However, American and Israeli officials said the time was not yet ripe for real peace talks with Syria. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel will have enough to do trying to get skeptics to agree to give up settlements in the West Bank and to share Jerusalem with the Palestinians, compromises Israel will have to make if the peace track with the Palestinians has any chance of working.

Trying to get the 12,000 to 15,000 Israeli settlers out of the Golan Heights, in addition, would make an already hard job close to impossible, Israeli officials said, and make it far less likely for Israel to start separate talks with Syria soon. Olmert echoed that with reporters before he flew home Wednesday night. “Conditions are not yet at the point” for talks with Syria, he said. “There’s enough that we will have to do that will be heartbreaking.”

Over the past few months, the American relationship with Syria has been alternating between cold and lukewarm.

Officially, the United States considers Syria a state sponsor of terrorism, and the administration has struggled to isolate it as a strategy to have it change its policies. The United States withdrew its ambassador to Syria, Margaret Scobey, in 2005 after the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Syria, which had troops in Lebanon at the time, has been implicated in the assassination, but has denied any involvement.

This April, the White House criticiSed the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for visiting Damascus and meeting with President Bashar al-Assad, calling the trip “bad behaviour,” in the words of Vice President Dick Cheney.

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