeting with Assad he flew over to Israel and shared the information with Netanyahu, who had just recently returned to power after 10 years either out of politics or in the opposition. “The next day, I flew to Israel, where I sat down with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and showed him Assad’s letter,” writes Kerry. “He was surprised that Assad was willing to go that far, significantly further than he’d been willing to go [previously].”
Kerry had mentioned the letter’s existence once before, in a New Yorker interview in 2015, but had not previously described his conversation with Netanyahu about it. Back in 2015, he said that Netanyahu eventually told the administration he could not make an agreement with Syria under the circumstances.
According to Kerry, after he showed Assad’s letter to Netanyahu, he brought it back with him to Washington. The Obama administration tried to test Assad’s seriousness by asking the Syrian leader to take “confidence-building measures” toward both the United States and Israel, including a cessation of some weapon shipments to Hezbollah. Yet Assad disappointed the administration by failing to follow through on his promises.
“I remember hearing that Assad was continuing with exactly the kind of behavior on Hezbollah that we told him needed to stop. It was disappointing but unsurprising,” writes Kerry.
Later in the book, Kerry describes Assad in very negative terms, reflecting on his conduct throughout the brutal civil war. “A man who can lie to your face four feet away from you can just as easily lie to the world after he has gassed his own people to death,” Kerry says.
Kerry also writes at length about deliberations within the administration on how to react to Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his people in the summer of 2013.
According to Kerry, he and most other senior national security officials around Obama advocated for a military strike against Assad, in line with Obama’s definition of chemical attacks as a “red line.” But Obama hesitated – especially after it became evident that such a step would not receive overwhelming support in Congress.
Kerry concludes his chapter on Syria by writing that by the end of Obama’s term, and as Donald Trump was preparing to enter the White House, “diplomacy to save Syria was dead, and the wounds of Syria remained open. I think every day about how we might have closed them and how the world might close them still.”
On Friday, excerpts from Kerry’s book related to his attempts to foster an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord as secretary of state were published by Jewish Insider. In his memoir, Kerry also says he probably spent more time as secretary of state talking with Netanyahu than with any other world leader.