If Israel had listened to the US State Department on Syria …

Dennis Ross is on television and in news articles offering unsolicited advice to Israel. But from 1993 to 1994, he was a source of hot air.

Moshe Phillips

Dennis Ross, a former U.S. Mideast envoy and peace negotiator, attends the Israeli Presidential Conference at the International Conference Centre in Jerusalem on May 14, 2008. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90.

[Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.]

As chaos envelops Syria—with one gang of terrorists overthrowing the other gang of terrorists who ran the government—the question needs to be asked: Can you imagine the danger Israel would now be facing if it had surrendered to U.S. demands in the 1990s to give up the Golan Heights?

This isn’t some theoretical what-if scenario. During the first Clinton administration, a team of State Department negotiators led by Dennis Ross spent several years trying to pressure Israel to give over the Golan to Syrian dictator Hafez Assad (father of the recently deposed dictator Bashar Assad, his second-oldest son).

Today, Ross can be seen on television and quoted in news articles presenting himself as an expert and offering unsolicited advice to Israel. Most consist of demanding that Israel make more concessions.

But from 1993 to 1994, Ross was not just a source of useless hot air. He was in a position to directly pressure Israel to hand strategic territory to an insane dictator who was building weapons of mass destruction. And he did, frequently.

In his 2021 book Red Line, Joby Warrick of The Washington Post revealed that in 1988, the CIA convinced one of Syria’s top chemical-weapons scientists to secretly provide the United States with information about Syria’s efforts to manufacture sarin gas and other deadly nerve agents.

The secret agent, who called himself “Ayman” and was known in the CIA by the code name “The Chemist,” provided information to the CIA continuously for the next 13 years.

Meaning that when Dennis Ross and his team began pressuring Israel to give up the Golan in 1993, the Clinton administration had already known from the inside—for five years already—the true evil nature of the Assad regime and its chemical weapons plans.

Yet in Ross’s account of his role in the Syria negotiations in his book The Missing Peace, he speaks fondly of Assad and about his friendly, sometimes warm relationship with the chemical-weapons war criminal.

Ross recalls wistfully one time when Assad was “holding my arm as he shook my hand to convey greater warmth and appreciation.” Assad “respected my knowledge and my attention to detail.” When the Syrian leader complimented him, “You never forget a thing,” Ross obsequiously replied, “I learned that from you, Mr. President.” The two joked around about which of them could stay in the negotiating room longer without taking a bathroom break.

And the human touch! In talks that took place a day after Assad visited the grave of a loved one, the warmongering dictator was “soft-spoken, fatalistic and clearly touched when I expressed my sorrow for his loss and the difficulty of this time for him personally,” Ross writes.

It’s painfully reminiscent of what some Western journalists wrote about Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

Assad was the man who twice tried to annihilate the Jewish state—first as Syria’s defense minister in the 1967 Six-Day War and then as Syria’s president in 1973’s Yom Kippur War. The man who daily ranted against Israel and Jews. The man whose schools raised entire generations of young Syrians to become antisemitic fanatics. The man who, at the very moment he was negotiating with Ross, was feverishly developing chemical weapons with which to slaughter millions of Israeli Jews. Assad literally aspired to finish Hitler’s job by asphyxiating millions of Jews with poison gas.

The only thing that stood between Israel and Hafez Assad’s chemical weapons was the Golan Heights. The same is true for Assad’s equally monstrous son, the deposed dictator Bashar Assad. If Israel had been foolish enough to follow along with Dennis Ross and his State Department colleagues, the Assads would have had the Golan—and their guns and poison gas would have been trained on the families who live in Israel’s Galilee, Jewish and Arab alike.

Today, Dennis Ross is again dishing out “expertise,” hoping that nobody remembers the awful advice he gave Israel about surrendering the Golan Heights. But Israelis, who are watching the unfolding chaos on their northeastern border, have not forgotten. They know just what the consequences would have been.