In Shift, Israel Gives Nod to PLO Delegates

Breaking its longstanding refusal to deal with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel said Friday that it would negotiate terms of Palestinian self-government with a PLO-appointed delegation.

Although Palestinian delegates to the Arab-Israeli peace talks will now formally represent the PLO, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Israel will continue talking with them, regarding their new status as “an internal Palestinian affair.”

“There is a Palestinian delegation with which we are negotiating,” Peres said. “Its relations with (PLO headquarters in) Tunis are its business. . . . They are improving or changing their internal relations. For us, it does not matter. It is the same members of the delegation, the same names, the same people, the same procedure. Even before, we knew whom they were consulting.”

Some Israeli officials went further than Peres, expressing hope that the Palestinian delegates’ new status will strengthen their position and speed conclusion of an autonomy agreement for the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“The delegation has lacked authority up until now, and this has undermined the negotiations,” a senior Israeli official said. “Similarly, progress has been hampered by differences between the delegates from inside the (occupied) territories and their political masters in Tunis. . . .

“Even we have seen the desirability of negotiating with the decision makers in the PLO. Well, this is it--we hope we have partners with new authority, who have a real mandate.”

The change ends the fiction that the delegates, drawn from the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and Arab East Jerusalem, were independent of the PLO, which in fact had appointed them prior to the Madrid conference on the Middle East in October, 1991. It had also directed them over the 21 months of subsequent negotiations, although always with a vague and undefined relationship.

The Palestinian move grew out of a crisis within the PLO over the limited authority of the delegation. Chief negotiator Faisal Husseini, spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi and senior delegate Saeb Erekat threatened to resign, complaining that their advice was being ignored and their efforts undercut by PLO headquarters.

The three returned home Friday from a PLO conference in Tunisia after being appointed with four others to a PLO committee steering the 21-month-old negotiations with Israel.

The move thus will bring Israeli and official PLO representatives face to face when negotiations resume in Washington on Aug. 30. Although that session will fall short of the formal, direct negotiations that the PLO wants with Israel, the breakthrough was acknowledged on all sides.

“I believe that what is going on is preparing the ground for direct negotiations between the Israelis and the leadership of the PLO,” Husseini said on his return from Tunisia on Friday. “Those negotiations, with our leadership, will ultimately be the decisive ones, but we believe we are newly empowered.” With their strengthened authority, the Palestinians will press hard for immediate autonomy for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho--including full Israeli withdrawal from the areas--Husseini said.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s ready acquiescence in the change--”We see no difference,” a Rabin aide said blandly, “and we look forward to more productive negotiations”--was widely attacked from the right.

“This is rapid slippage toward negotiations with the PLO,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, chairman of the opposition Likud Party. “No responsible government should negotiate with those who seek its destruction.”

Yitzhak Shamir, who as prime minister led Israel into the Madrid conference and Washington talks on Palestinian autonomy, accused Rabin of “trying to destroy the entire barrier we created” to keep the PLO out of the negotiations and thus foreclose the possibility of an independent Palestinian state. “This may be a fatal breach in our defenses,” Shamir warned.

Yehiel Leiter, a leader of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, which speaks for most Israeli settlers in the occupied territories, said that even at Madrid, Israel had been negotiating indirectly with the PLO and that now most ministers in the Rabin Cabinet favor direct talks.

“This is part of the process of chipping away at the little bit of self-respect we had (and) leading ultimately to face-to-face negotiations with (PLO Chairman) Yasser Arafat himself,” Leiter said.

Arafat on Friday reiterated his call for Israel to make a “peace of the brave” with the Palestinians, saying from Tunis in a monthly message to Palestinians: “We renew our appeal to Israeli leaders to take the initiative for peace and prove their seriousness and their sincerity.” While previous Israeli governments banned contacts with the organization, branding the 29-year-old PLO a terrorist group bent on destroying Israel, Rabin’s center-left government has gradually softened the country’s stance on talks with the organization. And three Israeli ministers have reportedly met with senior PLO officials in the last two months.

Peres nevertheless argued, “Israel is not talking to the PLO. Israel is conducting negotiations with a Palestinian delegation composed of residents of the (occupied) territories who are not members in any terrorist organization.”

Although its effect was to push Israel toward direct negotiations with the PLO, the Palestinian move was said to foster a new coherence within the group.

“From now on, there will be coordination in a way that we can always be there (at PLO headquarters in Tunis) and not just from time to time,” Husseini said, explaining that two committees, one advisory and the other decision-making, have been integrated with the inclusion of seven delegates, or their advisers, in the PLO’s steering committee for the peace talks.