PLO Leadership Sees ‘Historic’ Chance to Make Peace With Israel, No. 2 Man Says

The leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization sees a “historic opportunity” to make peace with Israel and has agreed on the need to take “bold and courageous” steps to achieve it, a senior PLO official said Monday.

But Salah Khalaf, the official widely regarded as the PLO’s second in command, also said the organization has no intention of “leaping into an abyss” by making major concessions without the likelihood of reciprocation by Israel, which labels the PLO a terrorist organization and still refuses to negotiate with it.

To do so, Khalaf suggested, would only drive the PLO into disunity, widening already existing differences between moderate and hard-line factions without gaining anything in return.

‘Prepared to Take Steps’

“We are prepared now to take major steps, but what prevents us is Israel’s hard-line position,” Khalaf, who is better known as Abu Iyad, said in an interview with The Times.

“We want to take a bold and courageous step, but not a leap into nowhere,” he added. “What we do will not be at the expense of the PLO.”

In the interview, Khalaf also:

-- Declared that the PLO is ready to recognize Israel if Israel is ready to simultaneously recognize the PLO and the Palestinians’ “right to self-determination.”

-- Softened his earlier criticism of a flexible peace plan floated last June by Bassam abu Sharif, a senior aide to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and said he now supports “much of its contents.”

-- Said the entire PLO leadership, with the exception of a radical fringe controlled by Syria, has given up its aim of liberating all of what was once Palestine and accepts the fact that “a Palestinian state won’t be established any place but in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” the territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 Middle East War.

Khalaf indicated that these and other points that are meant to take “American, Israeli and European concerns into account” are being incorporated into a major “political initiative” that the PLO plans to launch next month, after a meeting of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s highest decision-making body.

Two-State Solution

The initiative, he said, will implicitly recognize Israel’s right to exist by proposing a two-state solution based on Resolution 181, the United Nations’ original 1947 partition plan for Palestine.

However, it will stop short of meeting the main condition that the United States has set for dealing with the PLO--explicit recognition of Israel by accepting two later U.N. Resolutions, 242 and 338.

These resolutions, by themselves, remain unacceptable to the PLO, Khalaf said, because they do not address the question of Palestinian self-determination.

“We are ready to accept them, to accept 242 and 338,” Khalaf said, “but only if the other side accepts the principle of self-determination for the Palestinians.”

Khalaf conceded that a peace settlement based on Resolution 181, which incorporated part of what is now northern Israel into an Arab state, is certain to be rejected by the Israelis.

Not a Starting Point

But he indicated that it is being used now by the PLO not as a starting point for territorial negotiations, but as a legal basis for a two-state proposal.

“The most important aspect of this resolution is not the geographical borders it defines, but the spirit of the resolution as a basis for negotiations,” Khalaf said.

The Palestinian leader, one of the original founders of Arafat’s Fatah movement, also confirmed that the Palestine National Council session next month is expected to approve the formation of a provisional Palestinian government.

The aim of such a government, whose formation the PLO has been debating for years, would be to fill the political vacuum created in July, when Jordan’s King Hussein severed his kingdom’s administrative links to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Rethinking Their Positions

Khalaf indicated that the king’s decision, coming on top of the pressures for political action generated by the intifada, the nine-month-old Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has forced a number of PLO leaders, including himself, to rethink their previous, more uncompromising positions toward peace talks.

Reminded that he was one of the first PLO leaders to denounce the Abu Sharif plan, which proposed a two-state solution and called for direct peace talks with Israel, Khalaf said he had objected mainly to the timing of the initiative--which he noted was floated before King Hussein severed Jordan’s links with the West Bank.

“After that, everything changed,” he said, adding that now “I agree with much of its contents.”

This agreement, however, is by no means unanimous, other PLO officials have said. The senior leadership, meeting almost continuously in Tunis for the past several weeks, is still divided over the extent of the concessions and the timing of the moves that the PLO plans to make, these sources said.

Another Delay Likely

Khalaf alluded to these differences, complaining that “some people think that a Palestinian state will come to us from heaven, without any need for obligations or commitments from our side.” He also conceded that the National Council meeting, already twice postponed, may have to be put off another week until mid-October while the factional debate continues.

But noting that the intifada is rapidly radicalizing the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and contributing to the spread of Islamic fundamentalism there--a phenomenon that he said deeply worries the PLO leadership--Khalaf warned that time is running out for a negotiated settlement of the Palestinian problem.

“We have a historic opportunity, an opportunity for us and for Israel,” he said. “But history will judge harshly the side that loses this opportunity . . . for if we fail, the extremists will take over.”