Hopes High as Israel, Syria Start Talks : Mideast: U.S. meetings expected to begin final phase of peace process. Goal is initial pact by spring.

At a stately southern plantation overlooking Chesapeake Bay, Syrian and Israeli delegations today will begin what U.S. mediators now expect to be the final phase of Middle East peace negotiations.

The Clinton administration has high hopes.

The region’s most formidable foes now have a chance to complete the peace process in the “fairly near term,” President Clinton told The Times last week.

The unspoken goal is to reach at least an initial peace agreement by mid-spring, preferably by April, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.

It is a tall order, because in critical ways the delegations are beginning from scratch. The first of two three-day sessions in eastern Maryland will determine basic issues such as how to negotiate in the weeks ahead.

But in other ways, the two old adversaries have already had a dry run. For more than a year, Syrian President Hafez Assad and former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin discussed and debated the issues through others. Secretary of State Warren Christopher shuttled between them. Their ambassadors and then their military representatives conferred in Washington.

The last effort died in June, a victim of the wide divide on a security issue: how to guarantee no more war between two countries that fought each other five times between 1948 and 1982. Syria balked at Israel’s demand to have an early warning system on the strategic Golan Heights overlooking Israel’s vulnerable northern Galilee.

The issues have not changed. But the approach has--as reflected in ideas and actions from both sides since Christopher’s latest Mideast shuttle, which ended Dec. 17. An Israeli official called the new approach “a different way of looking at the same things.”

To get around the border security issue, Israel might be willing to give up its demand for ground-based warning stations if Syrian troops pull back and leave a large demilitarized zone, Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ori Orr said publicly.

Israel might then be able to rely on satellites and daily U.S. aerial reconnaissance to monitor Syrian military activities. New Prime Minister Shimon Peres also has indicated a willingness to consider turning over all the Golan Heights captured from Syria during the 1967 Middle East War--something that his predecessor was unwilling to do.

The normally reserved Syrians have reciprocated with the right noises. On a trip to Cairo over the weekend, Assad expressed some optimism about the talks.

“I believe Peres wants to negotiate with greater openness,” the Syrian leader said at a joint news conference with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh has also made encouraging statements about Lebanon--a critical issue to Israel--saying recently that Damascus favors “calming things down” in the only area of ongoing conflict in the region.

The border war has featured attacks by Lebanese groups against an Israeli-occupied enclave in southern Lebanon and against northern Israel, followed by retaliatory air strikes by Israel.

Syria has 35,000 troops and major influence in Lebanon--to the point that peace talks between Israel and Lebanon are considered a subset of the Syrian track.

During a visit to Beirut, Shareh also said that the guerrillas might lay down their weapons after a Middle East settlement.

The only concrete change so far, however, has been in the atmospherics. Rabin’s assassination last month has given “new possibility” to the Syrian-Israeli track, Clinton said.

“I think President Assad and the Syrians can see just how great [were] the risks Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin were making for peace,” he told The Times.

The new Israeli leadership is pressing hard. On Friday, Peres said that Syria and Israel have “no alternative” but to make peace.

“I am telling you peace will be achieved,” he said.

But his optimism is not universally shared among Mideast experts.

“I haven’t seen fundamental changes on substantive issues to lead me to any greater optimism than I had six weeks ago,” said Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute on Near East Policy.

Wright reported from Washington and Miller from Jerusalem.