NEWS ANALYSIS : Mideast Foes Like Peace but Not the Price, Baker Finds : Diplomacy: Israel and Syria appear to be throwing up roadblocks to avoid a conference neither one really wants.

The United States, Secretary of State James A. Baker III is fond of saying, can help mediate a Middle East settlement, but it can’t accomplish much if Washington wants peace more than the Arabs and the Israelis do.

As he ended his latest Middle East trip Thursday, his fourth since March 6, Baker must have been thinking that the parties to the conflict do not really want the kind of peace that he is trying to sell.

At every turn, in ways both subtle and direct, the leaders of Syria, Israel and Jordan told Baker that, of course, they want peace--but they do not want to give up much to get it.

The overall picture is not really changed by the minor procedural concessions that Israel agreed to make earlier in the day Thursday. There is a growing suspicion that both Israel and Syria are using the now well-known roadblock issues as excuses to avoid a conference that neither side really wants to attend. The Israeli concessions do not bring the matter much closer to a settlement. And, if those problems were removed, others might appear.

“It goes without saying that you’re not going to have a conference until the countries that are the (potential) participants . . . make a firm decision that this is what they want,” Baker said just before starting the flight home.

Israel, for instance, wants to add a peace treaty with Syria and Jordan to its decade-old pact with Egypt. But Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has made it clear that he will not give up control of the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip or Golan Heights to get such a treaty.

Syria wants to get back the Golan Heights, which it lost to Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. But President Hafez Assad, perhaps aspiring to leadership of the radical Arab bloc, is unwilling to normalize relations with Israel and, in effect, welcome the Jewish state to the Middle East about 43 years after its creation.

Jordan, one of the most vulnerable states in the troubled region, wants peace with its neighbors Israel, Syria and Iraq. But the Hashemite kingdom is reluctant to consider a formal peace with Israel until it is sure that Syria will go along. Moreover, if King Hussein attends peace talks with Israel, he might anger Muslim fundamentalists, who are becoming an increasingly restive element of his population.

The problem is that Israel and its Arab neighbors are not hurt much by the status quo right now. There are no armies about to go to war. There are no unusual border tensions. There is a de facto peace already, and the benefits of formalizing it are not overwhelming.

The 3 1/2-year-old Palestinian uprising has produced real pain for both Israel and the Arab residents of the occupied territories, but Shamir’s government has been able to contain the revolt. And the Palestinian residents of the territories--who may soon be willing to make almost any kind of deal that would ease the Israeli occupation--are in no position to make peace by themselves. Besides, they are intimidated by the Palestine Liberation Organization to hold tight to their maximum demands even if that means getting nothing.

President Bush believed that the U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf War would create a new opportunity for Arab-Israeli peace by enhancing American prestige and making at least some of the countries in the region--Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Israel and, possibly, Syria--beholden to Washington.

However, it now appears that the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s belligerent regime may have made the Arab-Israeli peace process even more difficult. By defanging a dangerous potential common enemy, Operation Desert Storm may have eliminated one incentive for Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia and others to make peace.

The Syrian government newspaper Tishrin greeted Baker on Sunday with an editorial suggesting that Washington has more to lose than does Syria if the peace process fails.

The newspaper said it would be a shame to waste an opportunity for a comprehensive peace settlement.

But it said failure does not hurt the “countries directly concerned with the Arab-Israeli conflict (as much as) it jeopardizes American credibility and affects international security, peace and detente.”

Tishrin suggested that the way for the United States to avoid a humiliating defeat would be to pressure Israel to make peace on Syria’s terms.

Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy demonstrated the flip side of that sentiment. The way to make peace, he said, is for Baker to make the Arabs see reason.

“Let Syria not seek pretext for impeding this process,” Levy told Baker just before the secretary of state boarded his jetliner for the trip home. “We have done everything possible to help it along. Let Syria help the process along as well.”

Nevertheless, Baker seems determined to keep trying.

“I’m certainly not claiming that we can make this thing work,” a senior Bush Administration official said. “But I’m certainly, equally, not suggesting that the effort is dead at this point.”