Agile Arafat Lands on Feet Again--but Wazir’s Death Poses a Challenge

Over the years, Yasser Arafat, the politically acrobatic chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, has managed to spring back from one misfortune after another--not always ending up where he wanted to be but nearly always landing on his feet.

This week, in another swiftly executed political back-flip, Arafat ended up in Damascus, the Syrian capital from which he was ignominiously expelled in 1983 after a bitter struggle with Syrian-backed rebels in Lebanon for control of the PLO.

The misfortune that bounced him back there was the April 16 slaying of the PLO’s military commander, Khalil Wazir, allegedly by Israeli assassins.

One of Most Trusted Aide

Wazir, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Jihad, was one of Arafat’s ablest and most trusted aides.

When the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories began five months ago, it took the PLO as much by surprise as it did Israel. But due largely to Wazir’s efforts, the PLO subsequently assumed a prominent role in the revolt, thus allowing it to claim at least some of the credit for posing a more serious challenge to Israeli rule than it has ever been able to mount through either terrorism or guerrilla warfare.

Wazir’s real importance, however, lay in the role he played in managing relations between Arafat’s more moderate wing of the PLO and radical pro-Syrian factions. He was instrumental in negotiating a rapprochement that restored some semblance of unity to PLO ranks last year, and he remained, in many ways, a cornerstone in that organization’s fissured structure.

His assassination thus creates a vacuum in the PLO hierarchy and poses a serious challenge for Arafat. How he meets this challenge in the coming months, diplomats and Arab officials say, may well determine whether Wazir’s assassination turns out to be a crippling blow for the PLO or--equally a possibility, in the view of some officials--a grave miscalculation by Israel.

Clearly, Israel hopes Wazir’s death will help defuse the uprising, weaken the PLO generally and box it into a more radical corner from which there will be little likelihood of its ever making the compromises necessary for it to take part in the peace process.

In the short run, at least, Wazir’s assassination does seem to have strengthened the influence of radical factions within the PLO and to have served as a catalyst for Arafat’s first meeting in more than five years with Syrian President Hafez Assad in Damascus earlier this week.

However, Arab diplomats and PLO officials close to Arafat say that the reconciliation is not the watershed that the Damascus-based radical groups are touting it as.

The personal enmity between the two men is too great for that, and Assad’s conditions for a real reconciliation--a cooling of PLO relations with Egypt and assurances that the PLO will make no important compromises to participate in the peace process--were unacceptable to Arafat, the officials said.

“It was an attempt to break the ice. It was not, in any way, a breakthrough,” a Palestinian official said.

Still, the limited rapprochement that was achieved--the two sides set up a committee to discuss their differences and continue their dialogue--is likely to complicate the picture for Secretary of State George P. Shultz when he returns to the region this summer for another round of Middle East peace-making diplomacy.

The Soviet Union, which wants to ensure that it is not deprived of a role in any peace conference, was putting heavy pressure on both Assad and Arafat to bury the hatchet long before Wazir’s assassination, and even a small degree of progress in that direction strengthens its position, diplomats said.

Senior Egyptian officials, however, see another danger and a darker Israeli motive for Wazir’s assassination in all of this.

Within PLO ranks, Wazir was a beloved, almost legendary figure and, even in the long and dirty war between PLO and Israeli agents, his killing was an unusual event. Although the Israelis have eliminated other PLO members for their involvement in specific terrorist attacks, never before have they targeted someone so high in the PLO leadership.

Thus the assassination is expected to generate heavy pressure within the PLO for a commensurately spectacular retaliation.

The PLO’s options in that respect remain militarily limited, however, without resorting to outright terrorism outside of Israel and the occupied territories. Such retaliation might satisfy Arab radicals, especially within the PLO, but it would also invite international opprobrium, deal Arafat out of the peace process and distract attention from the Palestinian uprising, which has focused concern throughout much of the world on the harsh methods that Israel has been using to contain it.

Noting that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir strongly opposes Shultz’s proposals, which envision territorial concessions and some form of Palestinian participation in the negotiations, Egyptian officials said that Israel may be seeking to provoke such a reaction in order to turn the tide of public opinion back in its favor and preempt the Reagan Administration from pressuring it into accepting the Shultz plan.

“We think it’s obvious that the Israelis are trying to provoke the PLO, to entrap them into committing counter-violence that would put the peace process on the back burner again,” a senior Egyptian Foreign Ministry official said, echoing a similar judgment made recently by Jordan’s King Hussein.

Some PLO officials, those who are close to Arafat and who--within the organization’s frame of reference--are considered “moderates,” say that will not happen.

“We will continue to support the intifada (uprising) and guerrilla actions against Israeli military targets, but we won’t go back to terrorism,” said a PLO official in Cairo. “We won’t do anything that stupid.”

However, Egyptian officials, remembering Egypt’s own painful experience with the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro 2 1/2 years ago, note that Arafat may not be able to control the reactions of all the disparate factions that make up the PLO.

This concern may have even underlined Arafat’s quick attempt to exploit Wazir’s assassination by using his funeral in Damascus as a pretext for meeting with Assad, some analysts suggested.

Certainly there is no love lost between the two men. Arafat has spent the better part of the last 10 years eluding first the collar and leash and then the noose that Assad has tried many times to slip around the PLO chairman’s neck.

Gesture of Appeasement

But with the influence of the Damascus-based radicals rising and his own position weakened as a result of Wazir’s death, Arafat may have felt compelled to make a gesture of appeasement--and to seek assurances that Assad won’t continue to try to undermine his leadership, the analysts said.

If this turns out to be the case, a major question arises: What price will Assad demand in return for his cooperation?

With the flowers still fresh on Wazir’s grave, this is a question that Egyptian officials and other diplomats here are already pondering.