Christopher Begins Mideast Tour With Warning: Don’t Try U.S. Patience on Talks : Diplomacy: Secretary of state says negotiating peace in region will lose its high priority if White House finds itself ‘pushing against a closed door.’

Secretary of State Warren Christopher began his first mission to the Middle East on Thursday with a promise and a warning to Israel and its Arab neighbors: The Clinton Administration is willing to spend time and energy to help peace talks succeed, but not if the Arabs and Israelis play hard to get, senior officials aboard Christopher’s airplane said.

“It’s a big world, with lots of things to do,” one senior official said, noting that the Administration already has its hands full with problems in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Russia and elsewhere.

The Middle East “seems to us to have a very high priority, but it can’t continue to have that priority if we’re pushing against a closed door,” the official warned.

Christopher plans to spend much of his weeklong trip through the Middle East by probing the attitudes of the region’s leaders and deciding whether the peace talks are worth a major investment of time, officials said.

“He’s going to be listening very, very carefully to what he hears from . . . the Arabs, the Israelis, the Palestinians, as to how serious they are in promoting meaningful negotiations that can move this peace process forward,” another senior official said.

“He will then come back with his own assessment that he will give to President Clinton. Based on that assessment of the seriousness of engagement . . . the President will decide what I could call the quality of engagement by the United States in these negotiations.”

Officials refused to describe further what they meant by the “quality of engagement” by the United States. But it appeared to imply that Christopher has little interest in investing a large part of his time in negotiations that offer little hope of success.

Then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III launched the talks in 1991, but getting them under way required a large part of his time and a dozen grueling trips to the region. Baker, too, threatened several times to abandon his quest if the area’s leaders did not show themselves ready to make compromises for peace. Even then, Baker was unable to bring the negotiations close to a conclusion before he left the State Department last August.

A round of talks between Israel and Syria last fall briefly raised the prospect of a possible peace between the area’s two most implacable enemies, but little concrete progress followed.

In December, the Arab delegations at the talks said they would suspend negotiations to protest Israel’s expulsion of more than 400 Palestinians, suspected by the Israelis of being Muslim militants, across the Lebanese border.

In recent weeks, Arab diplomats have said their governments want to return to the table, but they have also pressed for the early return of the deportees.

Israel has offered to allow 100 of the deportees to return immediately, with the rest to follow by the end of the year. But the deportees themselves have rejected that offer.

Christopher has said publicly that Israel’s offer should be enough to persuade the Palestinians and other Arabs to rejoin the peace talks.

He was scheduled to meet twice with Palestinian leaders during his three-day stay in Jerusalem next week, reflecting expectations of lengthy negotiations over the issue.

Some U.S. officials have also suggested that Israel could help solve the problem by speeding up the repatriation of the deportees or by making some other conciliatory gesture toward the Palestinians.

But Christopher has avoided any hint of American pressure on Israel on the issue.

Asked on his arrival here whether Israel should do more, Christopher praised Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s government for making “very important steps’ and said it is time for the peace talks to resume.

Among the State Department aides accompanying Christopher were most of the key Middle East experts who helped Baker bring about the peace talks in the first place--including Dennis B. Ross, who left the State Department last year to work on the abortive reelection campaign of George Bush.

Ross has been advising Christopher on the past and present attitudes of such leaders as Syrian President Hafez Assad and Rabin and is looking for signs that they are more ready to compromise with each other than before.

Both have expressed general interest in a deal--but their substantive positions remain far apart. Assad wants Rabin to start out by returning the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1967. Rabin says he is willing to talk about returning much of the occupied territory, but he has said peace should come first.

Some American officials are skeptical that a deal is within reach. They say it is unclear whether Assad is ready to make serious compromises, and equally unclear whether Rabin, whose center-left government is in precarious political condition, is willing to risk a compromise.

Christopher, who has not visited Egypt since he was deputy secretary of state in the Jimmy Carter Administration in 1979, will be meeting most of the region’s leaders for the first time.

He is scheduled to travel to Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Israel before heading to Switzerland next week for a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev in Geneva.

Meantime, in Israel on Thursday, Israeli troops shot and killed four Palestinians in 24 hours.

Security sources quoted by the Reuters news agency said troops killed Jaafar Mohammed Asrawi, 17, when he fled during a raid on the village of Illar in search of wanted men.

Earlier, Palestinians said a 27-year-old man in the occupied Gaza Strip was shot Wednesday evening. The army said he acted suspiciously and was shot while fleeing. Two other Palestinians, one 13 and the other 18, were killed by soldiers Wednesday afternoon in the West Bank, Reuters reported.