Israel May Have to Talk to PLO, Baker Declares

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, hinting at a dramatic reversal of American policy, said Tuesday that there may be no realistic way to make peace in the Middle East unless Israel negotiates directly with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

In an appearance before a House Appropriations subcommittee, Baker said that the Bush Administration ultimately may conclude that the PLO is so popular among Palestinian residents of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip that peace talks would be impossible without including the organization. Israel steadfastly refuses to recognize the PLO.

Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Arens, who is visiting Washington, immediately reaffirmed Israel’s refusal to deal in any way with the PLO, an organization that he said is guilty of the “worst atrocities we’ve ever seen since World War II.”

‘It May Be That You Can’t’

But, declared Baker: “If you can’t have direct negotiations that are meaningful that do not involve negotiations with the PLO . . . we would then have to see negotiations between Israelis and representatives of the PLO. It may be that you can have meaningful negotiations that don’t involve the PLO; it may be that you can’t.”

For more than a decade, the U.S. government has joined Israel in excluding the PLO from the Middle East peace process. For instance, former Secretary of State George P. Shultz maintained that Palestinians could be represented in negotiations only as part of a joint delegation led by Jordan. Although Shultz agreed late last year to launch an unprecedented U.S. dialogue with the PLO--after its chairman, Yasser Arafat, renounced the use of terrorism--he never suggested that Israel might have to deal with the organization directly.

For its part, the PLO for many years refused even to consider peaceful negotiations with Israel. However, Arafat said recently that his organization is ready for such talks.

Follow Arens-Bush Talks

Baker’s comments, apparently intended both to warn Israeli hard-liners that they can no longer take for granted U.S. support for their policy of isolating the PLO and to strengthen moderation among Palestinians, came less than 24 hours after Arens conferred with President Bush, Baker, Vice President Dan Quayle and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. The Israeli foreign minister said that the U.S. officials made no such suggestion in their face-to-face meetings.

“None of them urged Israel to talk to the PLO,” Arens said Tuesday in answer to a question after a speech to the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “We need peace more than anybody else and we don’t need to be urged,” Arens said. “But we need (negotiating) partners.”

He said that Israel is following a three-track approach to negotiations that calls for encouraging Jordan’s King Hussein to come to the table, identifying “legitimate interlocutors” among Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and bringing any other Arab state into the process.

He conceded that Hussein and virtually all prominent Palestinians refuse to enter negotiations with Israel and argue that Israel should, instead, talk to the PLO. But he said that this is because of PLO intimidation.

“The PLO wants to impose itself as a negotiating partner,” Arens said. But he said the Israeli government is determined not to “give the PLO that recognition” because to do so would be to encourage terrorism, undermine Hussein’s rule in Jordan and cause dissension in the Arab population of Israel proper.

Nevertheless, Arens obliquely conceded the PLO’s popularity with West Bank residents when he said of municipal elections in the West Bank in 1976 that “nobody ever maintained that they were not free or fair.” PLO-backed candidates won almost every contest in 1976. The Israeli military government canceled subsequent elections because, Israeli officers said, the PLO was certain to win again.

Rep. Matthew F. McHugh (D-N.Y.) told Baker during the House subcommittee hearing that although he wished it were not so, he knows of no legitimate Palestinian leadership outside the PLO.

‘We May Conclude That’

“We may ultimately conclude that,” Baker said.

For the time being, he added, the Administration supports negotiations between Israel and Palestinians without specifying who those Palestinians should be. If representative Palestinians can be found outside of the PLO, Baker indicated, that would be the best result; but, if not, Israel would have to consider talking to the PLO.

Lack of Trust

Yair Tsaban, a member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) from the leftist Mapam Party, told a seminar at the Brookings Institution in Washington that Israelis may not trust the PLO but that a growing number of them have concluded that some form of recognition is inevitable.

“The only way to examine the intentions (of the PLO) is around the negotiating table,” Tsaban said.

Tsaban was in the United States for a just-concluded meeting at Columbia University in New York that was attended by Israeli leftists and representatives of the PLO.