Sharon wants to scratch past negotiation progress with Syria

The Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon said that any negotiations with Syria should discarded previous negotiation, and should start again from ground zero, ignoring the previously achieved progress and terms,

Sharon refused during the weekly session of the Israeli government, the Syrian condition to that negotiations to start from the point it had stopped at, with the former government of the labor party led by Ehud Barak.

This came in reply to a question on the possibility of Israel's withdrawal from the Syrian Golan heights occupied since 1967.

Sharon said that he studied the proposal made by the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He said that Israel "wants peace with all its neighbors." However, he warned that the Syrian proposal is a maneuver to alleviate the American pressure on Syria. In a press statements by the beginning of this month, President al-Assad said that negotiations with Israel, if it succeeds, might lead to the establishment of full diplomatic relations between Damascus and Tel Aviv.

The Syrian- Israeli negotiations stopped since January 2000, after it had reached a deadlock. In these talks Barak approved withdrawal from almost all the Golan with the continued Israeli control of the East bank of the Tibries lake. A matter which was rejected by Damascus, which calls for a full withdrawal.