Israel Wants Pact With Syria Before Deal With Palestinians, Rabin Says : Mideast: Christopher is told that Jerusalem would be willing to negotiate Golan Heights withdrawal.

Israel told the United States on Tuesday that it wants to concentrate on negotiating peace with Syria, including a withdrawal from the strategic Golan Heights, and to leave a settlement with the Palestinians for later.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told Secretary of State Warren Christopher that he sees more chance of peace with Damascus than with the Palestinians who live under Israeli rule, Israeli officials said.

And a senior Israeli defense official said the army now believes it is possible to defend the country without the Golan Heights, if a real peace with Syria can be reached.

“We’ll have to . . . give it a chance and take risks, and the other side will have to take risks (and) give up a few things,” he said, indicating that Israel may ask for the area to be demilitarized under multinational control.

He would not say whether Israel would be willing to withdraw from all the Syrian land it occupied in 1967. But he said a complete withdrawal is at least “theoretically possible.”

Some American officials were cool to the Israeli tack, because the United States has told both Israel and the Arabs that it would prefer a comprehensive peace on all fronts of their 45-year conflict.

But they said they hope that the Israelis’ statements will make it clear to the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who have lived under Israeli military occupation for 25 years, that they must show themselves ready to make some compromises or risk seeing the peace process pass them by.

The fractious Palestinians have long had a difficult time making decisions, partly because they have no government to speak for them and partly because their own hard-liners have often blocked moderate initiatives.

Indeed, on Tuesday evening, Palestinian negotiators rejected--at least initially--a proposed compromise over the heated issue of 396 Palestinian militants deported to Lebanon by Israel in December. The deportees remained camped on a Lebanese hillside; their ejection had prompted the Arabs to suspend the peace talks.

Christopher has been traveling the Middle East promoting a compromise under which Israel would review the deportees’ cases, and quietly allow many of them to come home early, if the Arabs returned to the talks.

Israeli officials indicated Tuesday that they are willing to speed up the review process. But they refused to commit themselves to allowing many deportees to return--or to meet a Palestinian demand for a formal promise that no further deportations will occur.

And Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi struck a defiant tone, telling reporters at the Palestinians’ new East Jerusalem headquarters: “We are not in the process of making compromises. . . . Under the present conditions I don’t think the peace talks will resume.”

That left Christopher still shuttling between the two sides of the Holy City, trying to give each side what it needs without forcing either to eat crow.

Despite the tough statements, American officials said they still believe Christopher can wrest an agreement from them soon. Israel clearly wants to resume the peace talks, with or without the Palestinians. Syria, Jordan and Lebanon have already said they are willing to try for a compromise.

That could leave the Palestinians, the people at the heart of the conflict, as the only party outside the negotiations--a serious setback for their efforts to win the right to self-government.

Some Israeli officials have acknowledged that such an outcome would be fine with them. Israel is exploring the prospects of a separate peace with Syria--like the Camp David peace reached with Egypt in 1978--partly because it could leave the Palestinians in a severely weakened position.

Syria has refused to conclude a peace agreement without the Palestinians. But the mere fact of progress in talks between Jerusalem and Damascus would put pressure on the Palestinians to be more flexible, officials said.

A peace with Syria would also remove the largest military threat in Israel’s immediate neighborhood. Rabin has said a settlement with the Palestinians would be politically important but a peace with Syria would be “strategically” important--indicating that he considers military strategy more important.

Another senior official said that any agreement with Syria, a repressive one-party dictatorship, would be more reliable than one with the disorganized Palestinians.

“With the Syrians, we have a real party to negotiate (with),” he said. “When it comes to the Palestinians, the weakness is . . . in the party. For that reason, we feel that maybe with Syria we can advance a little bit quicker than with the Palestinians.”

Asked whether he believes Syria is serious about peace, he said yes.

“The Syrian conviction is that they cannot go on like this,” he said. “There is a younger generation that watches TV (as is done) all over the world, and they are, like us, beginning to understand . . . that the world is a global village.”

His optimistic assessment is not shared by many other Israeli officials, who point out that the regime of Syrian President Hafez Assad still routinely castigates Israel to its own public--hardly the way to prepare for a peace agreement.

But the senior officials’ open disagreement points up how the idea of peace with Syria, once unthinkable, is now the center of a major debate here.

A public opinion poll released here this week found that 54% of Israelis are willing to return parts of the Golan, while 46% oppose any withdrawal. Of those who are willing, 33% are willing to return a small part and only 6% are willing to withdraw from the entire area.

In the poll, conducted by the Jaffe Institute for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, 62% also favored handing some territory over to the Palestinians, and 89% strongly favored keeping the peace talks going.