Syria urges EU to heed Arab position on Israel

Syria called on European governments on Tuesday to show understanding of Arab refusal to normalize ties with Israel without a comprehensive peace deal as it prepared to join a Mediterranean summit in Paris alongside an Israeli delegation.

"The Europeans need to understand Arab demands to recover their lands and not engage in a normalization process for free with an enemy that is still occupying our territory," an editorial in the ruling Baath party's mouthpiece daily said.

"Arabs want to see the launch of a comprehensive development process so that progress and peace can reign on both shores of the Mediterranean," the Al-Baath editorial added.

"Peace and security are not achievable if territories are not restored to their rightful owners and if the social and economic gap between the two shores of the Mediterranean is not closed.

Assad is due to meet French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Saturday ahead of Sunday's summit of some 40 European and Mediterranean leaders.

In an interview published by the Paris daily Le Figaro on Tuesday, Assad hailed "a new... more realistic" French policy towards Syria.

Sarkozy's predecessor Jacques Chirac cut off all official contact after the assassination of Lebanon's former premier Rafiq Hariri, a personal friend, in a February 2005 bombing in which Syria was widely implicated.

Sunday's summit will mark the first time that a Syrian president has sat at the same table as an Israeli delegation. The most senior official to attend previous meetings involving the two sides was the then foreign minister, now vice president, Faruq al-Shara.

Israel and Syria announced in March that they had resumed peace talks after an eight-year break, indirectly through Turkish mediators.

The two sides, which remain at a state of war despite a 1974 armistice, have since held three rounds of Turkish-mediated talks and have agreed to hold another.

Syria has made any peace deal conditional on Israel's withdrawal from all of the Golan heights, the strategic plateau it seized in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in 1981 in a move never recognized by the international community.