Giving Peace A Chance : ‘Preparing Our Guns, Not Our Bags’ : These words, though spoken figuratively by one Palestinian leader, serve as a haunting reminder that there is a deep hate for Arafat, the PLO, and, thus, the pact with Israel

On the eve of the historic accord that set the stage for a new era of peace between Israel and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, nearly a dozen other Palestinian leaders were closeted in unmarked offices scattered around the Syrian capital, quietly drawing up a battle plan for war.

In his basement headquarters in downtown Damascus, Ahmed Jibril, a radical Palestinian guerrilla leader with armed fighters throughout the Israeli occupied territories, was meeting with key representatives from Iran, searching for ways to subvert Arafat and a peace plan many Palestinians call a sellout.

“If the Israelis and the Americans are going to impose a solution on us, they will have to face Iran, and they know what that means,” Jibril said in an interview. “There is a common interest between us and Iran in confronting the United States, Israel and their supporters at this time.”

The end result: “Arafat will be killed, and the accord will fade away.”

A few blocks away, in the basement offices of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Deputy General Secretary Abu Ali Mustafa, once a close personal friend of Arafat’s and a member of the PLO Executive Committee, mapped out a broad strategy that the group hopes will at least bring about Arafat’s political demise.

“Our direct task now is how to bring about a new birth of the PLO outside of Arafat,” Abu Ali said.

In the coming weeks, he added, the 10 Damascus-based Palestinian groups ranged against Arafat’s plan for self-rule in their former lands will attempt to form the nucleus of a broad-based Palestinian congress that gradually will cut Arafat out of the PLO.

And, even as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was signing the historic accord of mutual recognition with Arafat last Friday, an extremist, breakaway wing of the PLO leader’s own Fatah faction called his deal with Israel “the greatest treason against the Palestinian people and the Islamic and Arab nation.”

“This movement announces it is sanctioning the shedding of the blood of this traitor . . . ,” it added.

Such is the vision within the world of the Palestinian rejectionists--an odd coalition of Marxists, social democrats, Islamic fundamentalists and pan-Arabists long united by a common enemy in Israel and now regrouping against an even greater new foe from within.

The 10 Syria-based Palestinian groups, whose names read like an alphabet soup of revolutionary liberation movements, represent radical elements that Arafat and Rabin both hope to marginalize through their mutual recognition and shared vision of peace.

Certainly, these Damascus-based groups will be out-financed.

And with the potential for billions of dollars in donations from the oil-rich Persian Gulf states, the United States and Western Europe for Arafat’s soon-to-be-autonomous Jericho and Gaza Strip, the rejectionist leaders concede that their effort to draw support away from the PLO leader is an uphill battle.

But these Palestinian groups that established their headquarters here in Syria after fleeing the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 represent a potent force on the ground in the occupied territories. Abu Ali’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, and the Islamic Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups claim responsibility for most of the Israelis killed this year in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the self-proclaimed Israeli “security zone” in southern Lebanon.

And it is these well-armed and deeply committed radical Palestinian factions that most analysts say are likely to continue using the most violent tactics to derail the peace train Rabin and Arafat set in motion last week--at the very least through ongoing attacks on Israelis in the territories.

Iran already finances and helps arm Palestinian radicals in southern Lebanon through the extremist group Hezbollah, or Party of God, which has opposed the peace process from the start.

Tehran also has direct channels to the Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the territories, according to Jibril. And increased support from Iran for the rejectionists clearly would make Arafat’s task of subduing dissent in his new autonomous zones far more difficult.

Hamas leaders and sympathizers in the Gaza Strip assert that the opposition groups have the support of more than half of the Palestinian refugees living in the camps there.

One fundamentalist leader, Hassan Deib, who is acting president of the Islamic Society of Gaza, told The Times in an interview in Gaza City a few days ago that opposition groups, led by Hamas and the PFLP, are better armed and better organized than Arafat’s Fatah faction.

He predicted that the rejectionists will fight any future Palestinian police force that attempts to disarm them.

The radical Palestinians’ prospects for torpedoing the peace plan depend significantly as well on Syria, whose past support for them helped earn President Hafez Assad’s nation a place on the U.S. State Department’s list of international sponsors of terrorism.

Assad, whose goal is to recover the strategic Golan Heights lost to Israel along with the Jordanian West Bank and the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, remained conspicuously silent throughout the past two weeks of frenetic Mideast diplomacy, which included a personal visit from Arafat.

But there was no euphoria here for the historic Arafat-Rabin accord. In fact, as Arafat was initialing his letter recognizing Israel as a sovereign state and renouncing violence against it on Thursday, Syrian negotiators reported that they had made no progress on the Golan issue as the 11th round of Arab-Israeli peace talks ended in Washington.

Diplomats in Damascus speculated that Assad will continue to withhold any hint of an endorsement of the peace plan until well into the next round of peace talks, scheduled to reconvene in Washington in October.

In the meantime, they added, the Syrian president is expected to permit the radical Palestinian groups to remain in Damascus as a potential bargaining chip.

Similarly, Lebanon, which is dominated by Syria and which many of the radical Palestinian groups use as a military staging ground for attacks on Israelis in the territories, is seeking to recover the 440-square-mile strip of land that Israel occupies in the south.

Although official Lebanese reaction to the accord was muted, pro-Syrian newspapers and politicians in Beirut offered some of the most blistering criticisms of Arafat and his peace accords with Israel. The pan-Arab daily Al Diyar headlined its announcement of last week’s diplomatic breakthrough between Israel and the PLO: “Recognition of Humiliation and Shame.”

Among the front-line Arab states, only Jordan’s King Hussein--who is expected to shortly announce his own agreement with Israel on a framework for peace--publicly endorsed the deal.

The Palestinian radicals express optimism that they will continue to use Damascus as a headquarters for their anti-Arafat crusade--at least in the short term. Asked late last week whether his group had started packing its bags for Baghdad or Tehran, Abu Ali laughed, “We are now preparing our guns--not our bags.” Later he said he was speaking “figuratively, not literally.”

There was nothing figurative about Ahmed Jibril’s remarks.

“I have not said that I will personally kill Arafat,” declared the burly, 57-year-old veteran guerrilla commander. “I said our Palestinian people will not be lenient with Arafat, who has given up 90% of the Palestinian land. Therefore, he will be dishonored by the Palestinian people. . . . And when Arafat is killed, the accord will fade away.”

Later, reacting to the longer-range possibility that Assad will evict his and the other radical Palestinian groups if and when Syria and Israel reach a peace accord on the Golan, Jibril took an equally tough line.

“At that time, we will arrange our matters,” he said. “But, in any case, we will fight. We are not just here. We are everywhere in the occupied lands. There is a knife in every kitchen in Jericho and Gaza. We will buy weapons from Arafat’s policemen or take them from them to fight against the Israelis.”

That future Palestinian police force--armed civilian patrolmen who could number more than 8,000 former Palestinian guerrilla fighters--is a contentious issue for both militant Israeli and some radical Palestinian opponents of the peace plan. Though diametrically opposed in their goals, both groups fear that the planned Palestinian police force in the territories might become the core of a bloody Palestinian civil war.

Abu Ali, whose group has developed deep roots throughout the squalid refugee camps of the Gaza Strip, is counting on blood being thicker than politics.

“We will try to convince this policeman with his gun to join forces with us and stand against Arafat--not to steal his gun, but to enlist it,” he said. “Because, you see, these are our sons, our brothers. And don’t forget, the majority of them fought alongside us in south Lebanon against Israel.

“And we believe it will be so difficult for them to shoot their own people. You know, the way things exist, in a typical Palestinian family you will find four brothers--one is PFLP, another is Fatah, the third is Hamas and the fourth will be DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). Because of this structure, it is not easy to see this internal Palestinian conflict happening.”

Rather, Abu Ali and other relatively more moderate Palestinian rejectionist leaders here said their fight against Arafat and his agreement with Israel is likely to be a prolonged one.

It will begin within the next few weeks, they said, with the convening of an anti-Arafat congress--an attempt to form the center of a critical mass that will grow gradually as its leaders cast Arafat more and more as an Israeli collaborator.

“There are, of course, certain difficulties we will face in opposition to Arafat’s policy,” Abu Ali conceded. “Arafat will be supported politically and economically by many powerful groups and countries. And that will give him a power base beyond his Fatah faction.

“But this, in turn, will give our ongoing operation its own mechanism,” Abu Ali added.

“In time, it will give birth to new forces, even within his own faction, that will see Arafat more and more as a traitor. And these new forces will combine into a single new force--a reborn PLO.”