Analysis : PLO’s Mideast ‘Solution’: New Strategy, Old Suspicions

Did the Palestine Liberation Organization, in proclaiming the independence of a still-unborn Palestinian state, make history or just histrionics at its Algiers meeting this week?

The events set into motion by the 19th session of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s so-called parliament in exile, may have to play themselves out before that question can be properly answered. But for the moment at least, the answer depends on who is being asked.

In formally committing itself to a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict and in declaring its willingness to negotiate a peace settlement with Israel on the basis of two key U.N. resolutions implicitly affirming the Jewish state’s right to exist, the PLO argues that it has indeed taken a major, even historic, step away from the rejectionist views that characterized the organization in the past.

“We have adopted a political program that contains the moderation, flexibility and realism that the West has been asking us to show,” Yasser Arafat, the PLO chairman, said at the conclusion of the three-day meeting in Algiers. The PNC, he declared, has “given me a mandate to pursue a political settlement,” and the PLO is “ready and willing to negotiate peace.”

Nonsense, say the leaders of Israel. The strings the PLO has attached to its acceptance of the two Security Council resolutions in question, 242 and 338, show that it is not yet prepared to recognize Israel or renounce violence as its primary means toward achieving a Palestinian state.

“The so-called change in the PLO position,” said Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, “is the big lie. It was a specialty of the Nazis, the Communists, and now the PLO is following the same way.”

In between these two opposite, if equally predictable, poles of opinion are those of the countries who, to both sides, matter the most--the United States and the nations of Western Europe.

Recognized by 30 Countries

At the latest count, 30 countries have formally recognized the new Palestinian “state,” but this roster is drawn mostly from Arab and East European governments that supported the PLO anyway. In the West, however, the reaction has been more ambivalent.

In Washington, State Department officials described the PLO manifesto’s treatment of 242 and 338 as a positive “advance” in the PLO position but said its endorsement of Israel’s right to exist was still too ambiguous and indirect to meet U.S. conditions for opening a dialogue with the guerrilla organization.

Falling into line behind the American assessment, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called the platform adopted by the PNC a “modest step forward.” Privately, a number of West European envoys in the region were more enthusiastic in their assessments of what was accomplished in Algiers, but they added that it was probably still insufficient to persuade their governments to recognize the new Palestinian state.

“It is wrong to dismiss what the PLO did in Algiers,” one diplomat said. “It was not a revolutionary step forward, but it was an evolutionary one.”

Because the claims and counterclaims of both sides already are beginning to obscure and distort the results, it may be useful to summarize just what the PLO did and did not do in Algiers this week:

-- It did not offer immediate and unconditional recognition of Israel, but tied such a step to the convening of an international peace conference where the “national and political rights of the Palestinians,” foremost among which is “self-determination,” would also be guaranteed.

-- It did renounce “terrorism in all its forms,” but did not surrender what the PLO, citing another U.N. resolution for legitimacy on this point, considers its right to “resist foreign occupation and . . . to struggle for independence.” The PNC, on this point, ratified the 1985 Cairo Declaration in which Arafat drew a distinction between “legitimate” raids against military targets inside Israel and “terrorist” attacks against civilians, pledging that the PLO would henceforth refrain from the latter. There have been terrorist attacks by Palestinians since then--most recently on a civilian bus on the eve of the Israeli elections--but PLO officials say these are the work of radical Syrian and Libyan-aligned splinter groups and that the PLO is working to thwart them.

-- It did pledge itself to seek a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict through an international conference to be sponsored by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and it accepted U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, which affirm the right of nations in the region--implicitly including Israel--to exist within “secure and recognized boundaries,” as the basis for this settlement.

The central significance of these decisions, Palestinian officials say, is that, together with the independence proclamation based on the original two-state U.N. partition plan for Palestine of 1947, they constitute the first successful effort to rewrite and moderate the inflexible catechism of the PLO’s 20-year-old national charter, which rejected any recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

“What we are saying is that we are willing now to accept Israel’s right to exist in the context of a peace settlement,” said Nabeel Shaath, a Palestinian businessman who chaired the committee that drafted the new political manifesto. “We are saying that we want to go to an international peace conference and that we recognize that this conference will only be held on the basis of Resolution 242.”

Representing 5 million Palestinians, the Palestine National Council has always ranked as one of the world’s most eclectic legislatures, comprising a motley collection of people ranging from unshaven guerrillas in green fatigues to tweedy university professors and perfumed women in fur coats.

In the past, the latter categories generally tended to remain in the background, if they attended the PNC at all.

Technocrats Dominate

But at this meeting, called to craft a political agenda that could take advantage of the sympathy that the 11-month-old uprising in the occupied territories has generated for the Palestinian cause, it was the technocrats, not the terrorists, who dominated the occasion. It was the portly men carrying briefcases, not the muscular fellows wearing pistols, who drafted the documents that Arafat, on the last day of the conference, was to deliver to the world.

The influence of these technocrats is still extremely tenuous, however, and senior PLO officials professing moderation warn that the Palestinians may revert to radicalism if no progress toward a peace settlement is achieved in the coming months.

“We have tried here to demonstrate our serious intent to achieve a peaceful settlement,” said Salah Khalaf, the deputy head of Fatah, the largest PLO faction.

“But if we don’t make good on this intention, if we fail, then the next PNC will see the rise of the extremists and the fall of the moderates,” he warned. “If there is no peaceful solution, then next time the fanatics will take the floor.”