I would like to thank Amos Elon [Letters, July 20, NYR] for correcting a mistake I made in my article “The View from Damascus” [NYR, June 15] in claiming that the Arab-Israeli Copenhagen conference never met. His fuller explanation of the origins and purposes of the Egyptian-Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian “Copenhagen initiative” is informative and to the point.

I cannot help noticing, in Moshe Ma’oz's and Itmar Rabinovich's letters [NYR, July 20], the persistent tendency of many eminent Israeli spokespersons and representatives to overpsychologize their country's politics with regard to the Arab world in general and Syria in particular. This is evident, first, in Ma’oz's continuing nostalgia for President Sadat's exaggerated and reductive (but at the time useful and self-serving) claim that 70 percent of the Arab- Israeli conflict had stemmed from the “psychological barrier” between Arabs and Jews. It is also evident in Rabinovich's repeated insistence that peace with Syria somehow hinges on certain Syrian acts of “public diplomacy” that would placate the neuroses of “Israel's collective psyche”.

In my view, the prospects for peace with Syria will improve the sooner the Israeli side overcomes its fixation on Sadat and leaves behind its unrealistic attachment to the “charismatic” moment of the Egyptian visit to Jerusalem, and returns soberly to “normal” politics among states. I have no doubt that “Syria's collective psyche” is, for its part, incapable of producing “charismatic” and paradigm-shifting gestures in the Sadat mode.

When we consider that Israel craves normalization with the Arabs and with Syria in particular, a return to “normal” politics becomes doubly important for the achievement of a peace agreement. At the same time, it would be most helpful to all concerned if the Israeli side stops painting the idea of normalization, and the process to achieve it, in such bright colors. The “normal” in Middle Eastern politics and Arab affairs is, after all, quite somber.

To get a glimpse of the “norm” in this case all you have to do is look at the history of the relations between Syria and Turkey, Syria and Iraq, Iraq and Iran, Morocco and Algeria, and so on. For example, it is “normal” for Syrian-Turkish relations to swing violently and unpredictably between cold-blooded ostracism and outright threats of war (as in Turkey's threats concerning the Kurdish PKK's alleged relations with Syria) and highfalutin expressions of warm friendship, cooperation, and exchanges of state visitors at high levels. In 1978-1979, Syrian-Iraqi relations suddenly veered in the direction of unifying not only the two ruling Ba’ath parties, but the two states as well. That much-trumpeted pan-Arabist collaboration flaunted, at the time, a very high-profile visit by President Asad to Baghdad and the unveiling of a mutually agreed-on Charter of Nationalist Action. Soon after, and no less suddenly, relations between the two states reverted to the usual condition of bitter enmity, destructive rivalry, total boycott, and mutual vilification.