The peace that wasn’t
Attempts at a deal between Syria and Israel haven’t worked — until now

The Syrian-Israeli conflict is amongst the most structurally frozen of the many unresolved conflicts in the Middle East. Unlike the Palestinian issue, it is not animated by demographic politics or daily confrontation. Unlike Lebanon, it lacks the ambiguity of state and non-state actors. Since 1974 the Syrian-Israeli ceasefire line has been largely stable and incident-free. Yet despite this apparent manageability – and multiple rounds of negotiation over decades – no formal peace has ever emerged.

The absence of war has not been the result of diplomatic success but an extension of deadlock. In over five decades various mediators, most notably the United States, have attempted to convert the 1974 armistice into a permanent peace treaty. Each effort foundered on an awkward symmetry: Syria insisted on the return of all occupied land; Israel insisted on full diplomatic normalisation. Neither side was willing to move first.

Frozen conflict
The central dispute is the Golan Heights. Captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and unilaterally annexed in 1981, the plateau offers strategic high ground and a rare sense of topographical security for northern Israel. For Syria, it represents a permanent national grievance, made sharper by the settlement of thousands of Israelis on territory Damascus considers sovereign. 

Following the October 1973 war, in which Syrian forces briefly recaptured parts of the Golan before being pushed back, the US brokered a disengagement agreement. Signed in May 1974, this created a narrow demilitarised zone patrolled by UN forces. The line held until Assad’s regime collapsed in December 2024. Since then, Israel has considered the agreement to be null-and-void and has summarily occupied the demilitarised zone. 

After 1974 there were no further breakthroughs. Syria refused to join the 1978 Camp David Accords, seeing Egypt’s separate peace with Israel as a betrayal of the Arab consensus. Damascus also rejected the Oslo Accords of 1993 and the Israeli-Jordan peace agreement a year later. Israel, meanwhile, had no incentive to relinquish territory when its security on its northern border was no longer actively threatened. The peace track was shelved for nearly two decades.

Missed opportunities
One of the most consequential missed opportunities came in early 2000, when President Bill Clinton sought to engineer a last-minute agreement before leaving office. His efforts centred on bringing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Syrian President Hafiz Assad together for a decisive meeting. Preparations were extensive, and Clinton had extracted a preliminary outline of compromise from the Israelis – including nearly full withdrawal from the Golan in exchange for peace and normalisation.

But when Assad finally met Clinton in Geneva in March 2000, he was intransigent, demanding a full Israeli withdrawal to the 4 June 1967 lines (including access to the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee) to which Barak had not agreed. Assad offered little in return. Clinton later remarked that Assad seemed uninterested in concluding a deal. The opportunity evaporated; and Assad was dead by June.

Nearly a decade later Barack Obama’s administration attempted a quiet revival. In 2009–2010, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu newly re-elected and Bashar Assad having survived censure after the Hariri assassination, American and European diplomats facilitated backchannel contacts between the two countries. The aim was simple: to remove Syria from the Iranian orbit by trading land for peace. 

In private, Syrian officials indicated some flexibility, suggesting that phased withdrawal from the Golan could be matched with progressive normalisation. But the timing was poor. Netanyahu was under pressure from his right flank, and the Obama administration was soon consumed by the Arab Spring. The outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011 rendered the initiative irrelevant. Assad was no longer a prospective partner, but a pariah.

Although overt, high-profile talks froze, more discreet negotiations would sometimes occur. Turkish mediation in the late 2000s under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attempted to revive dialogue. Reports suggested that some understandings had been reached about the contours of a land-for-peace arrangement; but the 2008 Gaza War and the deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations ended the effort.

For Israel, the calculus changed with the Syrian civil war. Since 2011, Syria has ceased to be a coherent state actor but a proxy for Iran and Russia. The Golan border has remained relatively calm, though not entirely silent. Israel has conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Syrian territory, mostly targeting Iranian assets and Hezbollah infrastructure. Damascus protested, but (as now) lacked the capacity to respond.

The Trump administration’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan in 2019 effectively closed off the land-for-peace formula. For Syria, it was a fresh insult; for Israel, it was a strategic windfall. Full restoration of Syrian sovereignty over the Golan Heights will likely be off the table in any future talks. 

Uses of perpetual conflict
Syrian-Israeli negotiations were never derailed by a single issue, but by a combination of factors, and the domestic contexts have been critical. For Syria, the Golan was not just a bargaining chip but a symbol of national dignity. No leader could afford to be seen trading it away without maximal return. For Israel, the territory became a de facto part of the state – settled, developed, and strategically invaluable. No Israeli government has had sufficient public backing to remove tens of thousands of settlers from the Golan. No Syrian regime, especially one as brittle as Assad’s, could survive the perception of surrender. For both sides the rewards of peace were always abstract while the costs were immediate and visible.

There is also a more cynical – though no less accurate – strand in the explanation of the Assad regime’s ambivalence toward peace. For both Hafiz and Bashar, the state of war with Israel served a critical domestic function. It justified emergency rule, the securitisation of politics, and a patronage economy anchored in a bloated, unaccountable military. In the Syrian system, resistance was not merely policy, it was performance. To negotiate openly with Israel risked puncturing the regime’s foundational narrative: that Syria, led by a patriotic Alawite minority, stood alongside Iran and Hezbollah as a bulwark against Zionist and Western encroachment. Peace, even if advantageous in certain respects, was never entirely compatible with regime survival. 

Return to the Golan
In any event, Israel long preferred Assad to the potential chaos of alternative regimes – although that calculus began to shift on 7 October 2023; and with the rise of a Sunni-led transitional government in Syria, it may change further. A Sunni leader has less need to burnish his nationalist credentials through resistance politics and alignment with Iran. Indeed, an overture to Israel could serve to rebalance Syria’s alliances, shed its pariah status, and unlock foreign investment. Crucially, it could persuade Netanyahu to back off and enable a transition to unfold without constant bullying and destabilisation from Israel. From Damascus’ viewpoint, the incentives for peace are now far less abstract. 

Then there is the personal factor. Syria’s interim president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, hails from the Golan Heights – hence his former nom de guerre, “Al-Jolani.” His father lost substantial land during the 1967 war and became one of many internally displaced Syrians that settled in Damascus. For Sharaa, a deal that restored even partial Syrian sovereignty over the Golan would carry more than political weight. It would be cathartic.