Al-Sharaa takes the Israel question in New York, and puts withdrawal before arrangements

Ahmed al-Sharaa was photographed at UN headquarters on 22 September, ahead of the 81st session of the General Assembly, where The New Arab reports more than 150 heads of state and government are taking part. His own address is scheduled for Wednesday 23 September and had not been delivered at the time of writing. The evening before, he appeared at an Atlantic Council Front Page event in New York, listed on the Council’s own site alongside its president Frederick Kempe and Brett McGurk, the former White House Middle East coordinator who ran the anti-ISIS coalition file and Washington’s relationship with the SDF; The Syrian Observer reported ahead of time that McGurk would moderate. The billed subject was reconstruction, institutional reform and the US–Syria relationship.

Asked whether he could envisage diplomatic relations with Israel, and whether the Golan’s return was a precondition, al-Sharaa said the two states had already held direct talks over the past year and that Israel must first withdraw from areas of southern Syria occupied after the fall of the Assad regime, with security arrangements to follow. That account rests on a single source, the Times of Israel live blog of 22 September, in which the operative sentence appears truncated; The Files is not printing it as a verbatim quote until the Atlantic Council’s own video or transcript is available. On the same day, the state agency SANA carried a New York-datelined item on al-Sharaa addressing Syrians in the United States. The Syrian Observer notes that in September 2025 he arrived with his own name still on the Security Council’s ISIS and al-Qaeda list; that listing is reported to have since been removed.

Assessment: The interesting thing is the sequencing, not the sentiment. Al-Sharaa was asked about the Golan and answered about the post-Assad occupation zone — a narrower, more tradeable file, and one where Israeli withdrawal is a discrete act rather than a territorial concession. That framing keeps normalisation conversationally alive while making Israel the party that has to move first. Two cautions. The only account of the remarks is a partisan-adjacent live blog with a broken quotation, and a president’s think-tank answer is not a negotiating position. Read it instead against the certification clock: the Caesar repeal requires Washington to attest every 180 days that Damascus is not taking unprovoked military action against neighbours. Restraint in the south is now a sanctions variable, not just a policy.