Not Much, but Better Than Absolute Zero : Years of Palestinian struggle bear a stunted fruit.

As far back as the summer of 1968, a year after the Six-Day War, a Labor government in Israel put forward a plan calling for Israel to keep whatever land and resources it found of value on the occupied West Bank but cede the Arab population centers to Jordan or to some agency supervising stateless Palestinians.

In 1992 that implacable foe of Labor, General Ariel Sharon, put forward his plan, which envisaged 11 cantons for Palestinians, including self-rule for a majority of Arabs in the Gaza Strip.

So the notion of ceding towns on the West Bank or the Gaza Strip to Palestinian control is nothing new to Israeli politics, or even to a man of the far right like Sharon.

The present prospective deal is still obscure in many substantive areas. It offers the PLO control of much of the Gaza Strip; also Jericho and prospectively other West Bank towns. Jewish settlements, excluded from Palestinian control, would be guarded by the Israeli army); The Palestinians would be given local autonomy, meaning among other things the right to levy taxes and police themselves and exercise kindred municipal functions, all under the eye of the Israeli army and security forces.

The question has always been land and resources. The Jewish settlements on the Gaza Strip that will remain under the protection of the Israeli army have access to about half of the strip’s water.

Will crowded, urban Arab enclaves on the West Bank, with Israelis unyielding on the matter of greater metropolitan Jerusalem--an enormous area--offer Palestinians anything approaching their dreams?

Also, the matter of “mutual recognition” is entirely misleading. In various formulations, the PLO has recognized Israel’s right, as a nation, to exist. The agreement now under discussion contains no commensurate recognition by Israel of any Palestinian right to national self-determination. All that Israel might agree to do is recognize the PLO as a legitimate interlocutor, rather than as an informal one. Nor are there to be other rights of a nation.

There are more than a million Palestinian refugees from 1948 and thereafter resident in Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere. Are their rights to a homeland, recognized by the United Nations and other bodies down the years, now to be annulled?

This is the last chance for Yasser Arafat, the PLO and its bureaucrats to strut upon the world’s stage, brokers of a historic settlement that would return the exiled leadership to an autonomous Gaza Strip, even though--as one critic remarked bitterly--it is the autonomy of a POW camp.

Many Palestinians are raging about the deal, denouncing the secret brokering done by one man in the name of the Palestinian people. Autocratic leadership of the PLO has reached grotesque proportions.

Nor will local Palestinians who have fought through the long years of occupation and intifada necessarily welcome the PLO leaders jetting in from Tunis. Least welcoming of all will be the very organization Arafat hopes to undercut, the fundamentalist Hamas.

Against any substantive vision of Palestinian self-determination, this plan is a wretched thing. But what alternative is possible? Ten years ago, Palestinians could agitate for a U.N. conference on their future, but these were the days of two superpowers, not of just one who is Israel’s sponsor and ally.

And even if versions of today’s possible deal have been pondered and rejected for years in Israel’s ruling circles, it is clear that Israel feels itself weaker than in the early 1980s, when its army drove north to Beirut. Last month the bombs and artillery shells rained down on southern Lebanon, but no troops moved north. The Likud coalition that pressed that war in 1982 is now out of office, defeated in part because of hostility from the Washington of George Bush and James A. Baker III.

A generation ago, Golda Meir said there were no Palestinians; tomorrow the Palestinian flag may fly on the battlements of Jericho. Many Jewish settlements on the West Bank may now wither, even with guarantees of army protection.

For hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, the thought of an autonomous enclave like Gaza-plus-Jericho as the territorial embodiment of nationhood is a parody of their hopes.

But nowhere is it written that history has to be fair, or that if rejected this deal will be succeeded by a better one. The intifada proved to the Israelis that the price of total occupation was too high. So with these pieces of real estate on which to raise their standard, Palestinians can reorganize their political structures beyond the shambles of Arafat’s PLO and prepare for new struggles. This is but a stage in their journey.