Patience Is Running Out, Arafat Says : Warns That PLO May Reevaluate Moderate Policy

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat today challenged President Bush’s commitment to human rights and said the PLO might rethink its peace drive if the United States and Israel fail to respond to it.

He said he might convene the Palestinian parliament-in-exile to consider the results of its decision in November to pursue a moderate policy based on a Palestinian state coexisting with Israel.

Arafat said Israel had intensified what he called oppression against the Palestinian uprising.

Slain Palestinians

He named six Palestinians he said had been killed by the Israelis in the occupied territories in fewer than 24 hours. Eighteen had been killed since Saturday, he said.

Arafat waved a magnetic identity card, introduced by Israel on Friday, that must be carried by more than 60,000 Gaza Palestinians who work in Israel.

“These six new martyrs are an example of Israel’s iron fist policies. The magnetic cards are another example of Israeli discrimination against Palestinians,” he said several times.

“I would like to ask Bush, who keeps defending human rights, what he thinks of these cards and of the killings,” Arafat said.

“Where is the American position on human rights? Or does that . . . stop when it comes to talking about rights of the Palestinians?”

Arafat said the PLO raised Israel’s measures against Palestinians at every meeting it had with the Americans. “The only reply we get from them is to focus on Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s (election) plan,” he said.

“Patience has limits,” Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told a news conference. “At the end I am obliged to call for our PNC (Palestine National Council) . . . and they will decide what policy they are going to take.”

Civil Disobedience

He said the PLO might call for full-scale civil disobedience to step up the 20-month-old uprising in the Israeli-occupied territories and was considering other tactics that he declined to discuss.

“I am not going to deceive my people. They have the right to know the facts. . . . They have to understand the Israeli policy, Israeli crimes and the conspiracy they (Palestinians) are facing,” Arafat said.

The PNC approved a peace strategy in November calling for an independent Palestinian state to coexist with Israel in its pre-1967 borders.

In December Arafat met U.S. conditions for a dialogue with the PLO when he renounced terrorism and accepted Israel’s right to exist.

The PLO has complained that the talks with Washington have moved too slowly and have not addressed PLO ideas on peace.