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Middle East Books Review All books featured in this section are available from Middle East Books and More, the nation’s preeminent bookstore on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. www.MiddleEastBooks.com • (202) 939-6050 ext. 1101
Reaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace By Frederic C. Hof, United States Institute of Peace Press, 2022, hardcover, 216 pp. MEB $24.95
Reviewed by Walter L. Hixson Efforts to forge a peace agreement between Israel and Syria have long been overshadowed by the extensive history of failed attempts to secure a deal between Israelis and Palestinians. In this revealing insider account, Frederic C. Hof reflects on his ultimately unsuccessful mission of mediation aimed at securing an accord between Israel and Syria during the Obama administration. Hof, a decorated Vietnam veteran turned State Department diplomat, claims that a framework for peace between the two countries was in fact established. The proposed deal entailed securing an agreement to shift Syria’s strategic orientation away from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas in return for full recovery of the Syrian Golan Heights that Israel seized in the June 1967 Six-Day War. However, negotiations on the proposed accord collapsed in 2011 as the Arab Spring unfolded and Assad began to violently repress his domestic critics.
Contributing editor Walter L. Hixson is the author of Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor. 64
Hof’s book is rich in detail and revealing insider accounts, but it is fundamentally flawed by his pro-Western and pro-Israeli bias. Hof, who worked for the Obama administration from 2009 to 2011, blames the failure to achieve an accord entirely on Assad. He argues that Assad’s brutal response to protests rendered him “unqualified to speak for the Syrian people on matters of war and peace,” thus destroying the prospects of an agreement. Even as he puts the onus entirely on the Syrian leader, Hof acknowledges that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was “not a politician inclined toward taking big political risks.” Netanyahu, in fact, displayed more reluctance than Assad to enter the proposed accord, Hof notes, which in any case the prime minister insisted would have to be approved by an Israeli popular referendum. The reality is that everything in Netanyahu’s and his country’s history made it highly unlikely that Israel would hand back the Syrian territory. Hof worked in close association with the diplomat Dennis Ross and appears to have
imbibed Ross’ suspicion of Arabs and his well-chronicled pro-Israeli bias. There is no question, however, that Hof fervently hoped and genuinely believed that, while IsraelPalestine talks were hopelessly stymied, the prospect of a breakthrough between Israel and Syria was achievable. He chides Obama for failing to make a last-ditch effort to head off Assad’s campaign of domestic repression and to salvage the potential peace accord, yet Hof admits it is unlikely that Obama (who wanted the Assad regime to fall) would have been successful in such an effort. In retrospect, it is difficult to believe that the prospect of a full-blown Syrian-Israeli peace accord entailing the return of annexed territory was more than a pipe dream. Hof should be admired nonetheless for his sincere and tireless efforts to forge an accord. In a region notorious for the failure of diplomacy, Hof was tenacious in his efforts and deeply laments his inability to broker a lasting agreement. Despite its flawed conclusions, Reaching for the Heights is valuable for its richly detailed history of the effort to achieve an Israeli-Syrian peace. In addition to illuminating the roles of Assad and Netanyahu, Hof offers insight into the perspectives of Ross, Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Senator John Kerry and former Senator George Mitchell, who was Obama’s Middle East envoy and Hof’s close friend who chose him for the mediation initiative. Published by the U.S. Institute of Peace, the book opens with a foreword by the bipartisan duo of veteran establishment national security elites Madeleine Albright and Stephen Hadley. The book is comprised of 11 chapters, as well as reprints of key documents. In 2019 President Donald Trump—much to Netanyahu’s delight—recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli territory. In another example of his bias, Hof declares absurdly that the Golan Heights was ultimately a “gift to Israel by the Assad family,” a conclusion that blames Syria, the victim, in defiance of the indisputable reality that Israel seized the Golan in 1967, annexed the territory in 1981 and has illegally occupied the land for the past 55 years. JUNE/JULY 2022
