Time for Peace, Arafat Declares : U.S. Asserts Speech Didn’t Go Far Enough

The Reagan Administration said that Yasser Arafat’s U.N. speech Tuesday contained some “interesting and positive” elements but did not go far enough to win the Palestine Liberation Organization a place at the Middle East peace table or to clear the way for an unprecedented U.S.-PLO dialogue.

President-elect George Bush, signaling that current U.S. policy toward the Palestinians will continue after he takes office next month, said that “we’ve got to have a much clearer statement of everything” from Arafat before the United States will consider direct talks with the PLO.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, speaking at a news conference in Jerusalem, called Arafat’s peace moves “an act of deception” and appealed to the United States not to open talks with the PLO--ever. Rejecting assertions that the PLO had taken steps to moderate its position either on terrorism or on recognition of Israel’s right to exist, he declared flatly that Israel refuses to talk to Arafat or his organization.

Rejects PLO Contact

“I hope that for the sake of promoting the chances of peace and advancing the struggle against terror and violence, the United States will never establish any contact with the PLO,” he said.

“We shall not negotiate with the PLO under any conditions, nor recognize it. From our point of view, the PLO is no partner for any peace process. It is a terrorist organization aimed at undermining our national existence and bringing about the destruction of the state of Israel.”

State Department spokesman Charles Redman, delivering the Reagan Administration’s formal response here just hours after Arafat finished speaking in Geneva, said that the PLO leader’s declaration failed to accept unambiguously Washington’s 13-year-old list of conditions for a U.S.-PLO relationship--acknowledgement of Israel’s right to exist, acceptance of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and a firm renunciation of terrorism.

“These issues must be addressed clearly, squarely, without ambiguity,” Redman said. “That didn’t happen, and, as a consequence, the speech did not meet our conditions.”

Using Swedish diplomats as go-betweens, the Administration believed late Monday that it had obtained a commitment from the PLO that Arafat’s speech would meet the U.S. test. State Department officials even informed Israel that Washington was ready to open substantive talks with the PLO, touching off a flurry of objections from Jerusalem.

Shamir told the Jerusalem press conference: “We do not believe that the PLO is inherently capable of accepting the United States conditions, (which) contradict its very existence and raison d’etre .” He called PLO peace moves a “monumental act of deception . . . a mirage created to deceive the international community by an illusion of moderation.”

In Geneva, Yohanan Bein, acting Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, declared at a news conference that “the PLO is not a partner” for peace negotiations. The Arafat speech, he said “was another example of ambiguity.”

Although Arafat touched on all three points in the U.S. formula, edging close to acceptance of all of them, he did not say the precise words that American officials had expected. There was no explanation in Washington of why Arafat went as far as he did toward meeting the U.S. conditions without going the rest of the way to obtain the U.S.-PLO dialogue that he has long coveted. In Geneva, there were suggestions that PLO hard-liners had forced Arafat to water down his speech at the last minute.

One Middle East expert here suggested that Arafat’s florid speaking style, combined with the vagaries of Arabic-to-English translation, clouded the issue in a way that the PLO leader did not intend. Other specialists said Arafat may be concerned that he would lose face if he were to recite the U.S. conditions without elaboration.

Redman said that Arafat came closer to meeting the U.S. conditions in his U.N. speech than he did in a meeting last week in Stockholm with a group of American Jews and that the Stockholm meeting, in turn, was an advance beyond the Palestine National Council’s so-called Algiers Declaration last month.

“The overall tone was an improvement, and on some of the issues there was some movement, for example, in the references to (Resolutions) 242 and 338,” Redman said. “But, nonetheless, the language remained unclear in the end.” He said that the speech fell short on all three points of the U.S. formula.

Redman said that if Arafat meets the U.S. conditions in the future, Washington will be prepared to immediately open substantive talks with the PLO. And, he said, the United States would remove its objection to PLO participation in Middle East peace talks.

In the past, Administration officials have said privately that they hoped Arafat would not meet the American conditions because, if he did, it would create new friction in the U.S. relationship with Israel. This time, however, U.S. officials seemed disappointed that the PLO leader fell short. A Reagan Administration determination that the PLO had met U.S. conditions would ease the pressure on the incoming Bush Administration to deal with the issue.

Swedish diplomats, led by Foreign Minister Sten Sture Andersson, have been engaged in intense mediation between the United States and the PLO for the last week, according to Swedish sources.

“There were formulations that were tested in advance with both sides,” a Swedish official said. “We went back and forth and back and forth several times over the formula that would meet U.S. conditions for a dialogue with the U.S.”

A ranking Swedish diplomat conceded that Sweden expected “further formulations” from Arafat that were not in the speech.

Redman, insisting that the process should not be considered negotiations, said that the United States had conveyed its terms to the PLO through “third parties.” He said the same “third parties” informed Washington that Arafat would meet the conditions.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz and a personal assistant, Charles Hill, informed the Israeli Embassy in Washington that the United States was prepared to open talks with the PLO. Israel’s state-owned radio reported Tuesday that Arafat’s speech was submitted to American officials and that Arafat agreed to change some of the language to meet U.S. objections.

Redman insisted that the United States never saw a copy of Arafat’s text before the speech was delivered.

William B. Quandt, a former National Security Council staff member in the Carter Administration and an expert on Arab politics, said the U.S. reaction was “less negative” than it was after the Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers. He said that U.S. officials apparently were miffed that Arafat failed to use the exact language that he had outlined to the Swedes.

“They (Administration officials) thought they had some sort of explicit understanding of exactly what would be said and what would be said in response,” Quandt said. “But that didn’t work out. A fair reading of the speech, absent the knowledge of something else that was not there, is that this is a significant step beyond Algiers or even beyond Stockholm.”

Times staff writers Robin Wright in Washington, Daniel Williams in Jersualem and William Tuohy in Geneva contributed to this story.