Mideast Peace Signing Near, Both Sides Agree : Diplomacy: Negotiators expect to conclude talks on Palestinian self-rule next week. Rabin willing to end Golan settlements for peace with Syria.

More than six grueling months after peace talks began, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators said Thursday that they expect to conclude talks on Palestinian self-rule next week, clearing the way for signing of a final agreement early next month.

Although the two sides still differ on a variety of largely symbolic issues--from a Palestinian postage stamp to an international telephone dialing code and Palestinian passports--negotiators said they are close enough on the substantial issues blocking an agreement that a nearly final draft could be completed during the next round of talks scheduled to begin Sunday.

In Jerusalem, peace prospects on another front were advanced when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said he would remove Jewish settlements from the Golan Heights, seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, to make peace with Syria.

“If we need to dismantle settlements for peace, I have supported that in the past, and I will continue to do so,” Rabin said, declaring that the 32 Israeli settlements in the region do not bolster the country’s security. “For me, peace is a more important value for the future of Israel’s security than one group of settlements or another.”

The Israeli and PLO delegates dealing with Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank town of Jericho and the Gaza Strip said a final accord could be signed in early May during a summit between Israel’s Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, the delegations said.

“I cannot make any 100% assurances, but I think it is highly probable that we will finish next week and therefore we will be signing the Monday after,” chief Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath said. “Barring any major unexpected events, we should be very close to signature.”

Maj. Gen. Amnon Shahak, head of the Israeli delegation that left Cairo on Thursday afternoon, for the first time shared the Palestinians’ optimism and said the two sides agreed “upon quite a lot of issues” during the round of talks that concluded this week.

“I can only hope that next week, if the work will be the same as this week, we can at the end of the week be very close to summing up, if not all the things, then most of them,” Shahak said. “And that will bring us very close to the day of the signature.”

Palestinian negotiators said only four or five sub-paragraphs out of a draft agreement of more than 100 pages remain to be worked out.

The mood of the talks swung dramatically from early in the week, when the PLO declared a crisis in the talks over the issue of how much legal jurisdiction Israel will retain in the territories. But by Thursday, Shahak was back from consultations in Jerusalem with a new formula more acceptable to the Palestinians.

The PLO has insisted that it retain legal jurisdiction in criminal cases not only involving Palestinians, but non-Palestinians traveling in and through Gaza and Jericho. Israel had initially proposed sending all non-Palestinian cases to Israeli courts, but the new proposals “come very close to making an agreement on the jurisdiction issue, very close to the declaration of principles (signed in September) and therefore . . . a long way to satisfying our needs and requirements,” Shaath said.

Negotiators said they also reached an agreement on launching air service, once airport facilities are available, between Cairo and the Gaza Strip, via a new Palestinian airline and Egypt’s Air Sinai.

The week’s talks produced final agreement on nearly all areas relating to the hand-over of civil administration to Palestinian control, and Shahak said the outcome of ongoing economic talks in Paris would resolve most of the other outstanding issues.

But the smooth pace of the talks reflects the fact that some of the most difficult issues are being kept for last, to be decided at the highest levels.

Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres met Wednesday and Thursday in Bucharest, Romania, in an attempt to make headway on some of them, including the Palestinians’ demands to issue their own passports, postage stamps and telephone dialing codes.

Israel has held fast against any symbols of Palestinian nationhood, but Shaath insisted that such “symbolic” gestures were not synonymous with statehood.

“As a collector of stamps, I am looking forward to the new Palestinian stamp,” he said.

Even thornier issues--the ultimate size of the area to be transferred to Palestinian control in Jericho, for example, and the presence of a Palestinian border guard on the bridge crossing between Jordan and Jericho--will be left to a last-minute summit between Arafat and Rabin.

Shaath said he believed the two leaders could work out the details and sign a final accord during a two-day meeting in Cairo, most likely at the beginning of May.

The Palestinians’ demand for a general amnesty for about 8,400 Palestinian prisoners also remains unresolved, though Shahak indicated that any releases beyond the 5,000 that Israel has pledged to free in two stages after the signing of the agreement could be delayed for later negotiations.

The PLO is insisting that all prisoners, including those belonging to the militant Islamic group Hamas, be given amnesty. Israel has rejected the idea of releasing any Hamas members it holds in view of a wave of Hamas-engineered terrorist attacks.

Rabin’s comments about the Golan settlements Thursday went beyond his stated readiness to pull Israeli forces back in the region. They appeared intended to promote negotiations with Syria when Secretary of State Warren Christopher visits the Middle East next week.

Moshe Maoz, a leading Israeli specialist on Syria, said the shift in Rabin’s position and his bluntness suggested that Rabin is preparing to make painful concessions to obtain progress in the talks with Damascus.

But Rabin’s comments, repeated under questioning by angry Golan settlers, brought immediate condemnation from the opposition Likud Party and other critics.

“If he says that he is willing to dismantle communities in order to withdraw from the Golan, he is actually saying, ‘I am willing to make peace without security,’ ” Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu said. “And a peace such as that won’t last.”

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Times staff writer Michael Parks in Jerusalem contributed to this report.