Mideast Peace Negotiations to Resume in U.S. : Mediation: Focus will be on relations between Israel, Syria. Officials hope to capitalize on Clinton’s talks with Assad.

American mediators, hoping to capitalize on President Clinton’s summit with Syrian President Hafez Assad, have summoned Middle East peace negotiators to resume talks Monday focusing on the frosty relationship between Israel and Syria.

The meetings, to be held at the State Department, mark the resumption of the formal peace process that has been in limbo since September, when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed a skeleton plan for Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho.

Israel and the PLO are engaged in intensive negotiations away from Washington to settle the troublesome details required to accomplish objectives outlined in their agreement, signed with much fanfare more than four months ago.

While those discussions continue, attention here will focus on the separate talks between Israel and Syria, the region’s most bitter adversaries.

In his Geneva meeting last week with Clinton, Assad offered new assurances that Syria is serious about peace.

He described it as a “strategic option” for Damascus, meaning Syria considers peace an end in itself, not just a tactical means toward some other objective.

But the wily Assad refused to be pinned down on exactly what he means by peace.

Syria has long said it is willing to exchange “full peace” for a total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau that Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 Middle East War.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said in a speech Wednesday in Tel Aviv that he doubts if Syria is willing to accept Israel’s definition of peace--exchange of ambassadors, open borders and free trade.

U.S. officials expressed optimism that the Clinton-Assad talks will break the deadlock between Israel and Syria. Non-government experts on the Middle East are far more skeptical.

“It can’t hurt,” Goeffrey Kemp, a former National Security Council regional specialist, said of the Clinton-Assad talks.

At the same time, he said if the Clinton-Assad meeting has really produced a subtle change in Syrian attitudes, the opening can be explored only in secret meetings between Israel and Syria--away from the Washington negotiations.

“The only thing I’m convinced of is that if something did happen, if there is a chink in the door, the meeting will have to be a lot more private,” said Kemp, now a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Unlike earlier rounds, Monday’s talks will be conducted by heads of the Israeli, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Palestinian delegations, instead of by the full bargaining teams.

The American sponsors believe that the less-formal setting will permit the give-and-take bargaining that was rare in earlier sessions of the peace process.

“We’re trying to keep the stakes down so the parties don’t have to make statements whenever they go in or out of the door,” a State Department official said. “We’re trying to make it a little easier for them, a little lower profile.”

Still, Middle East experts consider the Washington talks little more than a holding action to keep the process going until Assad and Rabin are ready to take decisive action.

As such, the negotiations are a demonstration of the willingness of the adversaries to keep talking to each other, but there is little likelihood of a breakthrough.

“The question is whether the Washington negotiations have much to do with anything,” said William B. Quandt, a former National Security Council Middle East specialist. “Assad is so central to the process that it is hard to believe he will delegate much authority to the negotiators. Similarly, Rabin is unlikely to delegate much authority.

“The next determination that the Americans must make is when to try to increase the tempo of the negotiations, not through the formal process in Washington but perhaps through another shuttle by (Secretary of State Warren) Christopher,” said Quandt, now a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

American officials said Christopher has “penciled in” a Middle East trip in February or March, but no decision has been made on whether he will go through with it.

Notwithstanding any change in atmosphere resulting from Assad’s meeting with Clinton, the Israel-Syria dispute is by far the most troublesome in the region.

So far, both Assad and Rabin are insisting that they want peace but only on their own terms. The deadlock may be easing, but, if so, the process is a very slow one.

Rabin conceded recently that Syria is unlikely to relax its demand for total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

He said Assad is unlikely to put aside the “Egypt precedent,” in which Israel agreed to a complete return of the Sinai Peninsula as part of its peace treaty with Egypt.

But if Rabin agrees to return the Golan, the pact would surely touch off a major political crisis in Israel. Rabin has said he would submit such an agreement to a referendum and would go through with it only if he wins the support of a majority of the Israeli public.

Underscoring the constraints under which Rabin must operate, Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the opposition Likud Party, flew to Washington on Wednesday to deliver a message that Rabin has no mandate to even talk about surrendering any part of the Golan.

Netanyahu, Israel’s top negotiator in the Likud-led government of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, said Rabin’s offer of a plebiscite on a peace agreement is not enough.

He demanded that Rabin call new elections, in which Likud would campaign on a platform of refusing to give up the Golan.

He predicted that Syria eventually will agree to make peace without getting back the plateau--a view clearly not shared by Rabin or the Clinton Administration.