In late October 1991, Syrian and Israeli leaders sat down at the Middle East peace conference in Madrid and committed themselves to holding face-to-face talks to conclude a final resolution of the 43-year conflict between them. The promised bilateral negotiation opened that December: It was the first negotiation to be conducted directly between representatives of the two states.1 In the 50 months of discussions that ensued, the Israelis and Syrians surmounted some quite extraordinary difficulties. They were able to overcome (indeed, they drew vital strength from) a change of government in Israel in June 1992. They survived the November 1995 assassination of Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin, numerous setbacks in the overall climate of Israeli-Arab peace-making,2 and several changes in the format of the talks themselves. In addition, while much of value was accomplished in the face-to-face negotiations in Washington, a parallel high-level track was kept constantly in operation, undertaken by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who made over a dozen visits to the Middle East during the first Clinton administration, and also through summit meetings and frequent letters and phone calls to the two leaders from the White House. According to several authoritative accounts, among the contentious issues that the negotiators were able to resolve were the depth of the projected Israeli withdrawal from the Golan and the nature of the envisaged peace. The talks also resulted in agreement on the text of the all important "Aims and Principles" document (full title "the Aims and Principles of the Security Arrangement").

After Shimon Peres' favored negotiator, Uri Savir, had completed his first round in the negotiations with Syria in early 1996, officials from Israel, the United States, and Syria all expressed confidence that 1996 2 would see agreement on the final text of the Israel- Syria agreement. But in early March 1996, after the Israeli population suffered 79 losses from bombs set off by Palestinian extremists, the Peres government suspended its participation in the talks with Syria. Immediately thereafter, the Israeli-Syrian relationship plunged into a rapid downward spiral of mutual recriminations and hostility which neither Israel, nor Syria--nor the United States--appeared to do anything to brake. The rhetoric of the Middle Easterners shifted quickly from expressions of optimism regarding the peace talks to increasingly gloomy prognostications. With dread inevitability, this descent into political and rhetorical confrontation between the two states became transformed (as had occurred so often in the past) into an actual confrontation in Lebanon. On the night of April 10-11, 1996, the Peres government launched a much-expanded version of an earlier (July 1993) bombing campaign against its neighbor, which this time included intensive attacks from air, ground, and sea on facilities throughout the south of the country and up to, and including, Beirut.