Middle East: Syria intent on agreement to contain Israel: Charles Richards, Middle East Editor, visits the ruined town of Quneitra and assesses its significance in the search for peace in the region

IT IS 18 years since the Syrians recovered the southern provincial capital of Quneitra. For the benefit of visiting dignitaries they have kept it just as they found it.

The Israelis who had taken the town and the Golan Heights in the 1967 war were reluctant to bow to the disengagement of forces agreement thrashed out by Henry Kissinger the year after the 1973 war. Before pulling back, Israeli army engineers systematically dynamited or bulldozed the homes of 60,000 inhabitants.

Quneitra has entered Syrian mythology. 'On the land of the liberated city, the soil is mixed with the blood of martyrs who suffered greatly under the Israeli occupation,' declaimed the governor, Abdel Moneim Hamwi. More significantly, he declared: 'These ruins will remain as a living example of the monstrous barbarism of the Israelis.'

No rebuilding. No development. Not even in the case of full Israeli withdrawal from the rest of the Golan. The ruins are set to remain, evidence for future generations of Syrians of the essential nature of Israel's expansionism.

Quneitra then, not the recovery of the Golan, is the key to understanding Syria's long-term view of the region, which in turn dictates its approach to the now-threatened Middle East peace talks. Recovery of lost land is merely the first, essential step. But the talks have had as their main purpose something far more important to Syria's political and strategic interests: an attempt to formalise an accommodation of two rival powers in the region.

Simply, Syria wants an agreement to contain Israel. The option of achieving strategic balance declined as Egypt moved towards peace with Israel. Containment now will rest on a series of binding and enforceable agreements.

Syrian misinterpretation of Israeli intentions is neither more nor less than Israeli misunderstandings of what Syria wants. Much lies in language. Israelis accuse Syria of seeking to re-establish Greater Syria, pointing at Syrian control of much of Lebanon. Syrians fear Israel's desire to expand, pointing at its sometime occupation of parts of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and the West Bank.

The Syrian position is most clearly presented in its nine-point working paper. When it was tabled at the beginning of the seventh round of talks, at the end of August, it was greeted as nothing short of historic by the US administration. It followed the other major step: the declaration by the new Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin that UN Security Council Resolution 242 applied to the Golan Heights, including withdrawal from Golan.

The Syrian paper's whole drafting reinforces Syria's strategic concept. The introduction casts the paper as a proposed joint declaration, not a Syrian proposal. This is crucially important. As drafted, both sides have been seeking settlement on the basis of UN resolutions and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. The first paragraph says that the primary aim is to reach a comprehensive settlement; the second point repeats that any solution on Golan must be linked to, and be part of, an overall settlement.

This repetition of the commitments of the introduction in the main text reinforces the comprehensiveness of the solution which Syria desires. It does not wish merely to recover Golan. It does not seek a separate peace with Israel. The Syrians are not merely paying lip service to the Palestinian issue.

This does not, as the Foreign Minister, Farouk ash-Shara, explained, mean Syria has territorial ambitions. But what happens in Lebanon affects Syria, as what happens in Syria affects Lebanon. Syria wants recognition that it has legitimate security and strategic interests in its sphere of influence.

The whole basis is Resolution 242, with its call for Israel's withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 war, and with part two of the resolution emphasising the rights of all states to live within secure and recognised borders.