Dumas Quiet on Mideast Peace Efforts : Diplomacy: French foreign minister says a Syrian-Israeli summit would help talks. But he coyly refuses to say if he is trying to arrange one.

French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, concluding a quick swing through the Middle East, declared here Sunday that a Syrian-Israeli summit meeting would help push the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations ahead, but he coyly refused to say whether he was trying to arrange one.

“I never said I had such a mission,” Dumas said of widespread rumors that his visits to Damascus, Cairo and Jerusalem were intended to arrange a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Syrian President Hafez Assad. “But as it has appeared in the papers, it is interesting to launch the idea, for it is a good one, and from that we have to discuss it.”

And with a smile and a shrug that were even more enigmatic than his comments, Dumas then went off to dinner with Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, who himself has tried to open a confidential “French channel” between Israel and its Arab neighbors to operate in parallel with U.S.-sponsored peace talks.

Although a senior Rabin aide insisted Sunday that “nothing is hidden here,” the impression persisted that such an experienced and high-profile diplomat as Dumas would not devote an autumn weekend to grueling Mideast consultations, his second round of top-level meetings in a month, without a promise of progress.

Meeting first with Rabin and then with Peres, Dumas at the very least was conveying the essence of his four hours of talks Saturday with Assad in Damascus and the further discussions he had Sunday with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo.

“With Secretary of State (James A.) Baker gone, that sort of give-and-take has been missing, as has high-level mediation,” a senior Western diplomat commented. “Without knowing what was discussed, we can assume that Dumas was probing positions, exploring compromises or developing nuances that would encourage one side or the other to move ahead.

“We can also assume that everyone understands that when the issues are clarified down to the basics and decisions have to be made, there will be a summit because there will have to be one. And even if that is six or nine months away, the groundwork must be laid now so that there is some sort of, shall we say, trust between the two leaders.”

From Israel, however, Dumas got little publicly--a reiteration of Jerusalem’s demand that Syria commit itself to the Israeli concept of peace before Israel discusses “territorial compromise” on the Golan Heights.

From Syria, he had also appeared to have won little more than a restatement of Damascus’ pledge of “total peace for total withdrawal” of Israel from occupied Arab territory. On Saturday, Syria had publicly ruled out an early summit, saying that Israel would use it only to divide the Arabs.

But Dumas told Peres, according to Israeli officials, that Assad , in fact, said he wants to advance the peace negotiations even before the U.S. elections Nov. 3.

The Dumas trip came amid reports in two British magazines specializing in the Middle East that Israel and Syria had, in fact, already agreed on a basic formula for the return to Syria of the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War.

According to the unconfirmed reports, Israel would acknowledge Syrian sovereignty over the whole Golan Heights and immediately return 60% of the region to Syrian control. About 20% would serve as a buffer zone and would be manned by U.N. or other international forces. The final 20%, including most of Israel’s 32 settlements, would be leased back by Israel for as long as a century.

In Jerusalem on Sunday, police broke up a march led by Faisal Husseini, head of the Palestinian negotiating team at the Arab-Israeli talks, in support of an eight-day hunger strike by an estimated 4,500 prisoners demanding better conditions in Israeli jails.

Police said they dispersed about 100 demonstrators at the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s walled Old City after stones were thrown.