Unity Hailed as PLO Fortunes Fall : Arafat Again Proclaims Triumph Amid Disaster

One of the secrets of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat’s seemingly uncanny ability to bounce back from endless misfortune has been his talent for portraying his failures as successes and his setbacks as historic steps along the road to freeing Palestine.

True to form, Palestinian officials in Tunis, headquarters of the political wing of the PLO, were cheerily briefing reporters last week on a new agreement to unite Arafat’s Fatah, the largest faction in the umbrella group, with several dissident groups previously aligned with Arafat’s chief Arab nemesis, Syria.

“Unity is the next stage in the struggle and we are about to achieve it,” PLO spokesman Ahmed Abdul Rahman proclaimed.

The disaster that inspired this new wave of optimism was last month’s order by Jordan’s King Hussein to shut down all of Fatah’s offices in Amman.

That action, which appeared to snuff out any spark of hope for an early reconciliation between the king and Arafat, was the latest and hardest in a series of setbacks suffered by the guerrilla organization since its expulsion from Beirut four years ago.

Indeed, the PLO’s fortunes have never appeared so low as they do now. Deprived of a military base bordering Israel, divided into quarrelsome factions and scattered among more than half a dozen countries, the PLO, which likes to think of itself as at the core of the Middle East problem, has, in geographical terms at least, been driven far from its center.

Tunis, more than 1,500 miles from the land that the PLO seeks to liberate, “may be nice for tourists, but it’s terrible for terrorists,” one Western analyst said. “The PLO is really like a fish out of water here.”

Worse, from the PLO’s point of view, is the tactical alliance emerging between Jordan and Syria out of a common desire, albeit for different reasons, to wrest control of the organization from Arafat.

Some quarters--Israel and probably a majority of the Reagan Administration’s State Department--see the PLO’s current difficulties as positive. They reason that if the PLO can somehow be removed from the picture, it would make it much easier for King Hussein to enter into direct negotiations with Israel for some form of closely chaperoned Palestinian autonomy on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

But others, and they include not only moderate Arab states but a number of U.S. and other Western diplomats stationed in the region, view the PLO’s fall from Arab grace with greater concern. Interviewed over the past several weeks in Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, these diplomats and Arab officials nearly all expressed strong doubts that Hussein can succeed in his bid to negotiate a settlement of the Palestinian problem without the consent and participation of the PLO.

Further, they fear that the steady, if frustratingly slow, trend toward moderation within the PLO under Arafat’s leadership in recent years will be reversed. They see the organization splintering into small, radical groups that will revert to the kind of international terrorism that haunted Europe and the Middle East in the 1970s.

“This is the really dangerous thing,” a Western diplomat in Tunis said. “There are a lot of young and disillusioned Palestinians out there who see only two alternatives now: subjugation to Hussein or going back to terrorism.

“I think the real danger is that the PLO will fragment into little radical groups espousing terrorism, and not just in the occupied territories. It’s pretty frightening for all of us.”

Although the PLO’s fortunes have risen and fallen over the last few years, their general direction has been downward ever since Arafat’s forces were expelled from Beirut by the Israelis in 1982 and from Tripoli, Lebanon, by the Syrians the following year.

Divisions Hardened

As the PLO scattered, dispersing to Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, the two Yemens and Sudan, the deepening divisions within its ranks hardened into a formal three-way split.

Fatah dissidents, upset by Arafat’s increasingly conciliatory line towards Jordan, defected to the old guard “rejectionist” camp led by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Along with several other Syrian-controlled groups, this faction set up shop in Damascus as the Palestine National Alliance.

While Fatah, under Arafat, advocated a diplomatic solution to the Middle East crisis, the National Alliance viewed the idea of territorial compromise as treason, demanded Arafat’s ouster as PLO chairman and continued to insist on the liberation of all of Palestine through “armed struggle.”

Another group, also objecting to Arafat’s policies but favoring his leadership over what it feared would become Syrian tutelage, formed a third faction, the Palestine Democratic Alliance. Dominated by the Syrian-based Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, this group has now tentatively agreed to rejoin the PLO fold after the Hussein-Arafat split.

Though Arafat’s position looked bleak after the PLO’s dispersion from Lebanon, the politically acrobatic chairman again managed to dodge defeat by turning to Egypt, whose friendship he had renounced in 1977 when the late President Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem.

Confederated Entity

The realignment with Egypt set the PLO on a progressively moderate diplomatic course that culminated in an agreement with Jordan, signed in February, 1985, to jointly seek peace negotiations with Israel with a view toward establishing a confederated Jordanian-Palestinian entity on the West Bank.

Then came a new series of setbacks, which even Arafat was unable to turn to his advantage. The Amman accord began to founder over the conflicting conditions set by the United States and the PLO for a meeting between them--the first step in the scenario initially envisioned by Hussein and Arafat.

The United States insisted that Arafat first recognize Israel’s right to exist by accepting U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which guarantee Israel’s security in return for its withdrawal from territory captured from the Arabs during the 1967 Middle East War.

Seeking Independent State

To the PLO, however, these resolutions have long been unacceptable because of their failure to address Palestinian claims “to self-determination,” a code-phrase synonymous with the PLO’s demands for an independent state.

To accept them now, Arafat demanded simultaneous U.S. recognition of Palestinian self-determination, a step that Washington had made it clear it was not quite ready to take. Its counterproposal, relayed secretly to Hussein late last year by Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy, was to agree to PLO participation at a peace conference if it endorsed the two U.N. resolutions.

Arafat, meanwhile, was coming under heavy pressure from King Hussein to accept what the king saw as the best offer that Washington would make. When terrorists from the Palestine Liberation Front, a group within the Democratic Alliance, hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and murdered an elderly American passenger last October, the pressure increased.

His patience exhausted, Hussein suspended cooperation with the PLO on Feb. 19 with a bitter speech in which he blamed Arafat for the failure of the peace process and called upon the 850,000 Palestinians living on the West Bank to choose a new leadership.

Charges, Countercharges

Since then, and especially since Hussein put the royal seal on the rupture by closing Arafat’s offices in Amman on July 7, each side has accused the other of being insincere about the peace process from the beginning.

Claiming he was present at an early meeting where Arafat told the king he was ready to accept U.N. Resolution 242 immediately, only to renege later, a senior Jordanian official said, “We knew from the beginning that Arafat had other motives . . . (that) he signed the Amman accord only to restrain the king from going it alone and to give the PLO leeway in consolidating its position in Jordan.”

“The Amman accord was always a tactic for Hussein,” said a senior Palestinian official in Tunis. “Hussein wanted to trap the PLO, to maneuver it into giving him a mandate to represent the Palestinians. He has always been against us. . . . He is a traitor.”

The accusations underscore the fact that the Amman accord was an unlikely pact to begin with--a tactical alliance that tried, for the sake of temporarily convergent interests, to overlook the fact that the objectives of Jordan and the PLO were, in the final analysis, competitive and incompatible.

“The PLO’s objective was, is and must always be the eventual creation of a Palestinian state, toward which confederation with Jordan is a stepping stone,” a senior diplomatic source said. “But the king wants to solve the West Bank problem in a way that will let him sleep at night, safe in the assurance that his own East Bank is secure.

‘Last Thing He Wants’

“Next to formal Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and what that might entail for his kingdom, the last thing he wants on the other side of the Jordan River is an independent Palestinian state,” the diplomat said.

While the PLO is interested in a peace settlement only if it leads to “self-determination,” King Hussein has other, more immediate priorities.

According to senior officials in Amman, the king’s overriding concern is that, as the Mideast conflict drags on without solution, Israeli settlements in the West Bank will proliferate to the point where annexation becomes inevitable.

At the same time, the higher Arab birthrate in the occupied territories will eventually create an intolerable situation for Israel--one that Hussein fears Israel will solve by pushing the Palestinians across the river, with politically and economically disastrous consequences for Jordan.

Thus, since the suspension of the Amman accord, Hussein has embarked on a campaign to persuade the West Bankers that their interests lie in allowing him, not Arafat, to negotiate on their behalf with Israel for an autonomy agreement that in Jordan’s view is probably the most achievable solution.

To do this, Hussein has launched what amounts to a checkbook war with the PLO in the West Bank. He has sought to squeeze off the flow of PLO funds into the region, while at the same time proposing an ambitious $150 million-a-year, five-year Jordanian development plan for the area in the hopes of attracting the West Bankers’ support.

There are several problems with this plan, however. One is that economically strapped Jordan doesn’t have the money. It has let it be known that funding will have to come from the United States and from the conservative Arab oil-producing countries of the Persian Gulf.

Therein lies a second hitch, however.

Although they would probably like Hussein to succeed, the timid Persian Gulf countries are unlikely to support the plan while the PLO still commands the loyalty of most Palestinians inside and outside the West Bank. Without their support, however, Hussein will not have the umbrella of Arab legitimacy that he needs to proceed without the PLO.

Holding Onto Loyalties

Arafat’s strategy in the meantime appears to be to hold on--to the leadership of the PLO and to the loyalties of the West Bankers--for as long as he can in hopes that something will turn up.

However, even his remarkable talent for wriggling out of tight spots may be overtaxed. At a recent meeting of the Fatah Central Committee in Tunis, Arafat came under heavy pressure from hard-liners--among them Saleh Khalaf, his chief deputy, and PLO “foreign minister” Farouk Kaddoumi--to formally renounce the Amman accord and seek rapprochement with the Syrians.

Arafat resisted, arguing that the PLO needs to maintain what is left of its presence in Jordan to preserve its contacts with the West Bank, informed sources said. But grumblings within the organization are growing louder.

“Arafat is still the most popular Palestinian leader, but in the long run even he can base his legitimacy on only one of two things,” one analyst said. “Either he makes war against Israel or he makes peace with it. If he can do neither, eventually someone else will.”

To perform his political alchemy once again and transform failure into success, Arafat has negotiated a new unity agreement with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and four other small groups that make up the Palestine Democratic Alliance. But Western diplomats note that in falling back on an alignment with more radical groups, Arafat is only further limiting his room for diplomatic maneuver.

Limited Options

“The PLO’s options are very limited now and the more it tries to reconcile its differences, the more limited its room for maneuver becomes. The big risk is that Arafat will be backed into a corner where he will have to rejoin the radicals,” one diplomat said.

If that happens, then there may be no winners in the Jordan-PLO split, only losers, many diplomats on the Arab side of the Mideast conflict believe.

“It’s hard to see Hussein winning over the West Bank without the PLO,” one source said.

Michael Ross, Times bureau chief in Cairo, was recently on assignment in Tunisia.