The P.L.O. Strategy: Fight and Talk

Like armed commuters, Israeli patrols struck the Arqub region of southern Lebanon for six successive nights last week. They had been stirred up by Palestinian guerrillas who had ambushed an Israeli halftrack, which had been patrolling the frontier hoping to knock out fedayeen before they could mount raids on Israeli settlements. The incident eventually provoked some of the heaviest fighting on the border in two years. In the village of Kfar Chouba, on the western slopes of Mount Hermon, fedayeen fought the Israelis stubbornly. During the past week, four fedayeen were killed and 12 wounded; the Israelis suffered 15 wounded.

In addition to heavy border fighting, there was a bizarre but chillingly familiar encounter last week in faraway Paris. An El Al 707 Boeing jet taxiing slowly down an Orly Airport runway toward a takeoff for New York was apparently attacked by two men carrying

Soviet-built bazookas. One round plowed into an airport catering building. A second ripped a hole in a Yugoslav DC-9 jetliner about to load passengers for Zagreb. No one was seriously injured, and the terrorists, believed to be Palestinians, escaped.

In Beirut, spokesmen for the Palestine Liberation Organization disclaimed responsibility for the Paris incident. The Lebanese border fighting was a different matter. Guerrillas, reportedly including members of the Syria-based Saiqa and Palestine Liberation Army units, were in the Arqub looking for chinks in the Israeli border. That border, as a result of earlier Palestinian attacks on civilian settlements, has now been almost hermetically sealed. The frontier, reported TIME'S Daniel Drooz after a trip there last week, is rigged with devices to forestall infiltration. There are observation posts, defoliated zones, minefields and electronic detectors, searchlights and magnesium flares for nighttime detection and barbed wire. "If they can get their hands up faster than I can pull the trigger," one soldier told Drooz, "then I'll take them prisoner."

The border probes by the Palestinians are designed to keep pressure on Israel as part of a "gun and olive branch" strategy designed by P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat. The leader of the fedayeen has declared that "1975 will be the year of escalation." Even though Israel so far refuses to recognize the P.L.O., the emphasis is more and more on talk. Arafat and other P.L.O. leaders have somewhat moderated their goal of establishing a secular state in Palestine shared by Moslems, Christians and Jews. The P.L.O. chairman is willing to settle for the more immediate--and more attainable --goal of setting up an interim Palestinian "national authority" on the Jordanian West Bank and in Gaza, if and when they are liberated from Israeli control. Some Arabs and U.S. observers argue that the P.L.O.'s willingness to compromise on this key point leaves diplomatic room for an eventual recognition of Israel.

Anxious for Recognition. Arafat is convinced that his fight-and-talk strategy can succeed and that the P.L.O. this year will add to the impressive string of successes it scored in 1974. At the Rabat summit, Arab heads of state formally endorsed the P.L.O., rather than Jordan's King Hussein, as the sole spokesman for Palestinians, including the 640,000 living on the West Bank. At the United Nations, Arafat was granted the rare privilege of addressing the General Assembly from a podium normally reserved for representatives of established governments. More than that, the General Assembly passed resolutions declaring for the first time that the Palestinians were a nation with rights to sovereignty rather than a "displaced people," as they have been classified for 26 years. Two weeks ago in a precedent-setting act, India accorded the P.L.O. diplomatic status even though there is no such thing as a Palestinian government in exile.

In the words of a familiar Arab saying, Arafat "collected what was there" at Rabat and the United Nations. From now on, the Palestinians' quest for a role in future negotiations and for bargaining status will become more difficult. Although the P.L.O. is dependent upon Soviet arms, Arafat is anxious for U.S. recognition of that organization. This has not been forthcoming, because the P.L.O. has not recognized Israel, and Washington has relegated the Palestinians to a third-place priority until Kissinger settles disengagement on the

Egyptian and Syrian fronts. Arafat, though, dubious about Kissinger's approach to personal diplomacy, recently predicted that it would reach "a dead end." The Palestinians want the Secretary's peace negotiations to fail because they feel that their bargaining chances would improve at a Geneva conference, where the Russians would have a say and where they would be assured a seat. Beyond that, they suspect Washington's ties to Israel. In an interview with Le Monde earlier this month, Arafat attacked "American Zionist intrigues in which certain Arab countries are participating." The aim, he added, was to "torpedo the Geneva conference and to isolate Syria." The reference to "certain Arab countries" probably meant Egypt, which the P.L.O. worries may get too far ahead of its Middle Eastern partners in disengagement talks with Israel. Arafat and the Palestinians were presumably heartened last week when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, in an interview with the Beirut newspaper an-Nahar, set a three-month deadline on progress in disengagement negotiations and demanded simultaneous Israeli withdrawal on all three fronts.

West Bank Voice. Sadat's three-front declaration was welcome to Arafat because it dealt with another part of his worries, the question of who represents Palestinians living on the third front--Jordan. If too much time passes, the P.L.O. fears that Hussein will circumvent the Rabat decision and somehow regain a voice in the eventual disposition of the West Bank.

Arafat also faces problems within his own ranks. One embarrassment is that the P.L.O. moderates are obviously unable to control radical dissidents who can still manage to hamper Arafat's efforts to gain international approval and good will. Beyond that, the moderates, although they dominate the P.L.O., have not been able to reconcile a "rejection front" of left-wing guerrilla organizations that intend to continue an all-out fight against Israel. Ideological opposition, particularly that of George Habash and his Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is one reason why Arafat has so far not formed a provisional government. But there are other drawbacks to forming a government in exile or Palestinian "national authority" as other Arab leaders have urged the P.L.O. to do. The makeup of such a government would be a delicate problem; still unresolved is whether it should include only P.L.O. officials or also Palestinians who are nonmembers, particularly from the West Bank, and how it could function without facing the question of recognizing Israel. Beyond that, there is one more reason for not forming a provisional government at this time: to the Palestinian mind, a government with some land would stand a better chance than one with none.

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