The View From the Golan Heights: Peace : Mideast: Buoyed Syrians no longer just dream of retrieving the land seized by Israel--they expect it.

Amid the blocks of flattened houses, the miles of minefields, the abandoned shops, silent mosque and deserted streets that are Syria’s quarter-century-old reminders of war, there are some curious symbols of hope here in the ghost town of Kuneitra.

One is the collection of yard-long olive branches tied to metal-spike barricades by Syrian guards at border posts within firing range of the military installations that Israel built on the Golan Heights.

There is the memorial flag erected by Syrian President Hafez Assad “as a symbol of Arab steadfastness in the face of barbaric Zionism.” Neglected, it is now tattered beyond recognition.

And finally, there are the words of Jamal Salem, the mushrief , or official caretaker, of this ghost city that might become a new front line of peace in the Middle East.

“I am not only hopeful, but I am sure of it,” Salem said when asked--after a rather unenthusiastic prepared account of “Israeli atrocities and aggression”--whether he believes that Syria will actually recover all of the strategic, Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in the near future.

“The whole world is going toward peace now,” he said. “The climate is different. It is now, as our beloved President Hafez Assad said, the time for the peace.”

Indeed, the view from the Syrian side of the occupied Golan illustrates what many analysts see as the brightest prospect for peace in a region long inured to war.

Syria and Israel remain far from an agreement that would provide for an Israeli withdrawal from the hundreds of square miles of Syrian territory occupied in the Golan Heights since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and the two nations officially remain in a state of war.

But the two sides have begun discussing the issue in earnest, and most diplomats and Middle East experts in Damascus point to that simple fact as one of the most dramatic and encouraging developments in the intermittent peace talks.

Israel’s deportation last December of hundreds of Palestinians cast a shadow over the peace talks, and last week President Clinton directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher to visit the Mideast this month to try to repair damage from the ensuing stalemate.

Christopher said the negotiations are “on track” despite the deportee issue. He did postpone two rounds of multilateral talks scheduled for this week but predicted that the more important one-on-one negotiations will resume soon.

For years, Syria shelled the settlements of northern Israel from the strategic high ground here. Since capturing the territory, Israel has considered the Golan vital to its security. Syria has long called the land crucial to any comprehensive Middle East settlement. The fate of the Golan remains among the most contentious issues in the land-for-peace negotiations, along with the future of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

With the Golan a key element of the negotiations, Middle East experts are speculating not just whether the dispute will be resolved but how that settlement might take shape.

The outcome hinges on the motivation of Assad, one of the world’s most durable dictators, who has been among the most strident Arab nationalists against Israel throughout his 22 years in power.

His views are pivotal--and elusive. As one young Syrian wryly noted recently, “We are 13 million people, but we speak only with a single voice--that of Mr. Assad.” There is no policy debate in a country where there are no elections and no real freedom of speech. The president speaks out only on rare occasions. “Mr. Assad keeps his thoughts to himself,” one veteran diplomat noted.

Still, diplomats and independent analysts in Damascus do offer some insight into the motives behind what appear to be Assad’s newfound urgency about settling the Golan Heights issue.

Much of that motivation, they said, is grounded in Assad’s loss of his longtime strategic partner, the Soviet Union, which helped him build his military machine and his largely socialist economy.

The Syrian president has long had a reputation for ruthlessness, in dealing both with Israel and with internal dissent. He is also a political pragmatist, and he reacted quickly to the collapse of the Soviet Union, first by joining enthusiastically in the U.S.-led war to drive his old enemy Iraq from Kuwait and then by taking the lead in agreeing to join the Arab-Israeli peace process within weeks of the end of the Persian Gulf War.

But diplomatic sources in Syria said they view Assad’s increasingly moderate tone as evidence that he also sees the return of the Golan as a critical component of his personal legacy and an important cornerstone of his long rule.

“Assad is not in this for money,” one veteran diplomatic observer said. “He lives in a very modest house. He won’t even move into the new palace that was built for him because it just isn’t his style. He is in this for the power and for the creation of a legacy.

“He sees himself as an instrument of history, the father of modern Syria. And President Assad feels a certain personal responsibility to bring back the Golan to Syria.”

In fact, Assad was Syria’s defense minister when his country lost the territory during the 1967 war. He used the former regime’s role in the Arab defeat as a partial justification for leading the bloodless coup that brought him to power 22 years ago. And in 1973, he launched the “October war of liberation,” during which Syria managed to recover a third of the Golan, including most of Kuneitra, before suffering a series of defeats.

“The Golan Heights represents for Assad the salvation of Syrian honor,” the diplomat said.

“I think that Syria would accommodate almost any imaginative way and entertain all kinds of possible solutions to that end.”

Would Assad consider settling with Israel on the Golan issue without Israeli promises to return the other occupied territories--a step similar to that of Anwar Sadat’s 1978 Camp David agreement that won the Sinai Peninsula back for Egypt?

When asked such questions recently, a senior Syrian official handed over a slick booklet containing an Assad interview with Time magazine last fall.

In it, Assad emphasized that he would not compromise on the Golan and that he would not repeat what he called “the heavy price” Sadat had to pay for “separate deals.” The Egyptian president was assassinated three years after the Camp David agreement.

“Separate acts or separate deals would not achieve peace,” Assad said in the interview. “Separate deals may achieve the opposite of the peace we want. . . . I am surprised why some would like to cut peace into pieces--one piece now, another piece after 10 years.”

But many diplomats who have studied Assad through the years said they would not be surprised if he ultimately does agree to a phased settlement in which the return of the Golan would be the first step in a comprehensive series of agreements involving all the Israeli-occupied lands.

“Assad’s strategy has been to keep the focus as narrow as possible--focus on the Golan in bilateral talks and worry about the multilateral issues like the West Bank, the Gaza, south Lebanon and the comprehensive solution later,” another diplomat said. “So, at some point, I do think the Syrians might consider a step like that. But they’re going about it very cautiously, moving in lock-step. And Assad is not going to stick his neck out.”

Still, the president’s rhetoric of peace has had a great impact on Syria--a nation that moves in lock-step with its president’s pronouncements.

“There will be peace; I know this now,” one Syrian technician said. “This is what our president says. This is what I hear on the radio from the United States, even from Israel. And it is good. Peace, for us Syrians, means prosperity. If there is peace, maybe even I will go to Israel to work. No problem.”

The head of Syria’s diminishing Jewish community, Rabbi Avraham Hamra--who won from Assad key concessions, including free travel outside the country, for all 4,000 Syrian Jews last spring--was even more optimistic.

“The hope for real peace is very great now,” he said recently. “Never before has it been greater, and it is growing bigger and bigger by the day.”

It is a sense of national optimism that has made its way to the Golan itself--to Kuneitra, once home to 53,000 people, now a ghost town visited by thousands of Syrians and European tourists each year. During a standard tour recently, caretaker Salem gave the Syrian version of the events that left the place as it is today.

But Salem grew animated on the subject of peace.

“I am not speaking the official line of the government. I am speaking as a son of the Golan,” he said, explaining that he is among the estimated 500,000 former residents and their descendants who were forced from the territory after 1967.

“The whole world has become one small village now in the eyes of those leaders who want change. And we, as a part of this small village, should effectively contribute to humanity, to civilization, and contribute to building an international peace.”

When asked whether such a peace is possible among people who have harbored mistrust for so long, Salem thought for a moment.

“Everybody who is carrying such pain . . . of course, something will remain deep in his soul,” he said. “But the positive aspects of peace, plus the new education that will come with it--this will be enough to cleanse these thoughts from their insides.

“The Syrians, as much as we like to fight for what is rightfully ours, we love peace just as much.”