NEWS ANALYSIS : Its Goal in Sight, PLO Risks Being Torn Apart by Dissent

With its dream of a Palestinian homeland perhaps just months away, the 29-year-old Palestine Liberation Organization is being torn apart by a political crisis that threatens its ability to make the difficult decisions required for a peace agreement with Israel.

“The PLO is in danger of disintegration, and with that our hopes for Palestine will die, too,” said Sari Nusseibeh, a Jerusalem philosophy professor who has been planning a Palestinian government. “At the moment we should be achieving our goal, we are facing chaos and collapse.”

Demands are now coming daily for the resignation of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and for the purge of those around him on charges ranging from unwarranted concessions to Israel in the peace negotiations to mismanagement of Palestinian funds to outright corruption.

“The Palestinians are in a totally frustrated mood,” Shafik Hout, the PLO’s veteran representative in Lebanon, told journalists in Beirut this week. “Ever since the negotiations started 22 months ago, all they have gained is, God only knows, how many people killed, how many people wounded, how many homes demolished, how many people deported. The perception of the people is, ‘The leadership is giving concessions but where is the reward?’ ”

Hout and Mahmoud Darwish, a prominent Palestinian writer, quit the 18-member PLO Executive Committee this month denouncing Arafat for concessions he is making to Israel and the way he decides such questions. Six more Executive Committee members are reported ready to resign, largely over Arafat’s autocratic style; the commander of the PLO’s small brigade in Lebanon has called him “a tired old man” and urged him to quit.

The head of the Palestinian negotiating team, long an Arafat loyalist, called this week for a “national salvation” leadership to bring the PLO and the Palestinian nation out of the current crisis, and another high-level Palestinian negotiator, himself a founder of the PLO, has urged Arafat to yield power to a collective leadership.

Two Marxist Palestinian groups are winning widespread support on the occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip for a “national dialogue,” meetings to discuss such fundamental questions as terms for peace with Israel--and to take those decisions away from Arafat and the PLO.

Such infighting is typical of liberation movements as their countries close on self-rule, whether full independence or autonomy; various factions plainly are trying to shape the government that emerges.

But the quarreling among Palestinians has become so severe in the past month, insiders say, that the decision-making process is breaking down and the decisions themselves are affected.

“If the focus were really on the issues we have to resolve, then I would welcome the face-off, for a solid position would emerge,” commented Saeb Erekat, deputy chief delegate to the peace talks. “As it is, decisions have been very hard to get; at times, the process has been paralyzed. Then, some decisions we did get were skewed by the politics of the moment.”

The Palestinians’ political chaos has come, ironically, just as Israel was beginning a direct dialogue with the PLO, after concluding reluctantly that the movement had a popular mandate to negotiate terms for Palestinian self-government.

“The scenario for a Palestinian national disaster is before us,” Nusseibeh said, “and there is every indication that the PLO will collapse as a political vehicle, as a negotiating vehicle, even as a vehicle expressing our self-identity. . . . The pity and shame of it is that we are very close, very close indeed, to a settlement with the Israelis, a settlement that would give us a homeland.”

In an attempt to pull itself out of the growing political chaos, the PLO leadership began what will probably prove to be a crucial meeting this week at its Tunis, Tunisia, headquarters. Decisions will have to be made on the scope of Arafat’s authority, on a financial restructuring for the organization and the future shape of the PLO.

“The PLO is in crisis, and it would be unrealistic and untrue to say that it is not,” Hanan Ashrawi, spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation to the peace talks, said before the Tunis meeting began Thursday. “But the causes for the crisis are complex--they won’t be solved at a single meeting.”

The crisis is three-fold, according to Palestinian political figures in Israel and abroad:

* Arafat’s readiness to compromise in negotiations with Israel what other Palestinians see as fundamental principles to break the long stalemate and establish a Palestinian homeland.

He angered his own negotiators to the point that three top delegates resigned this month and were only talked out of a move that would have severely interrupted the peace talks after he brought them into the PLO committee on negotiations and promised other organizational changes.

* A sharp cutback in PLO funds for Palestinian institutions on the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as salaries for the PLO’s own employees, the result of a virtual end to payments from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Arab states. The PLO is selling its overseas properties to avoid bankruptcy.

Arafat is blamed, first, for his support for Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, which angered the Saudis and other Arabs and led to the cutoff, but also for poor management of the funds the PLO had received over the previous two decades. Accounts of waste and corruption among Arafat’s lieutenants have fed the furor.

* Arafat’s autocratic manner of leadership, making decisions on fundamental issues with little consultation. This is compounded by the longstanding lack of democracy within the PLO and bitter, even murderous rivalries among different Palestinian factions.

Arafat, 64, has maneuvered through many crises since becoming chairman of the PLO Executive Committee in 1969, and Palestinians began this week to rally to his side, especially on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“I don’t need to defend every decision and every action by Arafat to say that, at this time, we do not need this crisis and even that it has been artificially created to undermine us during the negotiations,” Nusseibeh said.

Much of the criticism stems from Arafat’s readiness to accept a Palestinian ministate in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho as well as administration of the rest of the West Bank under an interim agreement with Israel.

Part of the proposal that the Palestinians will put to Israel next week when negotiations resume will be the deferral, as sought by Israel, of negotiations over the future status of Jerusalem, which both sides want as their capital.

“This is typical of Arafat--a unilateral, one-man decision to put Jerusalem aside even though it is part of the fundamental consensus of all Palestinians,” a local supporter of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said. “Arafat will concede anything to get his ministate, and that’s our problem with him.”

Complaining about the harsh methods employed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to ensure Israeli security, Hout said, “The more we give, the more we get punished rather than being rewarded. . . . We need to stop, to reassess the whole situation. Simply put, that’s what the crisis is about.”