Israel to Arrest 3 Palestinians Who Met Arafat : Diplomacy: Seizing Arab delegates to Mideast peace talks could risk derailing the negotiations.

Police will arrest three leading members of the Palestinian delegation to Middle East peace talks because they met openly with Yasser Arafat, head of the banned Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel’s minister of police said Friday.

The trio, delegation leader Faisal Husseini and spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi from Jerusalem and chief negotiator Haidar Abdel Shafi from the Gaza Strip, met in a televised session with Arafat on Thursday in Amman, Jordan. Photographs of Ashrawi embracing a smiling Arafat were published in Israeli newspapers.

Contact with the PLO is illegal under Israeli anti-terrorism laws. With Israeli elections scheduled Tuesday, the beleaguered government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir apparently felt it had no choice but to react with an arrest threat or lose credibility as a law-and-order, tough-on-Arabs party.

“The moment they return to the country, they will be arrested,” Police Minister Ronni Milo told a campaign rally.

The threatened arrests could run the risk of derailing the peace talks, which are based in part on Israeli willingness to negotiate with local leaders regardless of their expressed loyalty to the PLO.

Government officials for the first time all but admitted that such local Palestinian leaders as Husseini and Ashrawi have met before with Arafat during the course of the Middle East peace talks, which began last October. Meetings have taken place in Morocco, Tunisia, which is the PLO’s headquarters in exile, and most recently in Egypt after Arafat had recovered from injuries received in an air crash.

Despite this history, Israeli officials suggested that it was not acceptable for the Palestinians to have flaunted their contacts in such an obviously staged manner. Shamir insists that only representatives from the West Bank and Gaza be allowed to speak for the Palestinians at the peace table. Ashrawi and Husseini have been barred from the talks because they are residents of Arab parts of Jerusalem, over which Israel claims full, non-negotiable sovereignty.

“There is a difference between rumors concerning briefings they received in the past and violating the law of the State of Israel in full view of the entire world,” Milo said.

Shamir called the public encounter a “provocation.”

“We have to do something,” the prime minister told reporters. “It is all against the agreements we have taken with the Palestinians and with the sponsors of the peace talks.”

Shamir was referring to an elaborate fig leaf designed in coordination with the United States to hide the PLO’s backstage role during the peace talks. No Palestinian flags are permitted in negotiating rooms, and Israeli officials refuse to meet with Palestinians in exile, ostensibly to preclude PLO participation.

However, at all peace sessions held so far, PLO advisers have been present to direct the negotiators from hotel rooms. Scores of Palestinian leaders and technical experts from the West Bank and Gaza Strip have visited PLO headquarters in Tunis for coordinating sessions.

In Washington, a State Department spokesman tried put the fig leaf back in place Friday. “We’ve repeatedly stated that the PLO is not part of the peace process that we have helped construct, and we’re troubled by the meeting and we have conveyed our concerns to the Palestinians,” he said.

With just days remaining in the Israeli election campaign, the Palestinian publicity ploy could create traps for Shamir as well as for his chief rival, Yitzhak Rabin of the dovish Labor Party.

Shamir is guarding his right wing against challenges from parties that oppose the peace talks out of hand. The far right, trying to influence Likud voters, seized on the Arafat meeting to blast Shamir for having met “with the PLO.”

If Rabin’s eventual response to the Amman meeting is considered soft, Rabin might lose former Likud voters who were wavering in their support of Shamir but who mistrust Labor’s willingness to negotiate with the Arabs.

On Friday, the Labor Party decided to try to have the issue both ways. It accused Shamir of having “ongoing, direct negotiations with the PLO.” Then, according to a party statement, Labor, once in power, plans to negotiate with the same Palestinians who met Arafat.

The Palestinians, rarely adept at playing to Israeli public opinion, are taking risks of their own. Rabin, their preferred candidate, was leading in the polls. The PLO, by inserting themselves into the campaign, could stir a backlash against Labor and dovish parties.

Analysts in Jerusalem say the PLO may have taken the gamble because it has concluded that even if Rabin wins a plurality of votes, the next Israeli government is likely to be a Rabin-Shamir coalition, and that no matter which heads the next government, it was time to make each aware that the PLO was coming out of the closet.