President Bill Clinton has said that he is quite hopeful about the Syrian-Israeli peace talks despite their postponement this week and said that the gaps between the two sides were not large. The peace talks were to have resumed yesterday for a second session at Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The goal is a land-for-security agreement in which Israel would return the strategic Golan Heights seized from Syria in 1967.
Now Israeli and Syrian experts are to come to Washington separately over the next couple of weeks for talks on the draft peace agreement which the United States submitted to their leaders earlier this month. Mr Clinton acknowledged that the two sides were embroiled in a dispute over "sequencing", the question of whether to deal first with security and normalisation of relations, as Israel wants, or to concentrate on an Israeli pullout from the Golan Heights, as Syria advocates.
