UNITED NATIONS — Israel does not currently have the “upper hand,” Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar al-Jaafari, said yesterday, dismissing recent talk in Jerusalem about launching direct negotiations with President Assad’s government.

Any such talks, he said, should be conducted with the Arab world as a whole rather than bilaterally with Syria. Damascus has used rejection of bilateral talks in the past to dismiss publicly direct diplomatic negotiations.

Relying on reports of indirect messages to Israel from Damascus through a group of businessmen, several senior Israeli officials — including the internal security minister and Prime Minister Olmert’s confidant, Avi Dichter — in the last few days have floated the idea of an overture to Syria.

“This is not the issue right now,” Mr. Jaafari told The New York Sun. “The issue is about solving the Arab-Israeli conflict in its comprehensiveness, not the Syrian-Israeli detail.”

The Syrian position has not changed “for decades,” he said, and before peace talks resume, there needs to be “full and comprehensive implementation of resolutions 242 and 338, and the principle of land for peace.”

Damascus’s interpretation of those two resolutions, which the U.N. Security Council adopted after the 1967 and 1973 wars, has been that for peace talks to begin, Israel first has to relinquish the territory it seized in those wars.

Chatter in Israel this week about renewing peace talks with Syria did not die down even after Mr. Olmert publicly dismissed the idea.

Mr. Jaafari indicated that the internal Israeli debate is not seen in Damascus as a serious approach.

“Peace is not only up to Israel,” he said. “Israel has not the upper hand in this. Peace should concern everybody in this area.” He added that just like the Golan Heights, which until 1967 was under Syrian control, the Palestinian Arabs and Lebanon have lands “under occupation.”

Asked about the part of council resolution 1701 that calls for establishing an arms embargo on Hezbollah, which gets most of its armaments via the Lebanese border with Syria, Mr. Jaafari said the weapons ban is directed at the wrong side.

“The embargo should be imposed on Israel by the international community,” he said. “Israel used, in all its aggression against the Arabs, the most sophisticated American weaponry. So any embargo should be imposed on the American weaponry to Israel.”