Arab World Uneasy Over Which Way Talks Will Go : Mideast: The feeling is that the conference is both a last chance for peace and the prelude to years more of hostility.

DAMASCUS, Syria —  In a shop stacked with musty-smelling sheep fleeces in the heart of this city’s spice-scented old quarter, a few steps away from the mosque where John the Baptist’s head is said by some to be buried, the proprietor turned successive shades of red as he struggled to find words for the Israelis with whom the Syrians are preparing to discuss peace.

“Enemies!” Mohammed Khair said gravely, then pronounced a darker word: “Murderers!” He fought for a third and a fourth. “Bloodletters. . . . Guilty!”

Then the former Syrian army lieutenant, who accompanied the last soldier he commanded out of the Golan Heights in the back of the wounded man’s ambulance when the Israelis bombarded the Syrian highlands in 1973, softened for a moment.

“All of us Arabs, we don’t want war. We are ready for peace, for our children, for life. We are ready for peace--if the Israelis give us our land. If Israel gives us our land and all our rights, this fighting may be finished. Peace, but with land!” Khair said, bending over and smacking the floor. “If not, Syria is ready to fight again: with the knife, with the sword, with stones.”

He traced the snap of a slingshot in the air, and it was almost audible in the quiet shop over the murmuring and shuffling of feet in the alley outside. He made a visible effort to calm himself with a sip of tea.

Everywhere in the Arab world, from the traffic-snarled streets of Cairo to the neat, shrub-lined avenues of Amman, there is this sense that the Mideast peace talks opening Wednesday in Madrid are both the last chance for peace and the prelude to years, maybe decades more, of hostilities.

There is an edginess in the air, a sense that the region has reached another crossroads after which anything could happen.

Hanan Ashrawi, an advisory Palestinian delegate to the Madrid talks from the West Bank, got on a bus Friday to meet her fellow delegates in Jordan and cried all the way. Nobody asked why.

In Lebanon, old-guard Palestine Liberation Organization fighters took over Lebanon’s largest refugee camp to protest the peace talks, and none of the camp’s 50,000 inhabitants seemed to mind.

In Egypt, which made peace with Israel 12 years ago, the government the other day abruptly rounded up 18 people who had tacked up posters around the city saying ominously: “Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates. The Jews are the Jews. They killed prophets and betrayed the covenants.”

In a wide range of interviews with university students, business people, academics, government officials, taxi drivers and shopkeepers, a sense emerges that the Arabs--maybe even some of those publicly opposed to the peace conference--are desperately eager to see what happens in Madrid, and not at all sure that the outcome will be any better than countless attempts to make peace between Arabs and Jews since 1948.

“I have mixed feelings, like anybody else in this situation,” said a senior official of Syria’s ruling Baath Party. “One feeling is that I see that we are ready to go do a serious deal on a very serious issue, meaning we are now ready to give concessions, and we’ve already given a lot.

“On the other hand,” he said, “we hear (Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak) Shamir talking just like a madman at a very nice party, spoiling everything. Now that he is heading the Israeli delegation, everybody is very pessimistic.”

Tahseen Bashir, a close confidant of the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, said the peace conference holds little hope of achieving the kind of peace that either side is seeking without firm mediation by the United States.

“The problem that we face is that this is only an anchor to transfer part of the conflict from the battleground to the rooms, which means changing the nature of the conflict from shooting guns to shouting arguments, putting to test the United States and the new world order,” Bashir said.

“But that will not achieve an acceptable peace--that is, a peace the Arabs can live with and the Israelis can live with--with the existing Israeli Cabinet formation. . . . The important game is how to pin down the working of a reasonable peace, and that might take months, or years.”

On the streets, few seem to have much optimism that patience will produce results. “Do you think this Shamir is going to give anything?” demanded one of Cairo’s freewheeling taxi drivers as he sped disconcertingly through noontime traffic. “He is a terrorist and a fanatic. What did it take us to get back the Sinai? We had to beat Israel with our weapons first, then get America to pay them and then talk for 10 years before they left all our land. Does a thief give back what he has stolen? He’ll tell you to go to hell.”

One afternoon last week over drinks at Cairo’s stately old Gezira Sporting Club, one of the last holdouts of years of refined British occupation, Hania, a 26-year-old sociologist, sighed. “I don’t think it’s going to work,” she said. “Look what Shamir is saying these days, just before the conference. It’s like a slap in the face. No to this, no to that, no land for peace. It’s all just a show. The Israelis will just keep stalling until there’s nothing left to bargain over.”

“I disagree,” interrupted her husband, a successful Cairo attorney. “I think the first round of negotiations is not so important. What it will lead to is simply a process, one that will eventually bring results, but this will take a long time. The main thing is that there is really an attitude on every side that feels there is no alternative to peace.

Magda, a 38-year-old government doctor, was definite. “The conference is not going to do anything, because the Israelis and the Palestinians are living in the past,” she said. “The Palestinians have to realize that they have lost their country. It’s gone. They have to recognize Israel, recognize reality. They are like diabetics who keep acting like they don’t have diabetes.”

In the sprawling Jaramana refugee camp, 5,000 of the 1.1 million refugees who left Palestine when Israel was created in 1948 live in a sprawling cement shantytown that bears little resemblance to the gracious villas and neat rows of apartment houses that make up most of the Syrian capital’s residential districts.

Here, incredibly, there is a sense of hope where there is little hope to be had. It seems certain none of these families will be going back to any home they knew before, whatever the outcome in Madrid.

“There are many problems in this camp: There is no money, no meat, no fruit, no milk. The houses are very bad,” said Abdullah, a librarian from a small village northeast of the Sea of Galilee. “The people here are very sad about the problem of the Middle East, about our life: We are helpless.

“What we are hoping is that the result of the peace conference at Madrid is to return all of the people of Palestine living in the east to the West Bank and Gaza,” he said.

In downtown Damascus, radical Palestinian leaders such as George Habash and Ahmed Jibril have criticized the conference, vowing to continue the Palestinians’ armed struggle against Israel and refusing to endorse talks on terms they see dictated by the Israelis.

“Most people don’t think that way,” Abdullah said. “They say it’s not a good idea, because the idea is not to return the West Bank and Gaza and Golan Heights to their people. But I think all of them are thinking foolish. Because America and the Soviet Union agreed on this peace conference. They have decided the peace conference must agree to return the land of the West Bank or Gaza, and so it must be OK, I think.”

Over a cup of thick black coffee, a young Syrian telephone operator leaned forward in his family’s small reception room and declared that the Arabs are ready for peace, and they are also ready if there is no peace. The concept of Israelis as good neighbors is an elusive one for him.

“The Israelis have always used every opportunity to steal more opportunities and stab the Arabs in the back; of course they will not be good neighbors,” he said. “But at the same time, if the peace conference can put all of these points forward and get our rights and allow people to live in peace, in this case, maybe it will be OK. Because, of course, war destroys everything.

“For years, we have seen the wounded come back from Lebanon, and when I see their wives and their mothers, of course it is a painful thing,” he said. “But then I remember it’s no matter, because we are fighting for our rights, for our beings. . . . With this peace conference, if we feel our humanity will be in danger, of course we prefer to fight; we prefer to be in war. But human beings by nature search for peace, and to live in peace.”