Rabin Pledges National Referendum on Any Golan Heights Withdrawal : Mideast: Government makes it clear that any deal with Syria would have to be sold to a very skeptical nation.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s government pledged Monday to hold a national referendum on any major Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights as a result of a peace agreement with Syria.

Mordechai Gur, the deputy defense minister, told the Israeli Knesset, or Parliament, that Rabin would seek popular approval--in effect, a renewal of the mandate for peace he won in June, 1992, elections--before pulling troops off the strategic plateau.

“At this stage, I want to make clear that if the territorial price demanded from us on the Golan Heights is substantial, the government will bring this to a referendum,” Gur told the Knesset, stressing that he was speaking for Rabin.

In terms of negotiations with Syria, the declaration made clear that Rabin considered himself bound by public opinion--that any deal would have to be sold to a very skeptical nation for which the Golan Heights are a key element in its defenses and for which retreat from the region would be psychologically difficult.

But Rabin was also challenging the vociferous opposition Likud Party not in the general election that it seeks but in a popular contest in which political odds currently favor his Labor Party. He was thus making clear his determination to reach a comprehensive peace with all Israel’s Arab neighbors.

All told, Gur’s declaration was Israel’s cautiously affirmative response to overtures from Syrian President Hafez Assad who, in a meeting Sunday with President Clinton in Geneva, declared his readiness for a full and normal peace with the Jewish state.

Gur, a former army chief of staff, signaled Israel’s readiness to make the necessary withdrawals--even the total pullout sought by Assad--in return for regional stability and for peace.

“We are a very strong country,” Gur said. “We will provide a solution to the security of Israel. . . . On the basis of our strength, it is our duty to take the calculated risk.”

Leaders of the 13,000 Israeli settlers on the Golan Heights, convinced that the country supports them, welcomed Gur’s declaration as an answer to their long campaign against territorial concessions there.

“We are very pleased,” said Yehuda Wohlman, one of the campaign’s leaders. “I see this as an extraordinary achievement in our struggle. It’s good that the prime minister has been so sensitive to our feelings.”

But Environment Minister Yossi Sarid of the leftist Meretz bloc objected to the referendum pledge, saying that the government had neither discussed nor decided on this and already had an electoral mandate.

“The subject has never been deliberated in the Cabinet,” Sarid said, “and the government has never taken a decision on this matter.”

A referendum, in fact, would require new legislation--and there would be a parliamentary battle over it.

“In the dictionary of political science, the term ‘national referendum’ is known as a manipulative tool by the government to design popular opinion, apparently to gain legitimacy but thus to circumvent elections that are the classic instrument to determine public opinion,” declared Tzachi Hanegbi, a Likud member of the Knesset.

Rabin has said in the past that he did not think the Israeli public was prepared for an agreement returning the Golan Heights, or a major portion of it, to Syria so soon after the accord with the Palestine Liberation Organization on limited self-government for Jericho, in the West Bank, and for the Gaza Strip.

A referendum would thus offer him a way to consolidate his political position and do both deals. But Israeli political commentators say that Rabin could also initial a peace agreement with Syria and then call a national election to reconfirm public support for his entire peace platform.

Syria’s central demand in two years of negotiations with Israel has been for the return of all the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War, in return for full peace. Israel has offered to pull back its forces in the region as part of a peace agreement, but says that the extent depends on what full peace means.

Dennis Ross, the U.S. State Department’s coordinator for the Mideast peace talks, briefed Israeli leaders in Jerusalem on the U.S. assessment of the Clinton-Assad talks and said he expected Israel and Syria to move forward when they resume direct negotiations next week in Washington.