Rabin Pushes for Golan Pullback : Mideast: Israeli leader says peace with Syria depends on concessions in captured territory.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, under sharp attack from Israel’s right-wing opposition as he presses ahead in negotiations with the country’s Arab neighbors, bluntly told his critics Wednesday that unless Israel gives up some of the strategic Golan Heights, there will be no peace with Syria.

But Rabin, who captured the Golan as the army’s chief of staff in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, also made clear that he is not ready to return all the territory and indicated that a compromise would have to be found to ensure Israeli security.

Defending his land-for-peace policies through a stormy debate in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, Rabin easily defeated, 53-32, a motion by the opposition Likud Party accusing him of jeopardizing Israel’s security in the latest negotiations with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians.

The triumph was important for Rabin as he tries to maintain the push-push momentum of the negotiations. Next Monday, when the talks resume in Washington, Israel is expected to suggest to Syria an initial “base-line agreement”--outlining points of agreement and dispute--as the basis for negotiation.

Syria recently dropped its insistence that Israel withdraw from the Golan before any peace settlement; it now believes that a “peace agreement” can be implemented simultaneously with an Israeli withdrawal. Israel wants to pursue this prospect in the negotiations.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, speaking in London on Wednesday, said the progress between Israel and Syria in the past two weeks has been so substantial that Jerusalem can now envision a peace agreement with Damascus, once its most implacable Arab foe.

Yet the Knesset debate, so bitter and fundamental, reflected the deep divisions that remain within Israel over how to achieve Middle East peace--particularly how far Jerusalem should go in meeting Arab demands.

David Levy, the former foreign minister and now a candidate for the Likud leadership, accused Rabin of making “wholesale concessions” in the negotiations without getting anything in return from the Arabs.

“Presents! The Palestinians and Syria are getting presents,” Levy declared, “and just because the current government wants to prove its moderateness.”

Likud rejects any land-for-peace deal for the territories Israel captured in the 1967 war, most notably the West Bank but also the Golan Heights and even the troublesome Gaza Strip. One hard-line Likud slogan declares that Israel would swap only “peace for peace”; Rabin described that as “no peace at all.”

Rabin, responding to the shift in Syria’s position, told a U.S. Jewish group by television Monday that his government will be flexible. Israel is prepared, he said, “in the absence of readiness on the part of Syria to negotiate a (full) peace treaty with us . . . even to negotiate interim arrangements.”

The point, according to a senior Israeli official, is “to do as much as we can, as fast as we can, to build the momentum of the peace process up to the level where it carries the substance with it.”

On Wednesday, Rabin was called to defend his tactics, which have largely reversed Israel’s longstanding approach to Middle East peace.

Amid raucous heckling, Rabin told the special session of the Knesset that only by giving up territory that it had won militarily and occupied for 25 years could Israel hope to achieve peace with its neighbors.

The Likud government, defeated in the June election, had achieved nothing in its talks with Syria, Rabin declared, largely because of its annexation of the Golan Heights in 1981 and the determined development of Jewish settlements there over the past decade.

Turning on the Likud members, Rabin recalled how they had returned “the last grain of sand” to Egypt when Israel pulled out of the Sinai Peninsula as part of the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. His government would do better, he promised, indicating that Israel would insist on measures ensuring its security.

In Damascus, Syrian President Hafez Assad called for a Middle East peace “that secures the interests of all” and stressed that that includes the return of the Golan Heights.

Meeting with 200 visiting Druze religious and community leaders from the Golan, the largest group allowed to visit since Israel captured the territory, Assad said Syria will never give up its claim to the heights, which guard both Israel’s Galilee Valley and the approaches to Damascus.

“Syria will never abandon its national will and will not surrender its land and rights,” Assad was quoted by the Syrian Arab News Agency as telling the Druze. “We want a genuine peace that secures the interests of all, and if others agree on this peace, peace would be realized. . . .

“But capitulation is not . . . in our dictionary. . . . We want every inch returned.”

About 15,000 Druze remained in the Golan Heights after the 1967 war, and they largely live in a cluster of villages near the Syrian border with loyalties now divided between Syria and Israel. About 70,000 other Syrians left in 1967. Over the years, Israel has moved about 12,000 Jewish settlers to the territory, and they are now putting pressure on the government to retain the land.