Israeli talks offer useless without Golan: Syria

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said on Friday resuming peace talks with Israel would be useless without a commitment by the Jewish state to withdraw from the Golan Heights.

Responding cautiously to an Israeli offer to open the talks without preconditions, Moualem reiterated Syrian calls for an Israeli commitment to restore the Golan and described it as "not a precondition but a requirement for peace."

"If Israel does not honor these requirements then there is no point of conducting useless negotiations," Moualem said.

"Negotiations will be futile if there is no true Israeli will to make peace and no U.S. involvement. We will not go back to wasting time," he told Syrian state television.

Indirect talks between Syria and Israel, mediated by Turkey, were formally suspended in December during the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip,

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said the talks stopped just as Syria was waiting for an Israeli response to Damascus's definition of what constituted the Golan boundary, which would have set the benchmark for any Israeli withdrawal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday after meeting U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington that he was ready to resume the talks with Syria immediately but indicated he would not make any commitments on land first.

"Israel says openly now it wants peace for the sake of peace, which is laughable," Moualem said.

TURKISH PUSH

Last week, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said Ankara was ready to continue as a mediator between Syria and Israel.

Diplomats in Damascus said Gul had been urging Assad and Netanyahu to resume the talks, and that Washington could help the Turkish efforts, partly because they might contribute to distancing the Syrian government from its ally Iran.

George Mitchell, Obama's Middle East envoy, is expected to visit Damascus and meet Assad after Lebanon's parliamentary election next month.

Moualem said Syria was ready to cooperate with the United States to stabilize the Middle East but there would have to be "normal" relations between the two countries first.

"We are still in the phase of testing intentions," he said.

Washington imposed sanctions on Syria in 2004 for what it suspected as a Syrian role in backing insurgents in Iraq and Damascus's support for militant groups.

The United States withdrew its ambassador from Syria a year later, following the assassination of Rafik al-Hariri, a Lebanese parliamentarian and former prime minister who had turned against Syria's role in Lebanon.

Washington supervised 10 years of direct talks between Syria and Israel that collapsed in 2000 when the late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, the current president's father, refused an Israeli offer to pull out of the Golan but keep several hundred meters (yards) on the northeastern shore of the lake of Galilee.

Israel occupied the Golan, a fertile plateau overlooking Damascus and the Sea of Galilee, in the 1967 Middle East War. Syria defines the occupied Golan as the territory Syria held on June 4, 1967, before the war broke out, including the northeastern shore of the lake, Israel's main water reservoir.

(Editing by Ralph Gowling)