Secure Until Next Spring?

Emerging from a meeting last week with Syrian President Hafez Assad, U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim smilingly announced a notable bit of peace keeping. Assad had agreed to a six-month extension for the U.N.'s 1,250-man Disengagement Observer Force stationed on the Golan Heights.

Since Israel would have greeted any Syrian demand to eliminate the force as a casus belli, the Waldheim visit removed a lot of the tension that earlier caused Israel to mobilize troops.

It was not clear what Waldheim may have promised Assad to win his agreement, but Arab spokesmen indicated that there would soon be an intermission in step-by-step negotiations by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and a return to the full-scale Geneva Conference. Ar abs favor the conference because they could speak as a bloc and they would also be supported by a Russian voice as forceful as that of Washington. Damascus predicted resumption of Geneva talks in early January. In Cairo, they were expected to resume soon after So viet Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev makes his first trip to Egypt on Jan. 15.

One More Round. Actually, the Vladivostok communique from Brezh nev and President Ford went no further than the resolution adopted last July by Brezhnev and President Nixon. Although the two superpowers agreed at Vladivostok that the Geneva Conference should "resume its work as soon as possible," the Soviets implicitly agreed to let Kissinger hold at least one more round of one-on-one talks.

Kissinger's present plan is to resume discussions between Israel and Egypt, especially since Cairo, with its economic problems, now seems more amenable to peace talks than Damascus. Toward that end, Israeli Foreign Minister Yigal Allon will visit Washington next week. One difficulty is that Israel so far appears unwilling to agree to a key Egyptian point in these talks: the return of the Abu Rudeis oilfields, which were captured by Israeli forces in the Six-Day War and have been pumping out oil for Israel ever since.

Even if Kissinger can solve this impasse, there are other complications. Israel is adamant against broadening the talks to include Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, which the Arab nations have designated to represent all Palestinians. The U.S., so far at least, accepts Israel's views.

The P.L.O. meanwhile went about gathering more of the recognition that has recently increased its power. Arafat visited Moscow for the seventh time and met with Soviet leaders. The Palestinians also cracked down on dissidents responsible for the skyjacking of a British Airways VC-10 whose crew and passengers were released earlier in the week. The four Arabs who had seized the plane to obtain the release of Palestinian prisoners and also embarrass the more moderate P.L.O. were detained in a Tunisian jail. P.L.O. agents swooped down elsewhere to grab 26 other dissidents. They were accused of supporting a breakaway group called "the Arab Nationalist Youth Organization for the Liberation of Palestine," which opposes any settlement short of destruction of Israel.

The fedayeen attacks against Israel, on the other hand, continued unabated last week. Israeli troops ambushed a group of Arab guerrillas attempting to cross the Lebanese border into Israel and killed five of them. The battle occurred on the eve of the 27th anniversary of the U.N. partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.

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