Hardest Task Still Lies Ahead : Palestinians’ Euphoria Quickly Turns to Caution

The Reagan Administration’s decision to open a dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization marks not only a major shift in U.S. policy but also the start of a hopeful, yet also hazardous, phase in the search for peace in the Middle East.

A sense of relief and--among Palestinians here--euphoria greeted Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s announcement in Washington on Wednesday that the United States was lifting its 13-year-old ban on official contacts with the PLO.

“We did it. We did it. We won,” one PLO official exclaimed as he hugged a burly colleague and twirled him around in a half-spin when the news reached delegates attending a special session of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in Geneva.

Barely a day later, however, talks with diplomats and other area specialists indicated that the euphoria is already beginning to dissipate; even Palestinian officials concede that the hardest part of the task for them still lies ahead.

“We have won a new dimension of legitimacy, thanks to the support we received from Europe and the change in the U.S. position. Now we have to live up to it,” one senior PLO source said.

“We think the American decision is a turning point that will help guide all the parties concerned to a just and lasting peace, but we have no illusions about what lies ahead,” added Bassam abu Sharif, a senior adviser to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. “We know a new stage has started. It means hard work. It will be difficult.”

The General Assembly, concluding a three-day debate that was moved to Geneva after the United States refused to grant Arafat a visa to visit U.N. headquarters in New York, called Thursday for the convening of an international Mideast peace conference to negotiate a comprehensive settlement between Israel and all of its Arab adversaries, including the PLO.

U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, hailing the U.S. decision on the PLO as “an historic turning point,” said he will return to New York today to begin consultations on the preparations for such a conference.

However, the fact that the PLO has finally secured an opening for itself in the negotiating process does not mean that such a conference is any closer to actually being convened. Israel still has not agreed to it, and the United States, in the words of Vernon A. Walters, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is still “not terribly keen” on a negotiating format that Washington feels would only serve as a forum for “posturing and propaganda purposes.”

The United States, Walters told reporters here, will be opening its talks with the PLO with the aim of “looking for some kind of common ground that could lead to direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Substantive Differences

The fact that there seems, at the moment, to be very little common ground on the question of a negotiating format is only one of many substantive differences between Washington and the PLO, even though the PLO has satisfied major U.S. demands by stating its acceptance of Israel and renouncing terrorism.

“No one in the region should go into spasms of euphoria or gloom over the U.S. decision, because what comes out of it depends on a whole range of unknowables,” a senior Western diplomat cautioned.

Among these are what kind of government finally emerges in Israel, how the incoming administration of President-elect George Bush decides to follow up on the outgoing Reagan Administration’s initiative and, perhaps most critically, what the PLO itself can make of its new opportunity.

“It’s crucial that they don’t just leave it here, that a dialogue with the United States is not taken by the Palestinians as an end in itself or a victory that can be exploited,” said one diplomat based in the Middle East.

Extreme Caution Expected

For this reason, the diplomat added, the United States is at least initially expected to approach its dialogue with the PLO with extreme caution. “I wouldn’t expect much in the way of drama over the next few weeks. The initial meetings will probably be more in the nature of photo opportunities,” he said.

Robert H. Pelletreau Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia, who has been charged by Shultz with conducting the dialogue, has already made an initial telephone contact with the PLO’s political office in Tunis to arrange for a meeting that is expected to take place soon.

PLO sources in Tunis, reflecting their own caution, said that representation from the Palestinian side would probably start out at a “lower level.”

But, however ceremonial at first, the opening of a dialogue still represents the start of a major diplomatic undertaking offering opportunities and risks in equal measure for both sides.

Essential First Step

In the view of moderate Arab governments, such as those in Jordan and Egypt, talking to the PLO was the first essential step the United States had to take to reassume its central role as chief peacemaker in the Middle East following what they regarded as eight years of diplomatic timidity by the Reagan Administration.

“The image and the influence of the United States in the region is greatly increased by this move, which also strengthens the positions of the Arab moderates,” one diplomat said.

“Finally, they have their vindication, something in terms of real progress to point to when the radicals in the region accuse them of selling out,” another diplomat added.

This vindication is especially important for Arafat who, against the resistance of PLO radicals, has been trying to steer his organization onto a more moderate course in recent months.

Key Meeting Last Month

The effect of this effort first became apparent last month, when the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s so-called parliament in exile, approved a new political platform that implicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist by endorsing a peace settlement based on U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which provide the legal foundation for all American peace initiatives in the region over the past 20 years.

This, in turn, energized a new burst of diplomatic activity by Arab and some West European nations aimed at encouraging the start of a U.S.-Palestinian dialogue.

In particular, Egyptian and Swedish mediation efforts were pivotal in this process and finally bore fruit here in Geneva on Wednesday, when Arafat issued a statement that Washington said finally met its three longstanding conditions for talking to the PLO--unequivocal acceptance of Resolutions 242 and 338, recognition of Israel’s right to exist and a renunciation of terrorism.

While many in the region--not just the Israelis and the Americans--still have serious doubts as to whether the PLO can keep these promises, the real measure of what happened here in Geneva has less to do with what was gained than with what was avoided, several of the diplomats involved in the negotiations said.

‘Catastrophe’ Averted

“If we had not achieved this result . . . it would have been a catastrophe for the peace process,” a senior Egyptian official said.

“The radicals would have taken over again, and all hope of moderation could have been lost.”

The key question now is whether Arafat can demonstrate that he can deal productively with Israel.

“The Palestinians now bear the primary responsibility for working to assure the Israelis that they mean what Arafat just said (in Geneva),” one diplomat said. “This has increased the burden on the PLO, not lessened it. It’s their victory, but now they’ve really got to produce.”

One very serious risk in all this is that terrorism--against Israelis, against Americans and very likely against Palestinians themselves--will increase precisely because of Arafat’s renunciation of it.

The PLO is not a homogeneous organization completely under Arafat’s control, and outside the group are other, even more radical factions totally opposed to the peace process.

Talks Could Be Sabotaged

There is a real danger that one or more of these groups will now try to sabotage that process by staging terrorist attacks in the PLO’s name, diplomats and other officials in the region say.

Israel, which still refuses to talk to the PLO and is strongly opposed to the American decision to do so, is liable to quickly seize upon any such terrorist attack as proof that the PLO cannot keep its promises.

These are just a few of the risks involved as the turbulent Middle East embarks on what everyone in Geneva this week agreed is a critical, possibly even historic, new phase.

Arafat, in his speech before the General Assembly on Wednesday, said that the olive branch he first brought to the United Nations 14 years ago has since then been so watered “with blood, sweat and tears” that it has turned into “a tree with roots entrenched in the ground and a stem reaching for the sky.”

That poetic analogy can be stretched a bit further, however. If peace can be likened to a tree, then those who support it in the Middle East are still sitting very precariously on one of its slenderest limbs.