WASHINGTON -- Ever since Martin Indyk, on a Florida golf course in the fall of 1992, tempted him with the promise of agreements between Israel and all its close Arab adversaries in a first term, Bill Clinton has kept the Middle East a top priority.

Weighing in personally and sending Secretary of State Warren M. Christopher to slog between Damascus and Jerusalem, Mr. Clinton has shown a consistency and determination absent in some other policies.

Behind this drive is a team of mostly Big Chill-generation diplomats who share a career-long passion to break the regional cycles of bloodshed and hatred, and a belief that the time is ripe.

Called the "peace team," "peace processors" or, before a woman joined their ranks, the "peace brothers," they have sparked some of the administration's few foreign affairs highlights by bringing continuity, long practice, and a knowledge of the players and history seldom found in post-Cold War diplomacy.

Daily strategy talks

Their incubator is a free-wheeling 10 a.m. daily meeting on the State Department's seventh floor chaired by Middle East coordinator Dennis Ross, 45. A loose-limbed, casual Californian, he began work on the Middle East while at President Jimmy Carter's Pentagon. In 1991, he shaped then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III's strategy to spur direct Arab-Israeli talks.

Around the table are Mr. Indyk, 43, an Australian-raised presidential assistant, now slated to be ambassador to Israel, who dates his "obsession" with the Middle East to a trip to Israel at age 18; a career envoy to the Arab world, Robert Pelletreau, 59, who opened the first U.S. contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1988; Toni Verstandig, 41, a former aide to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, specializing in the Middle East and terrorism; and the group's core trouble-shooter negotiators, Daniel Kurtzer and Aaron Miller, both 45.

Their cohesion has survived splits over tactics and strategy, Mideast flare-ups, all-night negotiations in hotel rooms, threats to their personal security, criticism from all sides and public scrutiny of their backgrounds for pro-Arab or -Israeli bias.

With two agreements in hand and Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians reconciling at a pace unimaginable a year ago, it's paying off. But the big prize -- an Israeli-Syrian deal -- still eludes them. Israel has yet to satisfy Syrian President Hafez el Assad's demand for all of the Golan Heights. And Mr. Assad is still subjecting peace to cost-benefit analysis.

A vast change rides on the outcome. The remaining rejectionist states would lose the critical mass of force needed to mount an attack, Lebanon's Iran-backed terrorists would be further isolated and the already-eroded Arab economic boycott of Israel would crumble.

More than a test of the team, this goal will demand toughness from their bosses, who face a selling job with Syria, Israel and the United States, where Americans are fearful of a U.S. role in securing the Golan Heights.

So will other challenges that threaten to negate the impact of peace on regional stability: the PLO's resistance to democracy and the threat to Muslim North Africa from Islamic extremists who are pushing Algeria toward chaos.

Building on a legacy from the Bush administration, the team serves as the grease that keeps peace-process machinery from breaking under the strain of disruptions. A plaque on Mr. Ross' desk says, "It can be done."

"Dennis doesn't recognize a brick wall," says an Israeli official. "He finds a way around, under or above it."

The toughest one to scale, Mr. Ross says, was the collapse of talks after the Feb. 25 massacre of Muslim worshipers by a Jewish settler in Hebron on the West Bank. Mr. Ross was on the phone without a break one day from 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

A frequent caller then and now is Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader, who calls him "Mr. Dennis."

Mr. Ross makes the most of Mr. Christopher's skills as a lawyer and conciliator to bridge negotiating gaps. His partner and longtime friend Mr. Indyk keeps the president in at least monthly contact -- in 45-minute phone calls or by letter -- with Mr. Assad.

Acting on the team's advice to play hardball with King Hussein, ** Mr. Clinton pressed the Jordanian on June 22 to make a leap toward peace with Israel, suggesting a meeting with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the White House.

Last week, Mr. Clinton urged other nations to ease Jordan's debts.

Mr. Indyk, who has spent his career researching, writing, lecturing and thinking about the Middle East, also is key to what an Israeli official calls "unprecedented intimacy" between the Clinton White House and Mr. Rabin, who also faces a re-election contest by 1996.

These personal ties set a tone. But they obscure the fact that U.S. Middle East policy hasn't changed fundamentally in decades.

With bipartisan support, successive administrations have viewed Israel's security as a vital U.S. interest and backed it with military and economic aid; pressed for direct negotiations between Israel and Arabs; kept ties with moderate Arab leaders; neither supported nor flatly opposed a Palestinian state; and espoused a position on Jerusalem's future that satisfied no one.

The peace process itself, advanced by the end of the Cold War and the Arab world's rupture in the Persian Gulf crisis, rests on ideas dating from Camp David.

The institutional memory that can summon all the policy nuances and arcane negotiating history rests with Mr. Miller, Mr. Ross' deputy, and Mr. Kurtzer, a ranking foreign service officer who has served in Israel and Egypt and been a peace processor since 1979.

"They used to call us Frick and Frack," says Mr. Miller, a rail-thin, long-locked former intelligence analyst and author of three books on the Middle East who became immersed in the Arab-Israeli conflict as a doctoral student.

Mr. Kurtzer is now the point man for a broad series of talks between Israel and Arab states on regional problems. But the pair has been most deeply involved in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.

Both sides can be "tough bastards" in negotiations, Mr. Kurtzer says. He responds in kind. "My assumption is if you get the problems out on the table, you see what they are and can work on them."

Mr. Baker adopted this approach as he shuttled for months to peel away excuses that kept Israel, Arab states and Palestinians from talking directly. The blunt instruments he wielded against former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, plus a heavy-handed Bush blast at the Jewish lobby, stunned many American Jews, some of whom took it out on Mr. Ross, Mr. Miller and Mr. Kurtzer. Some scars remain.

Mr. Ross says now: "The way the relationship was handled, at least in a tonal way, could have been better than it was."

Mr. Indyk faults the Bush-Baker tactics. Israelis sensed that Mr. Baker was "out to squeeze them."

"They [Israelis] feared Baker," he adds. "They trust Christopher. I think that's true of Assad, too."

'Fundamental turning point'

But Mr. Miller says of that period, "We caught a lot of unnecessary and extraneous abuse from all sides, but I would do it again." And of the rancorous 1991 Madrid peace conference, which proved a huge breakthrough, he says, "Make no mistake about it -- none: Jim Baker's effort to produce Madrid was a fundamental turning point in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict."

This same kind of pressure may be necessary to get Mr. Arafat to shift from being an autocratic Arab sheik to an administrator. So far, he has resisted setting up acceptable mechanisms to receive and account for $2.4 billion in international aid pledged in September.

"We're not going to come in and basically dump dollar bills on the streets of Gaza and make people believe that's good government," Mr. Kurtzer says. Nurturing Palestinian economic structures and economic ties between Israel and Jordan falls to Mrs. Verstandig, a deputy assistant secretary who helps guide the group politically.

But problems with Mr. Arafat go beyond money to his autocratic ways, ranging from the shutdown of a pro-Jordanian newspaper to stalling on elections.

Hisham Sharabi, one of a number of Arab-Americans alarmed at the PLO's leadership, warns that the whole peace process will be threatened "if what emerges there is another autocratic state."

The U.S. response so far is fairly indulgent, emphasizing the direction in which Mr. Arafat is moving, not the speed.

"If you look at what's happening day to day, you can find a lot to complain about," says Mr. Pelletreau, assistant secretary of state for the Near East. "But if you look at it in six-month segments, it's clear a lot of progress is being made."

The administration also refrains from pressuring Syrian President Assad to join the peace bandwagon. Meanwhile, Mr. Christopher continues a longtime practice of spoiling Mideast leaders with high-level shuttle diplomacy, taking his attention away from pressing crises.

'The moon in their eyes'

"They've got the moon in their eyes," Adam Garfinkle, director of the Middle East Council of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, says of a U.S. approach to Syria that he calls "too much carrot, too little stick, although it isn't obvious what the sticks are."

Counters Mr. Indyk: "Assad doesn't respond well to pressure tactics. His response is to dig in."

With the accurate readings the team has provided so far about Mr. Assad's incremental steps toward peace, this judgment can't be dismissed.

Neither can its view that, as Israelis and Palestinians adjust to sharing sacred land, the burning issues of a Palestinian state and sovereignty over the Holy City of Jerusalem will be easier to solve.

Shadowing the peace process, however, is a new Mideast dynamic that a team steeped in solving the front-line Arab-Israeli conflict may be less equipped to tackle: Islamic extremism eating at moderate governments throughout the Muslim world, from Algeria, now on the brink of collapse, to the Persian Gulf.

The administration's response to Algeria's crisis has been to urge the government to broaden its base and reach out to Islamics. But some experts say that, as in Iran, the search for moderates in an Islamic revolution may be a fantasy.