From the moment I arrived at Damascus Airport until the moment I left the city eight days later, I engaged every Syrian I met in a discussion about the Israeli-Syrian peace process.

President Clinton's decision to come to the Middle East was courageous, wise and timely. Although the visit was occasioned by the signing of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, it will have far-reaching implications on the Middle East's new emerging order. The cynicism that surrounds the president's motivation notwithstanding, the president has seized a historic opportunity to further Arab-Israeli peace, which is vital to American strategic interests.

Hamas's terror attack in downtown Jerusalem, its kidnapping and murder of soldier Nahshon Wachsman and Wednesday's bus bombing in the heart of Tel Aviv raise a number of daunting issues about the prospects for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

The tragic end of Hamas's kidnapping of an Israeli soldier and the awful bus explosion Wednesday in the heart of Tel Aviv that killed 22 Israelis raise a number of daunting issues about the prospects for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

From every indication, the creation of a Palestinian state is inevitable. The Gaza-Jericho agreement provides only the first stage in the long road toward statehood. Israel and the United States would be well advised to accept this inevitable development and help the Palestinians establish institutions for democratic rule.

The 27th anniversary of Jerusalem's unification is being celebrated this month in Israel only a few weeks after the Palestinian self-rule agreement went into effect. Perhaps more than at any other time in the past 25 years the Israelis are concerned about the status of Jerusalem a few years down the line.

Yitzhak Rabin now faces an extremely difficult task: convincing Israelis of the wisdom of exchanging the Golan, which has been labeled "strategically critical," for peace.

On his maiden visit to the Middle East as United States secretary of state, Warren Christopher should lay the foundation for the revival of the Arab-Israeli peace talks without the deportees' cloud hanging over the next round of peace negotiations. It is far better to postpone the resumption of the peace talks by another two or three months, provided that the question of the expulsion is settled and all the deportees have been returned. The US-Israel agreement to allow 100 deportees to return home, with the rest to follow suit by the end of 1993, is flawed and impractical.

The aftershock of the Hebron massacre continues to reverberate through the Israeli consciousness, raising serious questions about fundamental Israeli ideology and understanding of the ethos of being Jewish at this historic juncture.