While the "oil crisis" and attempts to fashion a peace agreement in the middle east are usually treated as separate topics, they are in fact intimately linked. Moreover, the fate of both may rest in the hands of one man. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, professor emeritus of history and sociology at UC-Berkeley, is author of numerous books on foreign affairs and reads widely in the Arab language media.

Oil prices are going down on world markets. No matter what the diplomats say, this means the big dealers believe the oil crisis is over. Gold prices are going down as well, and this means the big dealers in gold believe the Israeli-Arab crisis too is over.

The two are linked. As market behavior has shown -- both historically and recently -- when one of these commodities moves into crisis so does the other. And when one moves out of crisis so does the other. For both, crisis alarms are set off when price ceilings are pierced. For oil, recently, it has been $30 a barrel and for gold $300 an ounce. Both are now significantly below those ceilings.

For ages people have hoarded gold when worried about war and sold it in peacetime. A few weeks ago, heavy fighting raged in southern Lebanon and gold and oil prices went up because two key OPEC members, oil giant Saudi Arabia and oil muscle man Iran, are deeply involved in Lebanon.

Saudis and Iranians are now arguing over how much more oil should be lifted to bring prices down. The Saudis insist oil output should be raised 1.7 million barrels a day while the Iranians want only 1.2 million barrels more.

This is not in fact a dispute over oil prices but is based on the tripartite peace talk now going on between Syria, Israel and the United States.

In 1990, Saudi Arabia brought an end to Lebanon's bloody 15 year civil war by brokering peace accords between warring factions.

One of the most powerful factions in Lebanon is the Shi'ite Hizbollah, closely linked, religiously and politically, to Iran. Iran also has close ties with Syria, whose President Hafiz al-Assad has long been a bitter enemy of Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

Assad's background makes some observers doubt the reported deal between Syria and Israel will come to pass.

Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has taken an optimistic stance, but some high-ranking Americans who accompanied President Clinton to talks with Assad in Geneva voiced pessimism.

Israel will return all of the Golan Heights if Syria will cede it a strip of land on the Sea of Galilee where there are springs vital to Israel's critically low water supply.

The entire region -- Syria, Israel, Jordan and Iraq -- is suffering its worst drought since 1908. The Israeli government last year reduced water allocations to its farmers by 25 percent. If Syria were to divert that water to Palestinian settlers in Lebanon and Syria the water loss to Israel would be much greater.

The deal brokered by Clinton, it is rumored, promises Syria full compensation for its losses by additional water from the Euphrates River. As Turkey has full control over that water, this deal requires Turkey's consent -- and it seems clear that, as a NATO member, Turkey must have consented or Clinton could not have offered the deal in good faith.

But Assad remains adamant that Israel must first return to Syria the entire Golan Heights up to their pre-June 1967 borders. Assad has ruled Syria since 1970. In that time, he has known hostility from every neighboring country and many of the great powers, including the United States. He trusts no foreigners, including Arabs.

During the 1960's and 1970's both Assad and Saddam Hussein were members of the Ba'ath (Arab Renewal) Party. But they broke with each other and then the Ba'ath split into two parts. Saddam became a ruthless Arab nationalist while Assad's main goal has been to keep Syria intact.

Thus peace and quiet has reigned for three decades in the Golan Heights region both within and beyond the Israeli borders. When Israeli troops crashed into Lebanon in 1982, an event that inflames southern Lebanon to this day, the Syrian-Israel borders, while closed, were quiet.

But the price Syrians paid for peace was economic stagnation. Syrian soldiers stationed in Lebanon saw furious building going on even as Damascus remained an old museum city. Assad knows Syrians want economic development, and he has decided it must come. Recently he appointed an entirely new government, mostly staffed by modernizers and technocrats -- an indication he is not against the alleged Israeli-Syrian deal.

One reason Assad has been able to keep the peace in Syria is that he is an Alawi, a Sufi order with many followers in Syria and Turkey. Sufis in general and the Alawis in particular stress the inner and mystical aspects of the Islamic faith.

Hafiz al-Assad knows he doesn't have that many years left on this earth. He must use all of his Alawite shrewdness to make sure that whatever deal is finally concluded with America and Israel be honored for decades to come and not forgotten once the peace euphoria fades away.