Palestinians Balk at 2-State Plan : PLO Treatise Points Up Choice Many Still Refuse to Face

Faisal Husseini, a leading Palestinian nationalist and head of the Arab Studies Center here, compares a political solution of the Middle East conflict to a coin with one beautiful and one ugly face.

“We always like to look at the beautiful face, with an international (peace) conference, self-determination, a Palestinian state,” he explained in an interview. “But the other side of the coin is the ugly one--recognition of Israel, negotiations with it, a two-state solution.”

Like those two faces of the same coin, Husseini said, it’s impossible to separate the two faces of a political solution. And that, he added, is what Bassam abu Sharif, a key adviser to Palestine Liberation Organization head Yasser Arafat, made clear when he circulated a conciliatory--and controversial--treatise on the conflict at last month’s Arab summit in Algiers.

‘Holding the Ugly Face’

“What Abu Sharif did is simply put a mirror in front of us,” said Husseini, the son of a famed Palestinian fighter who was himself released only weeks ago after nine months of “administrative detention” because of his nationalist sympathies. “And so we looked at ourselves in the mirror and found ourselves holding the ugly face” of the peace coin. That, he conceded, “made (some Palestinians) angry.”

The divisions exposed by the Abu Sharif document, which specifically disavows any desire to dismantle Israel, are worst among those Palestinians living outside Israel and the territories that it has occupied since 1967 on the West Bank of the Jordan River and Gaza Strip.

But even here, where Arafat has perhaps his most loyal following and where the conciliatory treatise was generally welcomed, the leaders of the 7-month-old intifada , or Palestinian uprising, have been unable to reach a consensus about it. Instead, according to well-informed Palestinian sources, they have decided to ignore the issue in the pamphlets that they issue regularly over the signature of the “Unified National Leadership of the Uprising in the Occupied Territories.”

Differences Debated

How serious those differences are is the focus of its own debate here. Palestinian sources dismiss them as more tactical than strategic.

Zeev Schiff, a widely respected commentator on security issues for the Hebrew-language daily Haaretz, also cautioned that too much should not be read into the splits. Controversy among them “discredits the old view that the uprising fully consolidated the Palestinians” and also “strengthens doubts . . . whether the Unified Command is truly operational in the full sense of the word,” the journalist wrote recently.

However, he added, “all this does not testify to the intifada’s demise--just as the violent arguments within the (pre-state Jewish) resistance movement did not put an end to Jewish resistance” against British rule in what was then Palestine.

On the other hand, the Palestinian divisions do underline what Hebrew University expert Matti Steinberg referred to in an interview as the “vicious circle” of the intifada.

“Its success so far is based on unity,” Steinberg said of the Palestinian uprising. “But to try and translate it into political gains threatens to bring back all the old divisions” within the Palestinian community.

Cracks started to appear in the unified front of the intifada last spring, breaking out along some of the political fault lines that have separated more militant PLO factions from the mainstream Fatah faction headed by Arafat.

The splits appeared to peak in May, when the “Unified Command” issued two different versions of their leaflets No. 16 and No. 17 in order to accommodate opposing views, principally between supporters of Fatah and those of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The PFLP reportedly wanted to step up sharply the level of anti-Israeli protest before the Arab League meeting in Algiers, while Fatah argued for a more gradual approach, saying that the PFLP program was too much to ask of a population that had already suffered greatly during months of continuous unrest.

If intifada tactics are contentious, they are nothing compared to the issues raised by the Abu Sharif document, which go to the heart of Palestinian aspirations. If the various factions have been able to sidestep their differences on those issues, it is mainly because there has been an unsatisfactory response to the document from Jerusalem and Washington, according to Palestinian sources here.

“It’s stupid to put your unity in danger without any assurance you’re going to get anything out of it,” explained one source about the intifada leadership’s agreement to ignore the proposal in its pamphlets.

Remarkable Document

The Abu Sharif document is remarkable primarily because it so directly addresses the great fear of Israeli--that the PLO will be happy with nothing less than the destruction of the state of Israel.

The PLO’s “ raison d’etre is not the undoing of Israel, but the salvation of the Palestinian people and their rights, including their right to democratic self-expression and national self-determination,” the document says. It endorses the so-called “two-state solution”--a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza existing alongside Israel--and calls direct negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis “the key to a . . . settlement.” And it expressly accepts U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, long considered a litmus test of Palestinian intentions toward Israel.

Washington greeted the document as “constructive and positive” but insufficiently authoritative to represent the kind of breakthrough that might lead the United States to accept the PLO as a full partner in Middle East peace talks.

Israel, which considers the PLO an unreconstructed terrorist organization and an unfit negotiating partner, dismissed the treatise out of hand. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said it contained “nothing new.” Even the relatively leftist Jerusalem Post called it a “public relations exercise”--although one that should inspire Israel to do “some fresh thinking of its own.”

Hebrew University’s Steinberg, among others, cautions that such comments may turn into self-fulfilling prophesies about a document that should be taken much more seriously.

While it falls short of representing official PLO policy, Steinberg said, it does represent “a quantum leap” in terms of the attitudes it reflects.

The document was condemned by militant Palestinian groups, including some pro-Syrian factions of the PLO, and even by another key leader of Fatah. Arafat himself has coyly rejected public comment on it, saying he would save his remarks for Washington.

Most Middle East analysts now seem to accept that Abu Sharif’s statement was at least a “trial balloon” by Arafat, however.

Sources quoted by the Jerusalem Post said that visiting Romanian envoy Konstantin Metea told top Israeli officials during a visit here earlier this month that Arafat is ready to negotiate directly with Jerusalem an interim settlement along the lines of the autonomy agreement worked out during the 1978 Camp David agreements between Israel and Egypt.

The offer, said to have come out of recent meetings in Bucharest between Arafat and Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, would constitute a major shift in PLO policy if confirmed.

However, both Prime Minister Shamir and Shimon Peres, who serves as alternate premier and foreign minister, reportedly repeated the government’s refusal to talk with the PLO.

An adviser to the Israeli government, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Jerusalem’s reaction is the result of “embarrassment.”

Palestinian personalities in the occupied territories have been calling for months for a PLO initiative that would match in boldness the intifada itself. But they say they never expected Israel to respond first to such an initiative.

Rather, they say, they were looking to Washington.

“We would like to have something more from the United States,” commented Husseini. The White House can act even before November elections in America, he said. But Israel will be incapable of moving until at least after its elections the same month.

So far, the Palestinians here say they have been disappointed.

But Steinberg, among others, is not ready to write off the initiative yet. This is a “very crucial moment,” he said. Soviet reaction remains a key, since Moscow could influence the hard-line Palestinian groups and may yet join the United States in co-sponsoring a Middle East peace effort.

“It’s only the beginning of the process,” Steinberg opined.