One day in early 1992, as Israeli and Syrian delegations were conducting negotiations in Washington following the Madrid conference, the Syrian team began to recite a well-worn narrative about how Israel, the perpetual aggressor, seized the Golan Heights without any reason in the world.
There was a moment during that particular conversation, remembers Yossi Ben-Aharon, prime minister Yitzhak Shamir's chief of staff at the time and head of the Israeli delegation at the talks, when Muwafiq Allaf, his Syrian counterpart sitting on the other side of the negotiating table, was carrying on in a particular grandiose fashion about Israel's transgressions.
"He said we were the aggressors, and that they were pure and righteous and only defending their territory," Ben-Aharon says, doing an imitation of Allaf's pronunciation of the word "territory," making it sound as if the word has five "r"s.
"Our territory is not negotiable," he quoted the then Syrian ambassador to Washington as saying. "So you have to tell me you are withdrawing from the last inch of Syrian territory."
At one point during the monologue, as Allaf continued his charges and presented the Syrians as peaceful victims, one of the Israeli officials on the team, Yigal Carmon, at the time a Military Intelligence officer, pushed a button on a cassette recorder, and a song broadcast on Damascus Radio just before the Six Day War started to play. The song's repetitive chorus was "Kill, kill, kill the Jews."
Allaf was surprised, but quickly gained his composure. "Mr. Ben-Aharon," he said. "We are conducting serious negotiations, and you are doing this type of thing."
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