PLO Question Stymies Bid for Mideast Talks

Efforts to arrange a meeting between the United States and a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, considered a key step toward solving the Middle East crisis, have deadlocked over the issue of who would represent the Palestinians.

“There is a stalemate,” Mohammed Milhem, a former West Bank mayor who is now on the 11-member Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said in an interview Tuesday.

The United States has said it will meet with a joint delegation so long as none of the Palestinian participants are members of the PLO--or with PLO officials only if the organization recognizes Israel’s right to exist.

Milhem said the Executive Committee, which met last week in Baghdad to consider the possibility of talks, decided that any American conditions on who could represent the Palestinians “would be totally unacceptable.”

‘Soul of the Resistance’

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat was quoted Tuesday as having told a French weekly that “we will never accept the PLO’s exclusion from negotiations because it is the soul of the resistance of all the Palestinian people.”

Although seemingly a minor procedural dispute, the disagreement has dissipated whatever optimism had built up after the Feb. 11 agreement between King Hussein of Jordan and the PLO for a “joint framework” for solving the Palestinian problem.

Richard W. Murphy, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, has been visiting the Middle East region for the past week and was reportedly expecting to meet a joint delegation in Amman. The Jordanian government is said to have urged him to stay on in the area until after the Baghdad meeting in hopes that such a meeting could be arranged.

Milhem said Murphy spelled out the American conditions on the Palestinian delegation during a visit with prominent West Bank Palestinians at the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem last week.

‘It’s Up to Them’

“Murphy’s offer was obviously not deemed sufficient by the PLO,” said one European diplomat. “The Americans have to be persuaded that it’s up to them to do something.”

Milhem also complained that the Americans were offering nothing in exchange for what the Palestinians considered a major concession.

The former mayor appeared to hold out a possible compromise in the deadlock with Washington by hinting that if the Reagan Administration withdrew its conditions, the PLO would select a delegation that would be acceptable.

For semantic reasons that have never been clear, the United States has said that members of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s so-called parliament in exile, are not considered members of the PLO. However, the PLO does consider them among its members, so it is widely believed that members of the delegation could be drawn from the council, which last met in Amman in November.

Denounced as a Sellout

Ironically, the Feb. 11 PLO accord with Jordan, which was denounced by many Palestinians as a sellout, is now being held up by the mainstream PLO as justification for its rejection of the American conditions for talks.

The accord envisaged the participation of all the parties to the Mideast conflict, “including the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestine people, within a joint (Jordanian-Palestinian) delegation.”

The agreement called for the formation of a confederated Arab state of Jordan and Palestine, which would presumably be created in the West Bank of the Jordan River, now occupied by Israel.