Middle East Sometimes a Great Notion

By Scott MacLeod

At first Yasser Arafat refused to speak with journalists. When he finally granted an interview to the Saudi Arabian newspaper Asharq al Awsat, a bile of irritation coated his words. He was never consulted before King Hussein cut Jordan's links with the West Bank last month, he complained. Yet that move dumped into his lap the responsibility for administering the occupied territory and for trying to recover it from Israel.

But if Arafat was initially stunned, the Middle East was abuzz last week with speculation that Hussein's shove may finally push the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization into doing the unthinkable: recognizing Israel's right to exist. Such a gesture, which would amount to an unprecedented P.L.O. peace proposal, has long been demanded by the U.S. and Israel before they would even contemplate talking with the P.L.O.

Deep skepticism is in order. The P.L.O.'s 24-year history is replete with rumors of imminent peace overtures soon followed by truculent denials. Arafat is infamous for his ambiguous pronouncements and retracted statements. With reason: in the past, hard-liners within his fractious organization who consider all of Israel to be Palestinian land have angrily denounced talk of recognizing Israel as treason.

What is different now is that the P.L.O. has never before been under such pressure to seize the initiative. Hussein's decision and the growing impatience of leaders of the eight-month-old uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to transform their revolt into political gains may finally force Arafat to compromise. Says Edward Said, a prominent Palestinian American who is a professor at Columbia University: "The P.L.O. realizes that this is a historical opportunity that should not be muffed."

Meeting in Baghdad last week, the 15-member P.L.O. executive committee approved a proposal establishing a provisional government in the occupied territories as a step toward creating an independent Palestinian state. At the same time, a ten-member P.L.O. working group is forging a new political program that, among other things, would endorse U.N. Resolution 181. Known as the Partition Plan and adopted in 1947, the year before Israel was founded, it called for Palestine to be divided into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. By accepting the resolution, albeit 41 years after it was initially offered, the P.L.O. for the first time would be acknowledging Israel's legal right to statehood. As one of the P.L.O.'s draft proposals puts it, "The Palestinian people do not desire the annihilation of the state of Israel. Rather, they wish to live peacefully as its neighbor."

A P.L.O. delegation traveled to Egypt last week and won President Hosni Mubarak's support for a plan to "offer through a provisional government a political program that would be internationally acceptable," a P.L.O. official said. Speaking to the Paris weekly Journal du Dimanche, Arafat's second in command, Salah Khalaf, said the new agenda "would be completely different" from the 1968 National Charter calling for "armed struggle" to destroy Israel.

Arafat plans to submit the proposals for approval to the Palestine National Council, the P.L.O.'s 451-member legislative body, in Algiers during the first week of September. Later he hopes to launch a major diplomatic offensive, speaking to the European Parliament in Strasbourg and, if it can be arranged, to the U.N.

Israeli officials first glimpsed this latest strategy last month when plainclothes agents of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, arrested Faisal Husseini, the pro-P.L.O. head of the Arab Studies Society. In his East Jerusalem office they allegedly found a four-page plan that calls for the declaration of an independent Palestinian state with Arafat as its President. The new state would then seek peace negotiations with Israel.

Such a scenario, of course, is rejected outright by Israel, which regards the P.L.O. as a terrorist group and considers large parts of the occupied territories necessary for its security. "The Israeli government will do everything so that these statements remain empty words, unmatched by deeds," said Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Added Foreign Minister Shimon Peres: "It is not a substitute for dealing seriously with the situation." Ariel Sharon, a former Defense Minister who heads the Industry and Trade Ministry, proposed extending Israeli law to portions of the occupied territories. U.S. officials warned against that move, which would be tantamount to annexation, but seemed taken off guard by the P.L.O.'s tactics. Secretary of State George Shultz said that a Palestinian state that is not linked with Jordan "doesn't make sense."

Could the P.L.O. ever deliver an unconditional statement acknowledging Israel's right to exist? For the U.S. to be impressed, a senior Administration official says, "it's got to be something big, comparable to Anwar Sadat's trip to Jerusalem," which led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979. But in the West Bank last week came an echo of the savage internal P.L.O. feuding that has almost always paralyzed Arafat when he has undertaken diplomatic initiatives. Any Palestinian serving in the proposed provisional government, warned a leaflet circulated by an anti-Arafat faction, "will be tried by a court of the people, which will punish him without mercy."

With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Jerusalem and David S. Jackson/Cairo