Book Reviews 

The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks: 

1991-1996 and Beyond 

Helena Cobban 

Washington, DC: Un ited States Institute of Peace, 1999. 235 pages. 

According to Uri Savir, one of the two Israeli chief negotiators who led 
their country's team to the Israeli-Syrian talks in Washington, DC, in the 

1990s, "there was a sense among both delegations that, if necessary, we 
could go on living without peace." This sense of a fallback position, 

engendered mainly by the absence of any urgent existential need to reach 

a final settlement, is what distinguishes these talks from the Israeli­

Palestinian negotiations whose failure is fraught with many risks and 
unforeseen consequences. 

Cobban's book draws on research she conducted for her 1991 book, 
The Super-Powers and the Syrian-Israeli Conflict, and her 1997 mono­

graph, Syria and the Peace: A Good Chance Missed Published and partly 
funded by the United States Institute of Peace, a federal institution cre­
ated by Congress in 1984 to promote research on the peaceful manage­

ment and resolution of international conflicts, the volume consists of 
eight chapters, supplemented with a forward by the president of the 

Institute, Richard Solomon, and a thirty-page section devoted to notes. 
The book contains no illustrations, photographs, appendices, or biblio­

graphic information; however, it does offer a small map of Syria and 
Israel at the beginning of the book and an eight-page index section at the 

end. 
Although somewhat overshadowed by the off-again-on-again Israeli­

Palestinian talks during the 1990s, the Israeli-Syrian negotiations (pro­
pelled initially by the 1991 Madrid Peace conference) lasted a period of 52 

months and, to varying degrees of enthusiasm and success, engaged three 
successive Israeli governments. The author offers a fascinating account of