Buoyed Peace Hopes Are Sinking in Syria : Mideast: Optimism fades as talks with Israel over Golan Heights reach dead end. But Western analysts see an opening for new negotiations.

Peace talks between Israel and Syria appear to have reached a dead end, dampening the optimism that swept this capital just a few months ago and leaving President Hafez Assad content to bide his time as patient powerbroker.

The last round of talks between the Syrian and Israeli military chiefs of staff, in Washington in June, broke up in disagreement. The Clinton Administration responded by stepping back from the peace process and now finds itself consumed with Bosnia-Herzegovina. Dennis Ross, the U.S. envoy involved in the Middle East peace process, has not been in Damascus since July, and no new talks are scheduled.

“There’s great disappointment and a feeling here [that] Israel doesn’t want peace,” said Sohail Zakaar, professor of Islamic history at Damascus University. “Four years ago, when the talks began, boys 13, 14 years old were dreaming of a peaceful life that wouldn’t require military service. Now those boys are 17 and 18 and preparing to enter the army. Peace has become a mirage.”

But since Syria is a secretive country where the only point of view allowed is the one expressed by the Assad regime, Western analysts believe that both sides in the talks still have considerable room to maneuver, and they say negotiations over the Golan Heights are, if not on track, at least likely to resume and move toward a narrowing of differences.

What happens next, they say, is difficult to predict because Syria has two policies: a public one, which shelters Palestinians who reject the peace process and permits them to broadcast into Israel from a radio station in southern Syria, and a private one, which is far more moderate and enthusiastic about peace and has banned leaders of the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas in Damascus from meeting the foreign media or issuing statements that gloat over violence in Israel.

In the Syrian section of the Golan Heights from which Israel withdrew in 1974, former teacher Jamil Salem looked across the barbed-wire cease-fire line the other day at a hill that once belonged to Syria and now bristles with electronic devices sprouting from an Israeli outpost.

“When people ask why someone else is living on my land, I don’t know how to answer them,” Salem said. “I do not understand Israel’s demand for security. . . . Give me back our land, and living in peace with Israel is not a problem.”

On the Syrian side of the border, curious residents peered through a telescope on the veranda of a coffee shop to watch Israeli patrols moving down a dirt road. On the other side, past a minefield separating the two countries, Israelis getting off what appeared to be a tour bus stared back through binoculars at the Syrian civilians.

The exchange was testimony to what Anwar Sadat, the late Egyptian president, referred to during his historic trip to Jerusalem in 1977 as the psychological barrier of fear and mistrust between Arab and Jew.

The negotiating positions of Israel and Syria on the Golan seem simple enough: Both are based on the premise of land for peace.

Israel wants security and, in return for handing back land it captured in the 1967 Middle East War, a full peace with Syria--including an exchange of ambassadors. It also wants the continued presence of at least two early warning stations in the Golan manned by Israelis. Israel sees the process taking place in stages over a long period, perhaps years.

Syria wants sovereignty and no physical Israeli presence. In principle, Syria accepts the idea of warning stations if they are monitored by a third country or the United Nations. Critical of the slow pace of Israel’s negotiations with the Palestinians, Syria wants an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan within months, not years, of an agreement; it wants all details in place before anything is signed.

“The more we slice peace into pieces, the more peace is partial, the further away stability and security will be--that’s our concern,” Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh said in Norway this month.

Although Assad has rejected Israel’s call for secret talks and seems in no rush for an accord, he has not, Western diplomats said, done anything to sabotage the peace process. Peace with Israel, they said, is something Assad has come to accept as inevitable, and what he must now do is prepare his people for it and get a deal that is fair, if not favorable.