The Peace Process Falls for the Decoys : Middle East: Yasser Arafat could not meet the Bush Administration’s conditions. Now he’s played into Abul Abbas’ hands.

Yasser Arafat himself predicted the Palestinian terrorist assault in May on an Israeli beach--or its equivalent--a year and a half ago when at a meeting with five American Jews in Stockholm, he announced the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition of Israel and the disavowal of terrorism. The Americans asked if his statements also covered the dissident rejectionist groups within the PLO.

Two weeks before, the Palestinian National Council, the PLO’s legislative arm, had met in Algiers and, on a 5-1 vote, authorized Arafat to take those positions. The intifada had erupted nearly a year earlier and he understood that part of its message was addressed to him--the years of terrorism had achieved nothing but hatred and a new strategy was needed.

In the intervening months before Algiers and Stockholm, Arafat indefatigably traveled North Africa and the Middle East to lobby among the PNC members for support. He got all but 20%, those being the hard-liners. It was a major turn for the PLO.

So in answer to our original question about the rejectionists, Arafat’s response was clear. Right from the beginning, he said that if this dramatic shift produced no response from the United States and especially from Israel, then dissident elements under George Habash, Nayef Hawatmeh, Abul Abbas and others would begin to threaten his leadership. That was exactly what happened on the beach in Tel Aviv.

Abbas’ Palestine Liberation Front, which committed the beach action, is both the smallest and the most militant of the fringe groups within the PLO. Abbas is a rejectionist who wants neither negotiations nor peace with Israel. But he knew--all the time laughing to himself--that Israel, Washington and much of American Jewry, including most Jewish members of Congress, would deal with the beach incident by claiming that it was Arafat’s doing, pure and simple. President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III were caught in the resulting political frenzy and finally suspended the U.S.-PLO dialogue in Tunis. They were responding to the politics of the situation, not to its logic or its merits.

That Arafat did not meet Washington’s conditions for continuing the dialogue surprised few. After all, the instinct to avoid his adversary’s trap--that is, to play into Abbas’ hands--must itself have been overwhelming. The Bush Administraiton had just vetoed the U.N. Security Council resolution for a human rights survey team to go into the occupied territories, having earlier tacitly led observers to believe that it would not use the veto. At the very moment it was making demands on Arafat, Washington was thereby squandering some of its credibility, goodwill and moral authority to make any demands. Arafat’s final straw had to be the humiliation that the Bush-Baker team immediately added by going public with stern demands that he condemn and discipline Abbas. Knowing the internal politics of the PLO, they also knew that such public demands would make it harder for him to accede.

Nevertheless, accede he should have. It is the classic response of the underdog--which, unfortunately, Arafat is in this instance--to place too much emphasis on principle when the others, especially Washington, were giving a higher priority to politics and face-saving. His unwillingness to meet those demands has now helped put the dialogue and quite possibly the peace process on the back burner. So, in the final analysis, and despite himself, Arafat played into Abbas’ game anyway. All of us are the losers--the glee of Yitzhak Shamir and some Israeli and American hard-liners notwithstanding.

For what end, anyone concerned with Israel should be asking, was the clamor to stop the Tunis talks all about? There is now far less opportunity for moral and political pressure on Arafat to moderate further--which was the point in the first place. The United States also gives up the tools with which to strengthen Arafat against his own dissidents. The other side of that coin is that Washington has now abetted Abbas and his ilk in their drive to dislodge Arafat from the PLO leadership. If they succeed, Shamir may be pleased, but Israel would then face either the Abbas types calling the shots in the territories or else a fundamentalist leadership financed by Iran, a dynamic that already is disturbingly on the increase.

Since forming his new Likud-led government, Shamir once again is talking peace just as he did in May, 1988. No doubt, he will again work resolutely to undermine the plan, always rationalizing that Arafat and the PLO are not the true representatives of the Palestinian people. This time he even expresses a willingness to sit down with the likes of Hafez Assad of Syria but not with Arafat.

Leading Palestinians from the territories are now seeking an internationally supervised poll or plebiscite of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to determine their choice of representation. Arafat should add to this calling of Shamir’s bluff by applying his own pressure and put to rest once and for all, and one way or the other, Shamir’s argument that the PLO does not represent the Palestinians in the territories. Then perhaps the peace process can move forward without deliberately distracting decoys.