"Time Is Running Out"

By William Drozdiak

Israel grows impatient as the P.L.O. finds no home

A deceptive calm descended late last week on the rubble-strewn streets of West Beirut.

Irrepressible merchants set up makeshift stands to hawk books, camping lanterns and underwear in front of shuttered stores. Shoppers discovered to their delight that abundant supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables had filtered through a leaky Israeli blockade posted along the Green Line that divides the capital. In the surrounding hills, Israeli soldiers played Ping Pong or strummed guitars to pass the idle hours. As a silver kite bobbed brightly in a stiff breeze, an Israeli officer sighed in amazement: "This is a surrealistic war."

Yet lurking beneath the placid facade were gathering tensions that threatened to bring the Israeli siege to an imminent and bloody climax. After weeks of intense haggling, negotiations to transfer some 6,000 Palestinian guerrillas encircled inside West Beirut to another Arab country came to a virtual standstill when Syria refused again to offer them sanctuary. Moreover, the Israelis charged that Palestine Liberation Organization Leader Yasser Arafat had no intention of leaving Beirut and that he was deliberately dragging his feet in order to avoid a direct Israeli attack on his stronghold. In East Beirut, the director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, David Kimche, bluntly warned U.S. Special Envoy Philip Habib that a final assault on the Palestinian positions could become inevitable, if the deadlock persists. Said Kimche: 'Time is running out. They better take us seriously."

Alarmed by Israel's mounting impatience, President Reagan dispatched an urgent letter to Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, noting that "we may be but a few days away" from an all-out Israeli attack on West Beirut. The Administration's chief concern was to secure Israeli forbearance until Reagan can meet with Foreign Ministers Prince Saud al Faisal of Saudi Arabia and Abdel Halim Khaddam of Syria in Washington this week. "The No. 1 problem is still where the P.L.O. will go," says an Administration analyst. "I suppose the issue will come down to just how much money the Saudis are going to pay whoever takes the P.L.O."

Reagan also sent a message to Syria's President Hafez Assad, urging him to reconsider his refusal to accept the Palestinians. But Assad flatly turned Reagan down, stressing that Habib's prime mission should be not the evacuation of P.L.O. guerrillas but the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon. In any event, the Syrians insisted, the P.L.O. leadership had made no formal request for sanctuary in Syria. Nonetheless, Arafat admitted in Beirut that a proposal for Syria to take in Palestinian fighters was "under discussion" and that he was interested in such a move because "my main headquarters is still in Syria, and we have our camps and military bases there."

Arafat's contradictory signals seemed designed to hold up an Israeli assault while he sought some kind of political compensation for his military entrapment. P.L.O. leaders already cite the fact that they have held the Israelis off for five weeks as proof of a moral victory. Yet Arafat also seems bent on extracting an even more important dividend from his predicament: some form of dialogue with Washington. Says Hani al Hassan, one of Arafat's top advisers: "We are fighting to force the Americans to recognize the P.L.O." Late last week, Arafat appealed publicly for a face-to-face meeting with Habib, in order, he said, to "save time."

The P.L.O.'s intense desire to embark on direct talks with the U.S. was reflected in an apparent readiness to explore the possibility of reciprocal recognition with Israel. In Paris last week, Issam Sartawi, a trusted Arafat adviser, asserted in a speech before the French Institute for International Relations that "the P.L.O. has formally acknowledged in the most unequivocal manner Israel's right to exist on a reciprocal basis with the future Palestinian state." Sartawi's views were privately endorsed last week by other P.L.O. officials in Beirut, who contended that Arafat was prepared to accept Israel's right to live within peaceful and secure boundaries if Israel, in turn, recognized the P.L.O. as the representative of the Palestinian people. Said a senior P.L.O. adviser: "Arafat is ready to say something if the U.S. is ready to move, but Washington has to be quick about it." Officially, the U.S. disregarded Sartawi's statement.

Arafat also undertook a new initiative in the negotiations by sending a written message to Habib reiterating his prior agreement in principle to pull out of Beirut, and spelling out conditions. The eleven-point P.L.O. plan called for an initial Israeli withdrawal from the immediate Beirut area, to be followed by a multinational peace-keeping force brought in to supervise the evacuation of P.L.O. guerrillas from Beirut. Israeli officials charged that the P.L.O. was backtracking on past compromises and pronounced the negotiations "back to Square 1." Said an exasperated Israeli diplomat: "After three weeks, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. We are in a complete stalemate."

The lack of progress affected the mood of the Israeli government. Early in the week, Prime Minister Begin said at a private meeting that Israel must show "good sense and patience" with Habib's painstaking efforts to sort out snags in the four-way talks. Even Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, the architect of the invasion, endorsed the need for "political means" to extricate P.L.O. guerrillas from Beirut. But Arafat's stalling tactics and the Syrian refusal to accept the guerrillas created new fears that Israel's political momentum was slipping. "With the passage of time, the P.L.O. thinks it will have the image of a martyr, with its back to the sea, holding out against the savage Israelis," said an Israeli official. "They have scored points. We know we have paid a price for this waiting."

At the same time, the Israelis were increasingly aware that military action could prove even more damaging to their position than a protracted wait. Begin and his aides are taking into account three main reasons for avoiding an armed assault on West Beirut: fear of heavy casualties among Israeli troops, the risk of a high civilian death toll, and the possibility of causing serious harm to Jerusalem's ties with Washington. The Reagan Administration believes that Israel may have violated its arms agreements with the U.S. by deploying U.S.-supplied military equipment in the invasion of Lebanon.

Despite those risks, Begin's sentiments turned more bellicose late in the week. "He wanted to give Habib as much time as he could," said a Begin aide. "But he's absolutely determined that the result of this operation, having cost so much blood, must be the evacuation of the P.L.O. from Beirut." During a military ceremony on Thursday, Sharon, too, adopted a more militant posture. Said he: "We have not returned the sword to the sheath and will not do so until the last of the terrorists has left Beirut."

The latest negotiations followed the most intensive artillery battle that Beirut has suffered throughout the war. Lebanese authorities estimated that just before the latest cease-fire took effect, 20 to 30 shells a minute were raining down on West Beirut and its suburbs. From dawn to dusk Israeli gunboats and hilltop artillery traded fire with Palestinian fighters perched on trucks mounted with Katyusha rocket launchers. The P.L.O.'s hit-and-run tactics proved more effective than in previous skirmishes. According to P.L.O. officials, some 25 Israeli vehicles were destroyed by P.L.O. rockets. The Presidential Palace in Baabda and the U.S. Ambassador's residence in Yarze were also damaged.

Despite the ceasefire, the P.L.O. continued to stage raids behind Israeli lines. Five Israeli soldiers were wounded in the hills east of Beirut when their patrol was ambushed at night. The aim of such small-scale operations, as a P.L.O. commander put it, is "to keep up a war of attrition that the Israelis will not be able to tolerate for long." But Israeli anti-terror squads were confident that they could wipe out the guerrilla threat with mopping-up operations in the low-lying hills between Tyre and Damur. According to Israeli intelligence officials, the area is "far from being free of the terrorists, but the situation is improving."

After the shelling ended, residents of West Beirut again displayed their resilience, thronging the streets to perform their shopping rounds. Occasionally, the supersonic scream of an Israeli jet on a mock bombing run caused a momentary flutter of panic. Most people ignored the threat of renewed fighting, taking advantage of the lull to stock up on supplies from East Beirut.

But an enduring peace, with all foreign occupiers removed from Lebanon, seemed no closer. Syrians, Palestinians and Israelis now find their interests so en tangled in the country's political quagmire that some parties to the negotiations despair of finding a solution. The best out come, says a Western diplomat, might be a gradual dissipation of the situation, with no grand settlement that would define winners and losers. If the P.L.O. slowly pulled out of Beirut with little or no fan fare, he says, perhaps Israel and even Syria would ultimately find reasons to bring their troops home.

That Utopian vision glosses over a number of subtle problems. Even if Syria appears to be the most likely haven for P.L.O. guerrillas, Arafat remains reluctant to place all of his forces under the repressive thumb of Assad's regime. For its part, the Syrian government, already trou bled by internal dissent, scarcely wants to court the risks of playing host to thousands of Palestinian guerrillas. Moreover, the Syrians, who still have at least 35,000 of their own troops in Lebanon, may simply refuse to leave because of strategic considerations: they insist upon control of the Bekaa Valley in order to thwart any direct threat to Damascus. For the time being, it seemed less likely that a solution could be found that would involve taking President Reagan up on his offer to send a peace keeping force of Marines to Lebanon.

The Israelis also find themselves in a difficult dilemma. Their attempt to deal a military blow to the P.L.O. may not bring a political solution to the aspirations of 4 million Palestinians any closer. If Israel annihilates the battle-hardened veterans of the P.L.O. by storming Beirut, it will incur the wrath of Washington but fail to extinguish the spirit of Palestinian nationalism. Yet if the Israelis withdraw from Beirut and grant the P.L.O. a face-saving retreat, they will forfeit the psychological benefits of the crushing victory that their government wanted as the main justification for the invasion.

Some analysts had hoped that the Israeli invasion would open up new opportunities to purge Lebanon of foreign intruders and permit a central government to exercise full authority. Last week, however, a telling incident showed that such hopes still seem very optimistic.

Only 24 hours after Lebanon's government issued its first unified statement on the crisis, calling for the withdrawal of all foreign forces, two Cabinet ministers openly disavowed the declaration. The real losers, once again, appear to be the Lebanese .

-- By William Drozdiak. Reported by William Stewart and Roberto Sun/Beirut

With reporting by William Stewart, Roberto Sun

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