Most Knesset Labor Members Back PLO Talks

In a major shift in Israeli political opinion, more than two-thirds of the members of Parliament from the ruling Labor Party want the government to open direct negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, according to the results of a poll released Saturday.

Thirty of the 44 Labor members of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, told state-run Israel Radio, which conducted the poll, that they favor direct talks with the PLO on the future of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“I am for it. I think we must talk with the enemy,” said Avigdor Kahalani, a retired general. “I support talking with the enemy to achieve peace.”

Although Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is moving in the same direction, he continues to hold back, perhaps from Israel’s longstanding and often-stated view of the PLO as a terrorist organization but perhaps saving such a major policy change for the moment when it will bring the greatest tactical gain.

Seven of the 13 Labor members of the Cabinet, among them Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, were among the 14 opposed to direct talks, Israel Radio said.

But Peres’ position is not deeply rooted, associates said Saturday evening, and after assessing the party shift and the state of the present negotiations he might change his position and, in doing so, force a change in the government’s stance.

Some of the Labor members of the Knesset said they want their caucus to instruct the government to make the change now in order to accelerate the negotiations that Israel is already conducting with West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, who support the PLO yet are not formally in its leadership.

But Eli Dayan, chairman of the caucus, said that the question is of such fundamental importance that it should be taken back to the party’s Central Committee, a far larger body that is likely to be more conservative on the issue and to respond to Rabin’s wishes.

“I oppose direct talks with the PLO,” Knesset member Yosef Vanunu said. “We must continue our current path, negotiating with representatives from the territories in Judea, Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza.”

With his Cabinet deeply divided over the expulsion of 415 Muslim fundamentalists from the West Bank and Gaza Strip--a move that has fueled unrest in the occupied territories--Rabin already feels himself under pressure on the Palestinian issue, according to Israeli commentators, and was not pleased to find himself publicly so outflanked by Labor members of the Knesset.

Rabin was conspicuously absent from the Knesset, leaving for a European trip, when preliminary approval was given last summer to legislation making it legal again for Israelis to talk with PLO officials.

But Rabin has also suggested that it might be better for Israel to talk with the PLO directly in the negotiations, because only the PLO has the ability to make the hard decisions that will be necessary in reaching an agreement on self-government.

“On the one hand, Rabin wants to prepare public opinion for dealing with the PLO directly and openly,” one longtime adviser said, “but he wants to do it himself, in his own way, in his own time. . . .

“He’s very much the autocrat, and ideas from below, even if they represent a democratic expression of views, are not welcome. He is the general, the chief of staff, and these MKs (Knesset members) are but colonels and majors.”

Still, the Knesset members’ views are likely to translate quickly into a push within the Labor caucus for a more forthcoming Israeli proposal to the Palestinians in the present Arab-Israeli negotiations when they resume in Washington in February.

The government has been contemplating an overture to the PLO, if not its formal inclusion in the talks, as a way of ensuring the Palestinians’ return to the negotiations following the Israeli deportation to southern Lebanon of suspected supporters of the militant Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.

“The reason for my change of mind is that . . . we have reached a situation in which it is preferable to sit with the PLO and talk with them to further peace,” Shlomo Bohkbaht, another Labor Party member of the Knesset, said. “Otherwise, tomorrow we will have to sit with Hamas, which we all oppose.”

Such an effort would be supported by the Meretz bloc, Labor’s main partner in the coalition government, which favors not only direct negotiations with the PLO but the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.