PLO Isolation Deepens

The long-feuding factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization have concluded their efforts at reconciliation in Algiers by proclaiming that unity has been restored after four years of bitter polemics and sometimes bloody hostility. Now the PLO must contend with the political cost of this tenuous achievement.

Within hours after the conference ended, Egypt, with which PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat had labored mightily to rebuild good relations, shut down the PLO’s offices in Cairo in angry response to the nasty things said about its policies by PLO radicals. Jordan had earlier done the same, after Arafat reneged on an agreement with King Hussein to adopt a common political line in any negotiations with Israel. Syria, whose President Hafez Assad detests Arafat, can be counted on to continue exploiting divisions within the PLO’s ranks. In Lebanon, local forces remain determined to stop the PLO from reestablishing its previous position of armed autonomy. There are those in the Arab world who welcome the appearance of PLO amity. But in the Arab states that matter most, the PLO’s political isolation has only deepened.

Additionally, the Algiers conference has almost certainly halted whatever momentum was gathering in behalf of a Middle East peace conference under international auspices. The PLO has indicated that it would go to such a conference, but only if the proposed participants--among them the Soviet Union and China, neither of which has diplomatic relations with Israel--had powers of “arbitration”--i.e., were invested with authority to dictate a settlement. That condition has been and remains as unacceptable to the United States and Jordan as it is to Israel.

Israeli hard-liners can take comfort from the Algiers meeting. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has dismissed the idea of an international conference--endorsed, among others, by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres--as “insane.” Had the chance for a conference somehow been brought to the edge of feasibility, it would have split Israel’s coalition government and led to elections that in effect would have been a referendum on accepting territorial compromises in exchange for peace. In the post-Algiers political climate that prospect seems more distant than ever.