Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Syrian Rebel Leader Calls for Peace With Israel

Syrian rebels should make peace with Israel in return for support in overthrowing the current Syrian government, a prominent Syrian rebel said.

Kamal al-Labwani spoke with Israeli reporters on Tuesday in Jerusalem. He visited Israel for more than a week while taking part in the annual International Conference on Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya.

Labwani said that a new Syrian government would be able to reach a negotiated settlement over the Israel-annexed Golan Heights to turn the territory into “a garden of peace rather than conflict,” he told the i24 Israeli news channel. Israel captured the southern Golan in the 1967 war.

“It is up to the government of Israel. I think we can open the road, we can cooperate, we can create a new process for peace in Syria and the whole region. But both sides need to understand each other and listen to each other,” he told i24 news.

Labwani was released from a Syrian prison in 2011 during a general amnesty after being held for nearly a decade on charges of “communicating with a foreign country and inciting it to initiate aggression against Syria.” He was given political asylum in Sweden.

He called on the new U.S.-led coalition against ISIS to also help to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad, and to provide more support to the rebels and the Syrian people, including establishing a no-fly zone for Syrian rebels and refugees in the north and south of the country.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.