Golan Hts. Issue Is Balancing Act For Netanyahu

TEL AVIV No wonder the Clinton administration and its Israeli ally, the Rabin government, are in such a hurry to clinch a deal that would get Israel off and Syria back on the Golan Heights.

Their nemesis, Benjamin Netanyahu, head of Israel's main opposition party, is ahead in the opinion polls. His main campaign plank is that the strategic plateau is a strategical necessity.

The opposition leader does not mince words on this issue. Netanyahu even considers the impending resumption of talks between Syrian and Israeli military officials "a major capitulation" by Rabin.

"For the privilege of sitting down opposite President Hafez Assad's emissaries, Israel has had to pay again and again with additional concessions," he charged.

Not only has Israel already promised to give up all of the Golan, but it also "is negotiating a partial demilitarization of the Galilee and the installation of a Syrian surveillance post atop Mt. Meron in mid-Galilee. I think that is a very bad starting point," he said, dismissing a New York Times report that Syria had dropped its demand that troops of the opposing armies pull back an equal distance from the current cease-fire line.

But the American-educated onetime commando does not limit his critique of the negotiations to technical details.

He bluntly rules out any withdrawal from the Golan Heights if he defeats incumbent Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Israel's first electoral contest to be based on personality rather than party affiliation. Rabin promised to put any deal reached with Syria to an unprecedented national referendum.

If elected, Netanyahu, his militant Likud party colleagues and their coalition allies further to the right are liable to complicate long-range American diplomatic objectives in the Middle East.

Nor would a Netanyahu government give the fledgling Palestinian autonomy an easy time. Unlike the incumbent Laborites and their left-wing Meretz party partners, it would not put any more territory under the PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat's control unless he totally disarmed and deactivated the Hamas and Islamic Jihad elements of the Palestinian population.

"We would not re-enter the Gaza Strip," he said, "but if the PLO is unable to stop hostile formations we will feel free to do so. We're not interested in a tactical intermission between purposeful bouts of terror, between campaigns of killing that are stopped momentarily so we give the killers more ground from which to kill us."

Strong words indeed. And the essential postscript to all this is that Rabin also vowed in 1992 that "he who gets off the Golan Heights sacrifices Israel's security." Now Rabin is on his way down - if the Syrians lend a helping hand. Will Netanyahu, if elected, resume the descent for the same obvious reason: Israel's supreme national interest, i.e., keeping in step with Uncle Sam?