NEWS ANALYSIS : Deportations May Spur Direct Israel-PLO Talks

Israel’s dramatic deportation of more than 400 Palestinian political activists could lead to the country’s first direct negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, senior Israeli officials and strategic analysts said Friday.

While making no apology for Israel’s biggest expulsion of Palestinians outside wartime, they see a breakthrough, rather than a breakdown, ahead in the Arab-Israeli peace talks.

Their logic runs this way: Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was rapidly losing domestic political support because of the surge in guerrilla attacks by militant Islamic groups, will regain sufficient strength through this crackdown to move ahead in negotiations on Palestinian autonomy.

But to get the Palestinian delegates back to the negotiations after Thursday’s expulsions, they say, Rabin will have to make major concessions in the powers that Israel is offering to the proposed “Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority”--and talk directly to the PLO.

“The attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad (the militant Muslim groups) made it clear to everyone in the government that we have to come to a settlement on the Palestinian question with the PLO and do so quickly,” a senior Israeli official said Friday. “We feel we can deal with the PLO; we cannot deal with Hamas or Islamic Jihad.”

For years, any suggestion of Israel talking with the PLO, let alone negotiating with it the future of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, has received from successive Israeli governments an adamant reply of “No, never.” For Israelis, unauthorized contacts with the PLO have, in fact, been a crime.

Yet, the profound desire for peace among Israelis, along with fundamental changes in the PLO itself, has increasingly brought the antagonists together. Many Israelis now see the PLO as moderate in its nationalism, a movement with which they can perhaps resolve the issue on which the future of the Middle East depends.

Rabin had been discussing with his advisers in recent weeks the opening of direct talks with the PLO as a way to accelerate the autonomy negotiations. In the wake of the expulsions--which late Friday brought a rebuke from the U.N. Security Council--Israeli politicians and commentators urged the government to make the move now that he has dealt with the security issue.

“I think we should make concessions to the Palestinians,” said Uzi Baram, a Cabinet member from Rabin’s Labor Party. “I think we should talk with the PLO.”

Shulamit Aloni, the education minister from the left-wing Meretz bloc, agreed that direct talks with the PLO are necessary to resuscitate negotiations that have been carried on for the past year with Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “We should talk directly with the PLO,” she declared.

Yossi Ginosaur, former head of Israel’s General Security Service, commonly known as Shin Bet, agreed, saying, “We have to (talk to the PLO). Only the PLO can provide the necessary guarantees for any (peace) agreements.”

Other Israeli officials and strategists reasoned that the blows being dealt to Hamas and Islamic Jihad--the expulsion of 415 of their leaders, arrests of more than 1,400 other supporters this week, measures to halt the flow of Arab funds to them--would show Palestinians that the “rejectionist” strategy is a failure; they would gradually increase support for the PLO.

While timing is an important factor, a long delay will only increase Palestinian anger and frustration, these sources said, and, thus, strengthen those groups, particularly the militant Islamic movements; those groups argue against any negotiation or compromise with Israel.

“Tactically, we wait until the furor dies down over the deportations, and then we put very attractive new proposals on the table,” a Rabin adviser from outside the government said, sketching “a possible approach” to salvage the peace negotiations. “We put up something they will have to discuss. . . . In addition, we offer the PLO direct negotiations, making it appear as the price we pay to get the Palestinians back into the talks but in reality getting their decision makers to sit down with us.”

But Ziad Abu Ziad, a prominent Palestinian journalist and adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks, rejected this reasoning as naively self-serving. “Israeli double-think,” he said in a dismissive fashion.

“Recognition of the PLO won’t help now,” Abu Ziad said. “This was the death blow to the peace process. This has hurt moderate elements and proven the claims of those who were opposed to the peace process and said Israel was not sincere.”

Hanna Siniora, the influential editor of the East Jerusalem newspaper Al Fajr, said there would be no further negotiations unless Israel rescinds the deportation orders and allows the Islamic activists to return from the no-man’s-land between the Lebanese army and Israeli forces in southern Lebanon. Acknowledging this as unlikely, Siniora commented, “This means it is the end of the . . . peace process.”

As for the deportees, news agencies reported that a convoy of three U.N. and International Red Cross trucks arrived after dark Friday with 40 tents and more than 1,000 blankets for them. They waited in the cold and dark, even as U.N. members in New York met to ponder their expulsion.

Meantime, Hamas supporters appeared undeterred by the Israeli crackdown and tight security as they demonstrated outside the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, after midday prayers on Friday at Islam’s third holiest shrine.

Perhaps the one thing that might reverse the situation, Abu Ziad said, would be a meeting between Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. Although Rabin has publicly rejected this option, senior Israeli officials said it has been among half a dozen ideas under discussion.

U.N. CONDEMNATION: The Security Council denounces expulsion. A20