MOVING TOWARD PEACE : NEWS ANALYSIS : Leaders View Peace as the Best Legacy : Hopes: Thoughts of mortality spur moves like the Israel-Jordan pact. The negotiators feel less soldierly than patriarchal.

The leaders of the Middle East, their age and ailments increasingly upon them, are pushing hard to leave their nations a patrimony of peace.

As he addressed the U.S. Congress in Washington on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin spoke alternately as a political leader, as a commanding general and, perhaps most movingly, as a grandfather hoping that future generations of Israelis will not know the war, the bloodshed and the trauma of day-in, day-out terror that past generations have.

Turning to Jordan’s King Hussein, Rabin said in his rumbling, gravelly voice: “Your Majesty, we have both seen a lot in our lifetimes. We have both seen too much suffering. What will you leave to your children? What will I leave to my grandchildren?

“I have only dreams to build a better world, a world of understanding and harmony, a world in which it is a joy to live,” Rabin said. “This is not asking for too much.”

Hussein’s eyes misted over as he looked out at his wife, Queen Noor, and one of his sons in the audience.

Witness as a teen-ager to his grandfather’s assassination by a Muslim fanatic opposed to peace with the Jews, Hussein had been equally persuasive, and poignant, when he spoke of freeing his people--and his neighbors--from the burden of hostility and hatred.

“Although we have labored for so long under conditions of hostility, I am certain we can see these conditions for what they are--emblems of an unnatural and sinister state,” Hussein said. “We have all known the portents of that state--the fear of death, the silence of isolation--and we have all felt the fear that has mesmerized us, preventing us from moving forward to create together a bright future for the coming generations.

“What we are witnessing today, God willing, is a progression from a state of war to a state of peace,” he said.

Although intensely personal and far from the hardened political considerations of most of their decisions, such are the motivations of Rabin and Hussein and of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and Syrian President Hafez Assad.

They are all men who are worried about the legacies they will leave their nations and their people.

There are objective factors in the growing momentum for peace in the region: the end of the Cold War, the defeat of Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, the conflict between militant Islam and secular societies, the diminished value of Arab oil exports.

But the commitment of the current generation of leaders has given the peace process a personal character not seen since the time of the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

This makes the health and life expectancy of each leader increasingly important elements in the region’s politics--and in their own calculations.

Hussein, 59 this year, is recovering from cancer and spoke openly Tuesday of using “the years left to me” for peace.

Rabin, 72, shows no desire to slow down and even looks forward to another term as prime minister, but his lifetime in war and politics has exacted a heavy physical toll.

Arafat, who will soon be 65, is clearly fatigued and in questionable health after years as the Palestine Liberation Organization’s guerrilla commander.

And Assad, 64, survived a massive heart attack a decade ago but is rumored now to be suffering from new, life-sapping illnesses.

Singly and together, they bear the responsibility--the destiny--of leading their nations to peace, of ending the hostilities that have occupied them for decades and of setting the course into the next century.

Each of them speaks often of that burden, and it has become a clear bond among them, even when they are frustrated by the others.

Some of the motivations could be viewed critically--a resolve to recover territory lost in war (Assad’s loss of the Golan Heights in 1967) or to rectify past misjudgments (Hussein’s decision to join the 1967 war), a desire to put themselves “right before history.”

There is the determination, as well, not to leave the Arab-Israeli conflict to a new generation to settle, largely in the belief that the older generation with its experience of past wars, tense truces and abortive negotiations knows better how to establish a real and lasting peace for the region.

“One cannot say ‘now or never’ of the Palestinian revolution, for its victory is inevitable,” Arafat said last week. “But we cannot leave the Palestinian crisis to the future to cure somehow in the way it was left to us by our fathers.

“The Palestinian nation,” he added, “cannot squander another generation of our youth--not when it is within our power to achieve independence and peace.”

But even more powerful are the motives expressed so movingly and so frequently in personal terms--the fervent hope that their grandchildren will not know the wars and bloodshed they have known, that the next generation will prosper once freed from the cycle of preparing, fighting and recovering from war only to begin again.

“We bear the responsibility,” Rabin said in his address to Congress. “We have the power to decide, and we dare not miss this great opportunity, for it is the duty of the leaders to bring peace and well-being to their peoples.”