Arafat Declares PLO Is ‘Ready to Cooperate’ : Mideast: He cautiously endorses conference and urges other Palestinians to go to the peace table.

Yasser Arafat, convening the Palestinian parliament-in-exile for the first time in nearly three years, declared that the Palestine Liberation Organization is “ready to cooperate” on a Middle East peace conference, and he launched a bid Monday to persuade the badly fractured organization to follow his lead to the peace table.

In a direct appeal to the 480-member Palestine National Council, Arafat, the PLO chairman, cautiously endorsed the peace conference but insisted that the PLO still seeks guarantees, including assurances about Israeli settlements and Israeli military withdrawal from occupied Arab lands.

“We renew our readiness to overcome the obstacles remaining on the road of convening (the peace conference). We hope that the other parties make their efforts in order to help, in their part, in solving these obstacles,” he said. “But let everybody know we reject the Israeli blackmail and the Israeli conditions.”

Arafat, under attack from moderates for his support of Iraq during the Gulf War and from radicals for his overtures toward peace, launched what promises to be a difficult effort to rally the PLO’s widely varying political factions around a common approach toward a peace conference in which they stand little chance of quickly realizing their goal of an independent Palestinian state.

Arafat is said by his aides to be inclined to move forward toward the conference, convinced there is no alternative and hopeful that the United States will provide further, if unspoken, assurances that demands for self-determination will ultimately be met.

President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III “are serious about the effort to push the peace process forward, and I believe that President Bush wants to see the occupation by Israel of the Arab lands over, because this is the only way that will stabilize the Middle East,” Bassam abu Sharif, a senior political adviser to Arafat, said in an interview.

“What we’re looking for now is a reassurance by the American Administration that what President Bush declared in front of the Congress will be done--i.e., implementation of (U.N. resolutions) 242 and 338, land for peace and the full legitimate political rights of the Palestinian people. For me, the only basic guarantee is the continuing involvement of the U.S.,” Sharif said. “It will be an ongoing process that will have to end in the fulfillment of (these rights) . . , and other guarantees don’t necessarily have to be spelled out.”

Privately, Arafat’s confidants say the PLO has little choice but to participate in a peace conference that Baker has warned will proceed with or without the Palestinians. “We will end up saying yes, or something that Arafat can look at and interpret as yes,” said another Arafat adviser. “What we have to avoid doing is telling the people that we’re going to a conference to liberate Palestine, or to end the Israeli occupation, or trade land for peace, because if we say that, there cannot help but be a very bad result.

“We have to tell them we are in a very bad situation, and there is nothing else to do. We are not going to this conference to gain anything, because we have nothing to gain. It’s an effort at damage control. It’s a question of how much do we lose if we don’t go.”

The PLO could block a meaningful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict by refusing to endorse the conference, since virtually no Palestinians from the occupied territories would proceed to the conference without PLO endorsement. In the coming days, say diplomats close to the peace process, the organization will seek to determine how far it can use that threat as a lever for more guarantees from the United States and Israel.

“The PLO has a very weak hand, but playing the spoiler role always gives you a certain strength,” said one Western diplomat. “At the same time, you have to reckon with the long-term consequences of that.”

There is widespread dissent in the PLO and outside Palestinian groups about the wisdom of proceeding to a peace conference whose terms are largely being dictated by the United States and which seems unlikely to realize the Palestinian dream of an independent homeland.

Several Damascus-based groups holding out for much more significant concessions on the terms of the conference have not yet agreed to attend this week’s council meeting, despite reported Syrian government pressure. Two Muslim fundamentalist groups opposed to any recognition of Israel also will not attend.

Radicals under the umbrella of the PLO have also opposed moving ahead to the conference. George Habash, head of the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, told reporters: “We totally, clearly and utterly reject . . . Baker’s so-called peace initiative. I urge all Palestinian factions to express their clear rejection of the American ideas, which aim at legitimizing Israel’s occupation of Arab lands.”

The U.S. handling of the peace process came in for even harsher criticism from one of the PLO’s best-known moderates, Khaled Hassan, widely known for his opposition to Arafat’s backing of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Gulf crisis.

“We have rights. The Americans are refusing to give us any of the rights they practice around the globe, including in the Soviet Union, when the Soviet Union was a country,” he said bitterly. “All your ideas about human rights, when it comes to the Palestinian people, you keep silent. Why? God knows. Now America is the superpower. That means the leader of the world,” he said. “A leader without ethics is not a leader, it’s a jungle. Now, we’re living in a jungle. . . .

“Give me one point to be optimistic,” he added. “I am known as a moderate. I am known as a man of Western thinking. Give me one point of justice. . . . This (peace) conference is not for the Palestinian question. This is to naturalize Arab-Israeli relations, and you need the Palestinians for icing the cake. . . .”

Guerrilla leader Abul Abbas--mastermind of the Achille Lauro hijacking and an abortive terrorist raid on Tel Aviv beaches that led to the suspension last year of the dialogue between the PLO and the United States--sat at the PNC sessions Monday and afterward refused to say if he would resign from the council’s executive committee to help promote the peace process.

Arafat aides have predicted he will be replaced on the committee before the week’s end. But Abbas said he declined earlier to resign from the executive committee when the United States was threatening to cut off the dialogue if Arafat did not expel Abbas. “In this time, I told Arafat that’s not right at all, because America is against us anyway,” Abbas said.

He added that he might reconsider “if the U.S. is ready to support Palestinian rights and doesn’t put any conditions to conflict with the rights of Palestinians” and if the United States commits itself to an effective application of U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338. But Abbas said he is not yet willing to renounce armed struggle. “As long as the Israelis have settlements, there is justification for struggle,” he said.

Israel has prevented 186 or so delegates living in the occupied territories from attending the meeting, but conference sources said it is likely that ban will be lifted on behalf of two Palestinians from East Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi, who recently met with Baker.