Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's calls on Israel to resume peace negotiations, and Israel's reluctance to do so, are evoking an unpleasant sense of deja vu for some Israelis.
Yossi Sarid, a former education minister and opposition leader who retired from politics last year, was a young activist in the ruling Labour Party in the early 1970s, when an acquaintance asked him to convey a peace feeler from Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.
'I came to her and told her, 'Sadat is willing to negotiate',' Mr Sarid recalled. 'I was certain she would be delighted. Instead, she stared at me with cold eyes, and said, 'This is nothing new. Do you know what he wants? We will have to give him all of the Sinai.'' Meir said she was not willing to part with that territory, which Israel captured from Egypt during the 1967 Middle East war, when it also occupied Syria's Golan Heights, a strategic plateau overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Mr Sarid said he disagreed with Meir and told her Israel should return all of Sinai for a peace deal.
Had Israel responded to Sadat's overtures, the lives of thousands of soldiers it lost when it was taken by surprise by the Egyptian and Syrian armies in 1973 could have been spared, Mr Sarid said. Eventually, in 1978, a year after Sadat made a dramatic visit to Jerusalem, Israel agreed to do what Meir had refused: return all of the Sinai as part of peace arrangements with Egypt.
'We are in exactly the same situation today,' Mr Sarid said of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's refusal to respond to Syria's overtures. 'There is a danger of a war with Syria - not necessarily an all-out war, but rather attrition, limited attacks and all kinds of actions the Syrians know how to carry out by proxy.'
While Mr Olmert visits Beijing this week to discuss trade and matters related to Middle East peace efforts, Mr Sarid said the Israeli army's failure to win a decisive victory in last summer's war with Hezbollah might have pushed the Syrians towards concluding that if they could not regain the Golan Heights by negotiations, a military option might work.