Regional Outllok : Old Foes Prepare for Uneasy Peace : Israeli soldiers are eager to end the hated and dangerous patrols of Palestinian villages. But the future is unclear.

They assembled on the parade ground of a southern military base for a familiar ritual. For the 42 seasoned members of an Israeli Defense Forces tank company, it was the first day of yet another stint of reserve duty, and their battalion commander would now explain the training exercise they faced.

They did not know it, but there was also a surprise in store for them.

Serving 40 or 50 days of reserve duty a year, these teachers, businessmen, students and workers had seen a lot of each other for a long time.

Once, they had gathered primarily for tank maneuvers and border patrols. Since the Palestinian resistance to occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip began to swell into the intifada in late 1987, however, they had served much of their reserve time there, carrying out policing functions that had little to do with the art of the tank. More than one of their number had died there.

The word was out that after this tank exercise, they would do their next reserve stint in Gaza this April.

But that was the surprise. The battalion commander, after explaining the exercise, told his men that “due to the change in circumstances,” the plan for the next year had altered. The Israeli army was expected to be out of Gaza by April, so guard duty there was canceled, and would be replaced by another tank exercise this winter as part of a push to improve their real skills.

“It took a few seconds, and then the realization that the days of running after stone-throwers in the streets of Gaza were behind us began to sink in,” one of the reservists recalled. “There seemed to be a general sigh of relief, and there were some cheers, but most of all, it looked as if people were amazed at how quickly, and how much, a political event--that handshake on the White House lawn--affected our lives.”

Implementation of the first phase of that Sept. 13 agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which established a framework for ending the 100-year-old conflict between Jew and Arab here, was officially postponed for at least 10 days over the weekend. But both sides say they remain committed to the pact, which among other things is expected to bring a rapid change in the Israeli army’s role in territories it has occupied for 26 years.

And in the longer term, it opens vistas for far deeper changes in an institution already undergoing a quiet transformation.

Eventually, said military historian Meir Pail, former chief of doctrine for the Israeli General Staff, “The army would start coming back to itself,” to its old pre-occupation role as the nation’s defensive shield, “a pure military force that’s supposed to function outside of Israel.”

Much remains undecided about the final form of Israel’s relations with the West Bank and Gaza, including the pace of the Israeli army’s withdrawal from Gaza, which was supposed to begin Monday but is now deferred at least until later this month. But the plan is for it to gradually give up its dangerous and hated patrols through Gaza’s cities and refugee camps.

A similar arrangement is expected in the West Bank. Israeli soldiers’ mission will likely be to protect Jews on the settlements, to secure their roads and to guard the Israeli borders, but no longer to “keep order” in the Palestinian cities and camps.

And that, say soldiers and officials alike, can only be a relief.

The years of the intifada did little to lessen the prestige of the military among draft-age Israeli youths and created no massive morale problem, but it hurt the army in more subtle ways.

Many soldiers were confused by the contradiction between orders they were given to put down unrest mercilessly and formal requirements that they act within the law.

“The army was caught in a dilemma and the soldiers, especially in the lower ranks, were pissed off about it,” said Uri Dromi, a reserve colonel in the Air Force who heads the Government Press Office.

“There developed a culture of--not deceit but people wouldn’t talk too much about what was going on. And this is something which is dangerous to the kind of army we are, because we really believe we’re not hired guns. It’s a people’s army, we’re defending the existence of this country--but the enemy were kids.”

In practical terms, the army--which keeps 430,000 reservists to bolster its standing force of 176,000--had to expend a great many days of reservists’ duty on policing the occupied zones rather than keeping their skills up to par. They got practice at working together, but not in the roles they would fill in an all-out war.

A pattern developed in which a combat unit reservist would typically serve two stints a year, one brushing up his military specialty and one serving in the territories, said Zeev Eytan, a senior research associate at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Now, “if it’s true that we’ll be able to shift from guard duties to training at least somewhat and have a shorter time of reserve duty, this would be a great thing for Israel,” Eytan said.

So many unknowns remain in the Palestinian-Israeli talks that it appears to be far too early to predict when the Israeli army could start feeling any positive effects aside from a psychological lift. The complexities of redeployment may even require increased call-ups in coming months.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has said that he will keep heavy deployments of troops in the occupied territories during the difficult transition period, which shows signs of becoming almost as violent as parts of the intifada.

The troops will be concentrated especially heavily around trouble spots like Hebron, and, according to Rabin himself, already number more than 120 companies--quadruple the force deployed on Israel’s northern border.

But eventually, if peace talks do lead to more efficient reserve duty, that will complement attempts over the last two years by Chief of Staff Ehud Barak to cut the fat out of the army.

Barak’s campaign for greater efficiency has led to all kinds of cuts, from whittling down mandatory service time to a controversial policy of calling up only those reservists who are most crucial, despite the unfairness of making some reservists serve far more than others.

Israeli men are reconciled to serving in the reserves until well into middle age, but for the country, reserve service is doubly expensive: The army must pay the serviceman, and the national economy suffers from the days of labor lost.

Even at the height of the intifada , however, the costs of soldiering in the territories absorbed only about 10% of the defense budget, Dromi said. “The real time and energy go into preparing for war,” he explained, and the real threats to Israel remain Syria, Iraq and, in the long term, Iran--not the Palestinians.

The more critical, long-term results of the peace process for Israel’s military will come from the eventual re-examination of its entire doctrine against the background of what may become a new Middle East.

That is far from just around the corner, officials say. “We don’t discern that the threat to the existence of the state in the long run has disappeared,” said army spokesman Moshe Fogel.

And yet Israel is giving up land--a valuable buffer in military terms--in return for peace. It appears headed toward relinquishing control over the West Bank and Gaza, and predictions abound that it will give up most of the Golan Heights to make peace with Syria.

The prospect of losing land, analysts say, must increase the army’s emphasis on an effective offense. It will need to rely more on Israel’s traditional strategy of the “defensive offensive,” meaning that Israel must aim to respond to any attack by quickly pushing the fighting onto enemy territory.

The ability to surge into an offensive does not come from a scaled-down army. Israel will have to compensate for the strategic assets it gives up--like the Golan Heights and the ability they provide to look deep into Syria--with greater might.

“I don’t think anyone thinks that if there’s peace we’ll have a lesser army or a smaller army,” Dromi said.

In fact, the army may get smaller anyway as Barak pushes for a more elite force that is better equipped and trained. Talk has even arisen of creating a civilian national service that would absorb many of the young people who are unfit for combat but would normally have to be placed somehow in the army.

But the smaller force is meant to have greater firepower, with long-range weapons and a top-grade air force that already absorbs more than 50% of the budget. Attack helicopters are gaining weight in Israeli strategy, Dromi said.

“Israel will never be able to lay back because the minute your neighbors perceive you as weak, they’re going to try something,” Dromi said.

But someday, maybe, there will be real peace in the region. Pail, known as a radical dove in Israeli politics, is already looking forward to what he might be seeing in 25 years or so.

Perhaps, he said, Israel, Jordan, Syria and Egypt will form a military alliance much like NATO. They could build bases in each others’ countries.

Israeli officers would attend an alliance general staff college in Damascus.

“Of course, we would have to learn Arabic,” he said. “Or they could learn Hebrew.”