Yitzhak Rabin’s Syrian catastrophe that never happened
A 1993 attempt to give away the Golan Heights was a close escape for Israel. The unrepentant architect of that fiasco is now supporting Trump’s fantasies regarding Syria.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Jul 21, 2025
Some scholars of history disdain counter-factual scenarios or, as they are popularly known, “what if” questions about the past, as a fanciful waste of time. They are wrong. As some of our most distinguished contemporary historians like Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts often point out, they are extremely helpful in understanding the past as well as our current dilemmas.
While some people who write about history are determinists and act as if everything that wound up happening was predestined to occur, the truth is that no one ever knows what the future will bring. Whether because of a matter of chance or factors not fully appreciated at the time, any single action can change what follows. As Eugene Rice, the eminent scholar who once chaired Columbia University’s history department, taught me a long time ago, everything in history is “evitable.” Unless you examine those “what if” scenarios, which might have led to very different historical outcomes—whether losing wars that were won or the absence of leaders who made a profound difference—you can’t fully appreciate how history turned out.
Or, for that matter, the world we must live in today.
Rabin’s Golan gambit
Recent events in Syria, with the regime that succeeded the brutal dictatorship of Bashar Assad engaging in the attempted slaughter of that country’s Druze population, which was stopped by Israeli intervention, reminded me of the importance of considering counterfactual historical questions.
One of the most intriguing and scary “what if” scenarios about recent Middle East history concerns the foreign-policy project that was the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s top priority when he took office in 1992: an attempt to trade the Golan Heights to Hafez Assad, Bashar’s even more brutal father, and the dictator of Syria from 1971 until his death in 2001.
Curiously, the architect of that attempt—Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli ambassador to the United States—was back in the news last week, lambasting the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for its decision to use force to try to save the Druze. The 82-year-old Rabinovich’s comments about recent events merely reflected the reflexive contempt from the Israeli left and The New York Times for anything that the current Israeli government and its leader do. The idea that it is “discordant” or that the rescue mission “runs against the effort to negotiate”—as if the theoretical chance that the current Syrian government run by former members of Al-Qaeda and ISIS are realistic candidates for inclusion in the Abraham Accords is more important than saving the lives of the Druze—is both risible and offensive.
But it did show that as far as the editors of the Times and foreign-policy establishment are concerned, the long-discredited views of Rabinovich still make him a credible source of analysis about Syria or U.S.-Israel relations. And that ought to matter to those who hope that the Trump administration will not be led down the garden path toward another attempt to pressure Israel to make dangerous concessions to Syria.
Rabinovich served as Rabin’s ambassador to Washington from 1993 to 1996. A professor at Tel Aviv University who would eventually become its president, he came to Rabin’s attention because of his scholarly work in which he sought to argue that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, missed an opportunity to make peace with Syria in 1949, in the immediate aftermath of the War of Independence. The book he wrote on that subject, The Road Not Taken: Early Arab-Israeli Negotiations, won the National Jewish Book Award in 1992. His deep dive into this subject was an effort to promote a different counterfactual in which readers were asked to imagine whether a negotiated peace with Syria was possible, and what that might have meant for the Jewish state’s future and the region.
The conceit of the book was utterly implausible. The reign of the one Syrian leader who flirted with the concept of talks with Israel, military dictator Husni Al-Zaim, was brief. He was overthrown and executed only a few months after he took power from his predecessors. These coup d’états were the first in a series of such seizures of power that would follow over the next two decades until the Assad clan seized control in Damascus and ruled for more than half a century. Syria was no more ready for peace with Israel than most of those who still seek Israel’s destruction are today.
The ludicrous notion that peace with Syria was possible and thrown away by a belligerent Israeli leader in 1949 was typical of the thought of a generation of Israeli “new historians” that came into prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. They sought to debunk traditional narratives about Israel being an embattled small country beset by bloodthirsty enemies. And, as Rabin’s choice of Rabinovich to both represent the Jewish state in Washington and lead a new attempt to negotiate peace with Syria showed, this intellectual fashion had a real impact on policy with disastrous consequences.
Itamar Rabinovich (left to right) with Ehud Barak, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres prepare to meet with U.S. delegation, February 1993.
For a brief period, Rabinovich was the face of an all-out diplomatic offensive aimed at convincing the Israeli people that they should give up the strategic Golan in the hope of peace with the Assad regime. Rabin had opposed any idea of giving up the Golan or negotiating with the terrorists of the Palestine Liberation Organization during his campaign in the 1992 election, when he sought to defeat then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and his Likud Party. But he went back on his word when he won and began a diplomatic offensive with Syria while then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres authorized secret talks with representatives of the PLO’s Yasser Arafat in Oslo, Norway.
A quest for a ‘New Middle East’
The Syrian gambit failed as a matter of diplomacy and domestic politics.
Assad was perfectly willing to accept the gift of the Golan from which Syrian artillery had shelled Israeli farmers in the Galilee from 1949 to 1967, though he showed little interest in actual peace, much to the frustration of the Bill Clinton administration and Rabin.
Even in those heady days of optimism about the possibility of peace, the Israeli public was outraged about the idea of giving up a beautiful region that provided their country with strategic depth (as the opening days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War had proved when Syrian invaders breached its defenses but were stopped before reaching the rest of the country) and where many Israelis had settled. In the early 1990s, the country was plastered with signs, banners and bumper stickers proclaiming in Hebrew, Ha’am im haGolan (“The people are with the Golan”), which proclaimed fervent opposition to Rabin’s scheme for surrendering it.
In August 1993, when Assad was still stringing along Rabinovich and U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Rabin decided to prioritize the Palestinian track that led to the signing of the Oslo Accords.
Seen in retrospect, the project to give up the Golan in a vain attempt to trade land for peace with Syria was a close escape from disaster. The notion that the Assad regime was ready to end Syria’s war to destroy the Jewish state was a delusion. It was fervently embraced by a generation of Israeli and American diplomats, politicians and journalists who cheered for them. They were desperate to create—in the words of Peres—a “new Middle East” in which the conflict would end. Then, Israel and its neighbors, including Palestinian Arabs and Syrians, might resemble Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, rather than combatants in a bitter century-long struggle rooted in an implacable belief that the Jewish state must be eradicated.
Given the dismal results of their efforts in which Israeli attempts to trade land for peace via the 1993 Oslo Accords with the Palestinians led to the bloodshed of the Second Intifada, the 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the creation of a Hamas-run terror state, and ultimately, the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, it’s difficult to think of the high hopes of the peace processors with anything but sorrow and anger. But many people were infatuated with the idea that anything was possible in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the inauguration of a unipolar world in which democracy and peace would flourish everywhere.
That dream was predicated on the notion that deep-seated hatreds and the eliminationist ideology that was at the heart of both Palestinian nationalism and the mindset of an Arab world that viewed a Jewish state in their midst as an intolerable affront to their honor and faith could simply be wished away.
Rabinovich has never conceded that his efforts were futile. He has continued to write about the 1993 Syrian diplomatic track as being as much of a missed opportunity as his cherished myth about 1949. Like many other Israelis and Americans who devoted years to trying to push for more concessions to the Jewish state’s foes in the belief that doing so would magically make peace, there has been no accountability for his mistakes, except with respect to the Israeli public’s repeated rejections of those ideas at the ballot box. He has spent the rest of his life accepting honors from the academic and foreign-policy establishments while those who have opposed these foolish and destructive ideas are still described by most academics, diplomats and newspapers like the Times as “extremists” and “hardliners” who don’t want peace.
View of a vineyard in the northern Golan Heights, July 2, 2025.
What if Israel had given up the Golan?
Let’s play the counter-factual game and try to imagine what would have been the consequences if Assad had, like Arafat, played the Rabin and Clinton administrations more cleverly.
Assad could have gotten an Oslo Accords-like deal in which he would have been given an enormously valuable tangible asset in exchange for airy promises about peace that he would have had—like Arafat’s talk of peace while fomenting, subsidizing and planning a renewed terrorist offensive against Israel in which he hoped to diminish it further on the way to its destruction—no intention of fulfilling.
In the years after Oslo, Israel paid dearly in blood for surrendering much of Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, to Arafat’s newly proclaimed PLO-run Palestinian Authority. The whole thing exploded—literally, as well as figuratively—after Clinton and then Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat an independent state with control of part of Jerusalem in 2000. Arafat was convinced that the Israelis and their American allies were weak and could be bludgeoned into even greater surrenders, and followed up his refusal with a terrorist war of attrition in the form of the Second Intifada (2000-05) that cost more than 1,000 Israeli lives and many more Palestinian ones.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal in the summer of 2005 of every Israeli soldier, settler and settlement from Gaza was another experiment in land for peace. It led to the creation of an independent Palestinian terror state led by Hamas. It was used as a launching pad for rockets and missile attacks on Israelis for 16 years before Hamas used it to fulfill their plans for the genocide of Israelis on Oct. 7.
The same could have been true of the Golan, making life in Israel’s north intolerable. And once Israel would have given up the region under the auspices of Washington, undoing the damage by taking it back from an internationally recognized nation, rather than just a terrorist group, might have been even more difficult than the war to ensure that Hamas and Palestinian terrorists could not repeat their horrific crimes of Oct. 7.
One might argue that possession of the Golan and the prestige that the pain this would have meant for Israel would have bolstered the Assad family’s barbarous minority regime, whose hold on a country made up of a mosaic of faiths and ethnic groups was predicated on a willingness to butcher its citizens. Maybe that would have allowed it to avoid the tumult of the 2010 Arab Spring, which ignited a bloody civil war that led to hundreds of thousands of dead Syrians and forced millions out of their homes. But that’s highly unlikely when you consider Bashar Assad’s weakness when compared to his even more terrible father.
In the following years, chaos spread throughout Syria. President Barack Obama’s punting on his “red line” threat to Assad not to use chemical weapons on his own people led to interventions by Iran, its Hezbollah terrorist auxiliaries and Russia. Israelis were grateful that they had never given up the Golan, the fearsome geographic barrier to invasion from the East. If they had, a diminished Israel, shorn of its main line of defense, would have been inevitably drawn into the Syrian civil war with unimaginable consequences for its security and existence.
Trump’s Syria delusions
That’s something to keep in mind as the Trump administration, besotted with the mad idea of including a government made up of ex-jihadis into an expanded Abraham Accords, leans on Israel to facilitate this project.
The cost of doing so would mean not just an Israeli promise to stay out of Syria’s internal conflicts, leaving the Druze to their fate at the hands of their Sunni Islamist enemies. It would also mean the withdrawal of Israel from the buffer zones it seized after Assad’s fall. And anyone who thinks that a Syrian government, whether run by ex-jihadis or a non-existent liberal faction, would agree to normalization with Israel without forcing it to give up the Golan Heights, which President Donald Trump recognized in his first term as Israeli sovereign territory, is dreaming.
Trump has lifted sanctions on Damascus and took the country’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Julani, off the terrorist watch list (with a $10 million bounty for the capture of this foreigner Al-Qaeda operative) and even shook his hand in Riyadh at the behest of the Syrian’s Saudi allies.
Reportedly, Washington is upset with Netanyahu for his skepticism about the project and his use of force to save the Druze because it interferes with his scheme for including Syria in his plans for the Middle East. According to some in the administration, that vision, if not quite the Benelux of Peres’s dreams, will be a place where the Iranian-led war against Israel will be replaced by trade and mutual recognition.
Even if al-Julani proves—as his murders of the Druze and other minorities illustrate—to be the same Islamist terrorist he always was, these gestures cost America nothing. However, if the administration thinks that the debt Israel owes Trump for joining the attack on Iran’s nuclear program and his steadfast support for the Jewish state means it must gamble its security on the delusion that al-Julani and friends are potential peace partners, Netanyahu—who played along with Clinton’s and Obama’s efforts to convince him to repeat Rabin’s folly but never promised to give up the Golan—must refuse.
The counterfactual scenario advocated by Rabin and Rabinovich to surrender the Golan is a warning from the not-so-distant past. Israelis and Americans should not give in to magical thinking about the Middle East, and the Muslim and Arab worlds, where the hatred for Jews, Israel, and just as importantly, America and the West, is still mainstream.
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