NEWS ANALYSIS : Christopher’s Next Job: Palestinian Face-Saving : Diplomacy: Having helped Israel ease out of the deportee crisis, the secretary of state now faces another such task.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who a month ago devised a face-saving formula for Israel to ease itself out of the crisis over the Palestinians it exiled to southern Lebanon, will be asked today to craft a similar out for the Palestinian leadership.

Faisal Husseini, head of the Palestinian team in the Arab-Israeli peace talks, will tell Christopher plainly that the Palestinians also need a compromise that pulls them out of the crisis over the deportees--but one that strengthens their domestic political standing and allows the negotiations to resume.

The problem with the first formula, Palestinians close to the negotiating team explained Monday, is that it was worked out by the United States to help Israel avoid international sanctions for the deportation.

But it failed to take into account the needs of the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks.

The result, Palestinian sources said, is that the crisis remains unresolved--and could deepen, if the Clinton Administration seeks to reconvene the peace talks without the assurance of Palestinian participation that could be reached in the discussions that Christopher will hold here this week, when he is scheduled to shuttle between meetings with each side.

“The issue of the deportees has to be resolved before the next round of talks,” Hanan Ashrawi, spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation, declared, and an opinion survey of Palestinians showed that 84% of those polled were flatly against a return to the talks without a resolution.

The essence of the Palestinian problem lies, however, not in the timetable for the return of the 396 men still in southern Lebanon--Israel has offered to take about 100 back immediately and said all could return by year’s end--but in the right that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin claims to deport those whom he wishes in the name of Israeli security.

“Even if the Israelis said they would bring all the men back by August, we would still have problems going back to the talks in April,” an adviser to the Palestinian delegation said. “The perception among our people would be that we caved in to the Israelis and Americans on an issue of principle . . . and whatever agreements we reached would be rejected on those grounds.”

What the Palestinian leadership wants as a minimum, these sources said, is a clear Israeli promise to deport no one else. That pledge could come, they said, in the form of an outright Israeli commitment made to promote the peace talks, a guarantee that the U.S. might provide following Christopher’s talks with Rabin or further action at the United Nations.

And, once that principle has been dealt with, the Palestinian leadership is prepared to show flexibility on when the deportees would actually return, the sources said, and the delegation would return to the Washington negotiations.

“We have a lot of ideas and are willing to listen to anything reasonable,” Ashrawi said. “The timetable is not the problem; on that we are flexible.”

In outlining the Palestinian position in advance of the Christopher mission, the sources characterized it as a plea for assistance from the United States, not a precondition or an ultimatum. “We are asking Christopher to bring us a ladder,” a senior Palestinian leader said, “so we can get down from this tree in which we are stuck.”

A further point Husseini will make to Christopher is that the basis of the negotiations is a set of U.N. resolutions, and if Israel fails to honor fully the resolution declaring the deportations illegal and calling for the men’s immediate return, it puts in doubt its compliance with the other resolutions.

If there is no Israeli movement on the deportation issue, however--and Rabin said over the weekend he considered the matter “closed and not to be reopened”--Husseini is prepared to tell Christopher that the Palestinians cannot return to the talks until all the men are home, even if that is December.

This risks a return by Syria, Jordan and Lebanon to the talks, leaving the Palestinians isolated. But the sources said the Palestinian delegation has concluded that it has little say about what its Arab partners do and that for the negotiations to succeed, ultimately the Palestinians will have to be brought back in.

“Our credibility is so diminished by the lack of results, by this crisis, by our inability to meet people’s expectations, that we are in a do-or-die situation,” a delegation member said.