U.S. Trying to Speed Up Israel-Syria Talks : Mideast: Foreign ministers may meet at U.N. next week. But gap between nations is said to be substantial.

The United States is trying to bring the Israeli and Syrian foreign ministers together in direct negotiations in an effort to accelerate the slow-moving peace talks between Jerusalem and Damascus, Israeli officials said Wednesday.

Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s ambassador to Washington and its chief negotiator in the talks with Syria, said a start might be made at the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York next week with a symbolic handshake between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his Syrian counterpart, Farouk Shareh.

“We believe it would be good for the political leadership from both sides to meet as early as possible,” Rabinovich said. “It is correct that our foreign minister and the Syrian foreign minister will be at the General Assembly. It would have been good, or so we put it, were the two to have met. This is not the stance the Syrians have taken until now, so far as I know, but there is more than one person trying to bridge this gap.”

But Dennis Ross, State Department coordinator for the Middle East peace talks, said after talks with Israeli and Syrian leaders that the gaps between the two countries remain so large that he does not know when they will resume direct negotiations.

“The discussions are serious and they are detailed,” Ross said, summing up his meeting with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv on Wednesday and six hours of talks Tuesday with Syrian President Hafez Assad in Damascus. “I think it is also fair to say that we are headed in the right direction, but there are real gaps that remain.”

While the United States is pushing both Israel and Syria to reopen formal talks after a year’s break, Ross added, “What we don’t want to have are discussions that would be sterile.”

According to Israeli sources, the goal is to have a very public channel at a high level--and a confidential track for secret negotiations whose results would then be brought into the public channel.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who has been mediating between Israel and Syria, plans to return to the Middle East in mid-October to try to narrow the differences, but he may first attempt to bring Peres and Shareh together in New York.

“On a symbolic level, a meeting between Peres and Shareh would be very important, for it would say to our people and to their people that this is serious, and from that we could get momentum,” a senior Israeli official said. “Beyond that, however, I think Peres and Shareh would have significant and substantial things to say to one another, and that would elevate the dialogue from the ambassadorial level to the ministerial.”

Rabin has sought for more than a year to open a secret channel with Assad, but the Syrian president so far has preferred to use Christopher as a go-between. Israelis point out that the breakthroughs in their talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization and then Jordan came in secret discussions.

Rabinovich’s discussions with Walid Moualem, his Syrian counterpart in Washington, have brought modifications in each side’s negotiating position, Israeli officials say, but large, fundamental differences will require high-level talks and extensive work by full delegations.

Rabin has offered an immediate withdrawal from a slice of the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War, to be followed by a three-year “testing period” while relations are normalized and final borders negotiated. Syria wants the phases to be much shorter--with Israel withdrawing completely in a year and dismantling at least one of its 33 settlements and removing some of the 13,000 Israeli residents at the outset.