Next Step : Standing Their Ground in Golan : Jewish settlers launch a propaganda war against proposals to return any land to Syria. They accuse Rabin of preparing to betray them.

Avi Pinkas moved to this small farming community 15 years ago, when it was made up of little more than a rock-strewn hillside and a handful of tiny, makeshift houses.

“We felt at the forefront of the settlers’ movement. We were encouraged by all the government agencies to come here,” recalled the soft-spoken Pinkas, now 42.

Today, he and the rest of the estimated 16,000 Israelis living in 33 settlements on the Golan Heights are again at the fore. But this time, the settlers fear, they are about to become the first line of Israel’s next withdrawal from territories it captured in the 1967 Mideast War.

The Golan settlers dread Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s next scheduled visit to the region, due to begin Sunday Christopher is reported to be prepared to shuttle intensively between Jerusalem and Damascus, determined to narrow the still-substantial gaps between Israel’s offer--a phased, partial withdrawal from the Golan in exchange for normal relations with Syria--and the demand by Damascus for an almost immediate full withdrawal in return for gradual normalization.

Christopher is encouraged, both by signs that Syria is serious about making progress and by the increasingly bold statements that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and other Labor Party officials are making. Rabin and his colleagues now speak publicly, and often, about the need for Israel to make a “painfully deep” withdrawal from the strategic heights in exchange for peace.

Last month, Rabin revealed that he has offered Syria a two-stage withdrawal from the Golan, trading an undefined amount of territory for a peace treaty.

His proposal was greeted with outrage and a vow to fight back from the people of the Golan. Golan settlers--most of whom, like Pinkas, support Rabin and the Labor Party he heads--say their way of life is about to be destroyed by a party they accuse of betraying not only them but also the values it has always represented.

“When you immigrate to Israel from a Western country, you are not running away from anything,” said Marla Van Meter, a former resident of Santa Maria, Calif., who has lived in Kibbutz Afiq on the Golan for 11 years. “You come with a lot of ideology. When my husband and I went to the immigration desk in San Francisco and told them we wanted to move to the Golan, they said: ‘What good Zionists!’ It was always part of Labor ideology to spread Jews around the land of Israel.”

Van Meter and her husband, Dennis, moved to Kibbutz Afiq when it was still a young settlement. She became the head gardener. He is in charge of the avocado orchards. Their daughter, named Kinnert--Hebrew for the Sea of Galilee--and their son, Golan, were born on the kibbutz.

“This is the only home my children have ever known,” said Van Meter, 36, a wiry triathlon competitor. She said she volunteered to become a spokeswoman for Golan settlements because she was alarmed by the government’s negotiations with Syria.

“What does (Syrian President Hafez) Assad need this land for, to save face?” she asked, her voice rising in anger.

After Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War, young Israelis, steeped in the pioneering spirit of the center-left Labor Party, saw a chance to fulfill the Zionist dream of redeeming the land with none of the complications presented by the West Bank, Gaza Strip or Sinai Desert.

Settlers who came to the Golan knew they were backed by a national consensus that security required Israel to keep that slice of southern Syria from which the enemy had rained shells on Israeli positions below. There were no Palestinians living on the plateau that separates northeast Israel from its most implacable foe, only Druze villagers in the far north.

Most of those who settled the Golan were politically liberal. They say they have nothing in common with the right-wing settlers who have built homes in the West Bank. Golan settlers say they would never dream of violently opposing any government decision taken on the fate of the heights.

Pinkas, Van Meter and other Golan residents interviewed uniformly agreed that the time probably has come for Israel to pull out of the West Bank and that Rabin’s decision to pull out of the Gaza Strip was a good decision.

“It was wrong to try to rule the lives of 1.5 million Arabs,” Pinkas said.

But on the Golan, Van Meter insisted, “the human rights issue is the issue of the Jews who are living here. We displaced no one. We are the ones who will be displaced.”

Pinkas and his wife, Rikki, invested years of back-breaking labor to transform their 12 rocky, sloping acres into a successful farm. Today, Pinkas greets guests in the four-bedroom home he built with his own hands. Each of his three children has a separate bedroom. Pinkas has planted vineyards and orchards and exports fruit to Europe.

He has what few Israelis, crowded into the tiny nation’s few large cities, can hope to own. He has land, and he has a breathtaking view of the Sea of Galilee, a profit-making farm and a spacious home.

So every day now, Pinkas fights a growing feeling of despair, a deepening fear that Rabin is preparing to trade it all away to Assad.

“It is for technocrats to talk about give and take,” the farmer said, his voice quivering with emotion. “That’s the way you talk with merchants--’You give me this, I give you that.’ But we live here. We’re not able to think in terms of a trade-off. It is not just a house. My children live in harmony with nature and their surroundings. We cannot see, in any situation, giving up our livelihood, our home, our love.”

Rabin’s willingness to even consider at least a partial withdrawal from the Golan--based on his growing belief that only by achieving a peace with Syria will there be peace in the region--is almost inexplicable for Pinkas and other residents here.

In the 1992 national election campaign, Rabin traveled to the heights and promised that Israel would never relinquish the land, not even in exchange for peace.

But in September, quelling a revolt within his own party, Rabin said that anyone who claims that Israel can achieve peace with Syria and keep the Golan “is uttering the biggest of all lies.”

The people of the Golan have launched an all-out campaign to stop Rabin. They are mounting mass rallies, blitzing the country with placards and banners proclaiming that “The People Are With the Golan” and trying to mobilize support in the U.S. Congress among those reluctant to see U.S. troops become part of any Israeli-Syrian solution on the Golan Heights.

In September, 11 Golan residents started a hunger strike that lasted 19 days, ending last Thursday after five Labor members of Parliament submitted a bill that would require a special majority of 70 in the 120-member body to approve any withdrawal from the Golan. The bill is not expected to pass, but its sponsorship by members of Rabin’s own party underscores the opposition he is facing.

The strike generated a lot of publicity for the settlers. They say that thousands of Israelis visited the strikers to express their support for the action.

“This is the most natural step for us to take,” said Ilit Eitam, 42, one of the hunger strikers, while the strike was under way. Eitam, 10 other strikers and a dozen supporters sat under an awning at Gamla, an ancient site where historians believe a Jewish community committed mass suicide rather than surrender to Roman soldiers.

Eitam sat with fellow striker Efrat Badichi, 40. They are among the handful of religious settlers living on the Golan. Each moved to the Golan as a single woman, married and raised a family on the heights.

“We are protesting a government whose actions we believe are illogical and immoral,” Badichi said.

Badichi and Eitam took part in a similar hunger strike a year and a half ago, they said. They believe that their protest helped pressure Rabin into promising that the government would make no decision on withdrawal from the Golan without putting the question to the nation in a referendum.

But now, with some polls showing more and more Israelis willing to consider at least partial withdrawal in exchange for peace, Golan residents are not so willing to leave the issue to a referendum.

“A referendum is not fair,” said Yitzhak Rahat, director of the Community Center at Bnei Yehuda, the regional hub for farming communities in the southern Golan. “The government has had two years to convince the people; we are starting from a disadvantage.”

Rahat and his wife, Gloria, say they are still “in a state of denial,” but they acknowledge that now, when they get together with friends, conversation is beginning to turn to the question of where people will go if the government actually does relinquish the heights.

“I still can’t believe it,” Gloria Rahat said. “In the evenings, I sit on our back porch and look up at the stars, and I just can’t imagine myself anyplace else.”