Why Talk to Arafat If He Can’t Deliver?

A week has passed since the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia delivered a note to the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization demanding that its chairman, Yasser Arafat, condemn those responsible for last week’s terrorist attack on the Israeli coast. The note also insisted that the factional leader who planned the raid, Abul Abbas, be removed from the PLO’s executive committee. Failure to comply, Administration spokesmen have said, will jeopardize the two-year-old dialogue between Washington and the PLO.

In the days since, Arafat, who apparently knew nothing of the operation, has refused to condemn the attack, and has insisted that he lacks the power to discipline Abbas, who, as head of the Baghdad-based Palestine Liberation Front, was responsible for the assault on the cruise ship Achille Lauro. Worse, the PLO’s second in command, Salah Khalaf, told The Times that since the raiders’ purported targets were Israeli military officers, the attack was not proscribed by the PLO renunciation of terrorism that preceded the beginning of talks with the United States. Israeli officials say that captured documents and the debriefing of the surviving terrorists indicate their targets included the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, a department store and Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union.

Whether these facts and the double talk by Arafat and his aide justify an end to the U.S. dialogue with the PLO remains to be determined. But they do raise serious questions about whether Arafat is, indeed, a credible negotiating partner and about whether his organization is, as it claims, the sole representative of the Palestinian people.

Arafat’s advisers argue that America has no choice but to continue the dialogue, since, as a responsible power, it must talk with all parties in the Mideast. Perhaps, but while a responsible power may have an obligation to talk, it cannot conclude agreements with parties too weak or deceitful to deliver on their promises--or recommend to others that they do so.