Israel Ready for Syria Compromise, Officials Say : Mideast: But it wants public commitment from Damascus on character of future peace before communicating its willingness to withdraw from Golan Heights.

Israel is ready to make significant compromises in its stalemated peace negotiations with Syria, according to senior Israeli officials, but it wants firm assurances that Damascus is similarly ready for the difficult decisions needed to achieve a breakthrough.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is virtually trying to coax a public commitment from Syrian President Hafez Assad on the character of peace, one that would allow Israel to communicate its willingness to withdraw from the Golan Heights, the officials said.

For the past year, the Syrian-Israeli negotiations have been at an impasse, with Israel unwilling to say how much territory it would give up on the Golan Heights until Syria spells out what sort of peace treaty it would sign.

Rabin is now willing to accept a more limited, less direct statement from Assad than he had previously demanded, according to these officials, in order to give the talks some momentum.

“A breakthrough depends on Assad. . . . The bolder his move the better it will be received here,” one official said. “But just a speech to army officers or comments in an interview could send the signal Rabin needs in order to reply. And Assad’s message could simply be, ‘Peace is peace--we will take what Egypt got for peace and give what Egypt gave.’ It depends on Assad.

“Rabin knows he has to move with Syria but feels strongly that (the Israeli) public is really not yet ready for withdrawal on the Golan Heights in addition to Palestinian autonomy. He needs something from Assad that allows him to advance, that justifies the compromises involved.”

Rabin, who will meet with President Clinton in Washington next Friday, hopes to draw the United States into orchestrating the complex political and diplomatic moves that will be necessary to revive the negotiations with Syria.

“If Assad moves, Rabin will move, and then Clinton can send (Secretary of State Warren) Christopher to reopen the ‘Christopher Channel’ between Jerusalem and Damascus,” a Rabin adviser said. “We are telling Assad through every way we can to move so that we can respond.”

Rabin would still like to meet Assad directly, perhaps under U.S. mediation, to see whether they might be able, general to general, to reach a basic understanding on peace. But Israeli analysts doubt that Assad would agree to such a meeting until he was certain of the outcome.

Assad is “cautious, not a man for the big gesture,” said the prime minister’s adviser, “and so we are looking for small moves that we could acknowledge and praise and use to regain momentum.”

Hopes for a breakthrough increased after Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said earlier this week that Wednesday, Nov. 3, would prove to be a historic day in the efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East.

Israeli newspapers reported Friday that Peres was probably referring to a clandestine meeting he had the day before with King Hussein of Jordan to discuss the draft of a peace treaty and economic cooperation between the two neighbors.

To prevent Syria from upsetting the agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization on Palestinian autonomy, U.S. officials won promises from Rabin that negotiations with Damascus would resume--”with forward movement”--within three or four months, a period that will end in mid-December.

Health Minister Chaim Ramon, one of the doves in Rabin’s Cabinet, confirmed Friday that Syrian-Israeli contacts are developing, although direct negotiations have not been resumed in Washington.

“We are in continuous dialogue with the Syrians,” Ramon said in a newspaper interview. “We demand a full detailing of the principles on the issues of security and the normalizing of relations. . . . The moment we achieve satisfaction on issues of peace and security, we will define parameters of withdrawal.”

Officers from the Israeli and Syrian general staffs have been meeting in Europe, according to Israeli sources, to prepare tentative proposals on possible models for a phased Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

Discussed on a non-binding, “off-the-table” basis, the proposals could be put into the negotiations and perhaps agreed upon quickly if warranted by progress on the key issues of the character of peace and the extent of withdrawal, these sources said.

But Dr. Ephraim Sneh, a former general, a Rabin confidant and a member of the Israeli Parliament from the ruling Labor Party, said Friday, “Despite all the rumors, the gap between Syria and Israel has not been narrowed.”

“As long as there is no explicit Syrian expression on a peace we can accept, we have an impasse, whatever our willingness to compromise on territory,” Sneh said.

According to a report in the influential Israel newspaper Haaretz, however, the military officers’ discussions and other contacts have persuaded Rabin that Syria is ready to agree to “full peace,” including open borders and diplomatic relations, in an agreement that would allow Israel to maintain forces on the edge of the Golan Heights, protecting the communities below.

As outlined to Haaretz by a “senior political figure,” Israel would withdraw from the rest of the Golan and give up three areas now on the Israeli side of the international border that Syria had captured in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and that were demilitarized until the 1967 war.

Described by other Israeli commentators as “cosmetic changes,” the territorial exchange--the Golan ridge for the three bits of Israeli land--might be sold to the Israeli public. A full withdrawal would not be accepted, according to Haaretz.

Arye Shalev, a retired Israeli general and military analyst who has long studied relations with Syria and the question of the Golan Heights, said Friday that he doubts strongly that Assad would agree to such a deal or that Rabin is prepared to make it.