Time for Peace, Arafat Declares : PLO Chief Tells U.N. of 3-Point Mideast Plan

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, addressing an expectant and unprecedented special session here of the U.N. General Assembly, said Tuesday that Palestinians want to live in peace alongside Israel and are ready to join its leaders in seizing “a historic, possibly irreplaceable opportunity” to negotiate a lasting settlement of the 40-year-old Arab-Israeli dispute.

“Come, let us make peace,” Arafat said at the conclusion of an often emotional 80-minute address before the General Assembly, which was meeting away from its New York headquarters for the first time.

“Let us make peace. Let us cast away fear and intimidation and leave behind the specter of wars that have raged continuously in the furnace of this conflict for the past 40 years,” he said in presenting a three-point Palestinian peace plan.

‘Historic’ Decisions

Following “historic” decisions adopted last month in Algeria by the Palestine National Council, its so-called parliament in exile, Arafat asserted that the Palestine Liberation Organization has closed the “gap between reality and dream” and has pledged itself to the search for a “realistic and attainable” peace settlement based on a two-state formula and on U.N. resolutions that affirm Israel’s right to exist.

The PLO chairman, who received a one-minute ovation from many of the delegates attending the special three-day General Assembly session in Geneva’s lakeside Palais des Nations, proposed the three-point initiative that he said could lead to a settlement guaranteeing the “security and peace of all states which are parties to the conflict in the region.”

The first step, Arafat said, should be the convening of a preparatory committee, under the auspices of the U.N. secretary general, to lay the groundwork for a U.N.-sponsored international peace conference on the basis of U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which implicitly affirm Israel’s right to exist but also call upon it to withdraw from Arab territory captured during the 1967 Middle East War.

The second step, he said, would be to place this territory--the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip--under the temporary protection of U.N. peacekeeping forces “to protect our people and, at the same time, to supervise the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from our country.”

The third step would be the convening of the peace conference to negotiate a “comprehensive settlement among the parties concerned, including the state of Palestine, Israel and other neighbors,” Arafat said.

Despite what most Western and Arab diplomats agreed were a number of “positive” points in Arafat’s long-awaited address, the general reaction among the envoys flown here from New York at the United Nations’ not inconsiderable expense was one of disappointment that the PLO leader was not more explicit in either his recognition of Israel or in the way he chose to renounce terrorism and violence--the conditions that the United States has said must be met before it will agree to open a dialogue with the PLO.

Indeed, far from breaking new ground, observers said, Arafat’s speech seemed to fall slightly short of a joint statement issued after a meeting between Arafat and a delegation of American Jews in Stockholm last week, although the State Department said the “overall tone” of the Geneva speech was an improvement over the Stockholm statement.

In that declaration, which was later condemned and renounced by two hard-line factions within the PLO, Arafat reportedly said that his organization “accepted the existence of Israel as a state” and “declared its rejection and condemnation of terrorism in all its forms.”

In Geneva, on the question of terrorism, Arafat reiterated that “I condemn terrorism in all its forms.” But he then went on, in the same passage, to “salute those sitting before me in this hall who, in the days when they fought to free their countries from the yoke of colonialism, were accused of terrorism by their oppressors.”

Despite the fact that the General Assembly moved its debate on the Palestinian issue to Geneva this year--a venue chosen after the United States, citing his support for international terrorism, refused to give Arafat a visa to address the United Nations in New York--the audience that the PLO chairman was most hoping to impress was in Washington.

Both Arab and West European states, not to mention the PLO itself, hope that the incoming Bush Administration can be persuaded to open a dialogue with the PLO and become more intensively involved in the Middle East question than its predecessor was.

Expectations that this would happen were heightened by what Palestinian and Western diplomatic sources said were indirect but intensive consultations between the PLO and the incoming Bush Administration over the past week.

One Palestinian source said before Arafat’s speech that “assurances” had been received from the United States via Sweden that a direct U.S.-PLO dialogue could begin even before Bush takes office, provided Arafat explicitly and publicly repeated in Geneva the statements recognizing Israel and disavowing terrorism attributed to him in the Stockholm communique.

The source said these assurances had been received from “senior members” of both the Reagan and the Bush administrations and that Dec. 23 had been tentatively chosen as the date for a meeting “between a PLO delegation and Secretary of State (George P.) Shultz.”

The Stockholm statements were interpreted as going beyond a similar declaration by the Palestine National Council in Algiers last month. In the earlier statement, the PLO’s legislature endorsed Resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis for peace negotiations with Israel, but linked the endorsement to its demand for acceptance of Palestinian “self-determination,” or statehood. The council also denounced terrorism, but retained the right to struggle against the Israeli occupation of Arab lands.

A number of diplomats, especially those from the Arab countries, sought to put Arafat’s speech in a positive light by noting his repeated emphasis on the PLO’s willingness to accept Israel and to negotiate a realistic settlement with it.

While he accused Israel of pursuing “aggressive and expansionist policies” over the years and caustically criticized its violent attempts to repress the yearlong Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Arafat also affirmed that “we do not wish to see another drop of Jewish or Arab blood shed (and) do not want a continuation of the fighting for one extra minute.”

The Palestinians want their freedom, but not “at the expense of anyone else’s freedom,” he added. “Nor do they want a destiny which negates the destiny of another people.”

Arafat referred to his last appearance before the United Nations in 1974, when he made his now famous “olive branch and a gun” speech. This time, he referred repeatedly to the olive branch he said the Palestinians were extending to Israel but made no reference to the threat of the gun. Indeed, while he wore his trademark black-and-white-checked kaffiyeh and olive green military uniform, the equally customary pistol was, in a symbolic gesture meant to be noticed, missing from his side this time.

“I come to you in the name of my people, so that we can make a true peace. I ask the leaders of Israel to come here, under the sponsorship of the United Nations, so that together we can forge that peace. I say to them, as I say to you, that our people, who want dignity, freedom and peace for themselves and security for their state, want the same things for all the states and parties involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Arafat concluded.

Washington’s initial reaction to Arafat’s speech was decidedly cool. And while a number of diplomats hailed the conciliatory signals in the speech as evidence of the PLO’s new-found moderation and realism, they conceded that they were probably not, in themselves, enough to meet the American conditions for opening a dialogue with the PLO.

“It was a good speech in that he said he was willing to live in peace with Israel, which is the main thing,” a senior Egyptian diplomat said. “But whether it’s enough for the Americans, I don’t know. We, for our part, had hoped he would say more and pressed him to say more.”

The Americans, he added, “certainly had been expecting him to say more.”

Another non-Arab envoy put it more bluntly. “He (Arafat) did not go far enough. Why did he have to say all that stuff in Stockholm and then come down like this in Geneva? The Americans, I expect, will be pretty angry.”

Palestinian sources said the Swedish-mediated understanding with the United States fell through because of last-minute opposition by two hard-line PLO factions, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Both groups had reluctantly gone along with the decision by the Palestine National Council last month to accept for the first time U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis for a peace settlement.

But in statements issued on the eve of the Geneva meeting, they took sharp issue with Arafat’s contention, reported from Sweden, that their endorsement of these two key resolutions meant that they already recognized Israel.

This concession, which the PLO has frequently referred to as its “last card” in the negotiating process, can only be made at a peace conference and only in return for reciprocal Israeli recognition of the PLO, a Popular Front source said.

One Palestinian source said Arafat did not incorporate the Stockholm statement into his speech because of threats by the Popular Front and the Democratic Front to withdraw from the PLO if he did so.

“There is a big split,” another PLO source conceded. “The fear is that, even if we start a dialogue with the Americans, the Jewish lobby in the United States will choke it off, and we’ll end up with having made yet another concession with nothing to show for it.”

The source added, however, that Arafat may now try to maneuver around this difficulty by incorporating some of the more explicit language of the Stockholm statement into two resolutions the PLO is drafting with the help of Egypt and other Arab states.

These resolutions, to be voted upon by the General Assembly at the end of its debate, are meant to accelerate the diplomatic momentum begun in Algiers with the PLO’s implicit recognition of Israel and the declaration of an independent Palestinian state to be established alongside it, the source said.