Arafat, Peace Plan Targets of Fury Among Palestinians : Mideast: Constituents say PLO chief left door open for massacre. And peace process has lost credibility, he says.

It is the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan. But in the whitewashed villas that are the Palestine Liberation Organization’s headquarters in exile, there is little fasting going on.

The chain-smoking starts at noon and carries on until dawn. Coffee cups stand in wet rings amid scattered ashes on PLO executives’ desktops. Here and there, the furtive bottle of Scotch finds its way onto the table by midafternoon.

These are hard times, maybe too hard for religion. PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat is keeping the prescribed dawn-to-dusk fast and makes the regulation five prayers a day.

But sitting in his office beneath a huge mural of the golden dome of Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque, he looks drawn and distant. With the Prophet Mohammed’s path to heaven depicted in bright color behind him, and his aides in respectful reverence seated around him, he seems very much alone.

After last week’s massacre of 48 Palestinians at a Hebron mosque, the PLO leader--who has banked his future on peace with Israel--has found the door, once again, slammed shut. Trying for years to run a revolution by fax and speaker phone from across the Mediterranean Sea, Arafat finds himself at a new deadlock with Israel only weeks before he could have concluded a peace agreement and planned his triumphal return to Palestine.

Now Palestinians throughout the occupied territories, Lebanon and Jordan are ripping down his photographs, burning effigies of his trademark fatigues and checkered scarf, blaming him for the peace plan they say left the door open to a Jewish settler’s murderous fury.

The rest of the world will hold him accountable if he doesn’t go back to the peace talks with Israel.

And Arafat, the blustery guerrilla leader who has been the single constant of the Palestinian revolution, grows quiet when he is asked if he can carry his people with him if he goes back to the peace table now.

“No,” he says softly. “To speak frankly, no. And you know why. Because the peace process has lost its credibility.

“I have to understand their feeling. Furious,” Arafat says, sitting at his desk at 2 a.m. after an emergency meeting of the PLO Executive Committee to find a way out of the crisis. “I promised them that there is peace, and what was the result? Massacre. . . . These are my people, and I am responsible for every one, every family, every victim, every injured person. And every person is asking now, ‘If this is peace, is this the price of peace?’ ”

Throughout Tunis, the attack that killed 48 worshipers during a holy Friday of Ramadan has led to a sea change in attitudes toward the Declaration of Principles signed with Israel in September, a rising tide of doubt about whether the agreement will ever be carried out--or whether it ever should.

Arafat and his top lieutenants are struggling to gain enough face-saving concessions from Israel on controlling Jewish settlements to allow them to resume negotiations. But even some PLO leaders who initially supported the agreement--they were a bare majority--are having second thoughts now. Many are demanding sweeping new negotiations that would abandon the idea of Palestinian self-rule “first” in Jericho and the Gaza Strip and put issues like Palestinian statehood, an end to Jewish settlements and the status of Jerusalem immediately on the table.

“There will be no more two stages of a settlement. There will be one stage: dismantling settlements, ending occupation, normalizing relations,” said Bassam abu Sharif, a longtime Arafat political adviser. “Condemnation, apology, sorrow means nothing. It means nothing. What means something concrete is a serious step toward peace . . . and dismantling the settlements built illegally is an indispensable step.”

Jawid Hussein, a PLO Executive Committee member who supported Arafat on peace with Israel, said it is time for the organization to abandon minor talks and start discussing a complete Israeli pullout from the occupied West Bank.

“There is a two-year delay under the (current plan) for discussing the final status” of the occupied territories, Hussein said. “This massacre is another proof that as long as you have occupation, you are going to have violence. There is practically a consensus among the Executive Committee of the PLO that we should really look toward a comprehensive and just peace and move as soon as possible toward it. Because of the delay in applying the withdrawal, we are giving way to the extremists to have the upper hand.”

At stake is the PLO’s fear that, locked away in Tunis from the 1.2 million Palestinians in the occupied territories and the millions more in exile abroad, the organization has lost the momentum toward peace and faces the prospect of signing an agreement that lacks popular backing.

“The Palestinian people at the beginning of this, by an overwhelming majority, supported the peace process,” said Yasser Abed-Rabbo, PLO information department chief. “Now the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people, the same majority, is taking a position refusing the resumption of talks and negotiations unless there are guarantees to protect the lives of Palestinians.”

Israel’s offers to crack down only on extremist settlers, a move regarded as largely cosmetic here, have left the PLO unwilling to go back to the revolution but unable to proceed with peace. “We don’t want to kill the peace process,” Abed-Rabbo said. “But we don’t want the peace process to kill us.”

Throughout the PLO headquarters here, there is deep frustration in the delay in implementing the Declaration of Principles, under which the Israeli army was to begin withdrawing from Jericho and Gaza on Dec. 13. Instead, negotiators got bogged down in details over how large the Jericho district would be, whether Palestinian guards would stand at the border crossings and whether Palestinian cars could lead joint security patrols.

Ahmed Suleiman Khoury (also known as Abu Alaa), who headed the secret talks in Norway that produced the September agreement, said the negotiations went astray when they fixated on details rather than a frank, faithful assumption that both sides would act in good faith and that details would take care of themselves.

Now, he said, April 13--the day when the Israeli army is to have completed its withdrawal--looms dangerously, and even he, one of the strongest proponents of the peace accord, worries about its future. “If the 13th of April comes without a withdrawal, I have my doubts the agreement will fly,” he said.

The Hebron massacre came as a devastating blow to those closest to the negotiations, precisely because they were so close to concluding an accord.

Two days before the incident, PLO sources said, negotiators had reached agreement that Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would sign a final accord in Cairo on March 10, with the Israeli withdrawal to commence on March 13 and be complete by April 13. A team of PLO officials was to have parachuted into Gaza and Jericho to start working out details of the transition this past Monday.

Now all of that is on hold. And for Arafat, this week’s new standoff has been a battle of nerves that aides say the PLO chairman may be losing.

Arafat, they say, is growing convinced that Rabin is trying to undo him personally. They say he believes that Rabin’s delays in promised releases of Palestinian prisoners were a deliberate attempt to deprive Arafat of the popular response those releases would elicit.

Rabin, he believes, may have gone back on his promise to sign an agreement 10 days after the initial Dec. 13 deadline; this would be part of a strategy to finalize a peace accord but, in the process, to fatally undermine the PLO leader.

He suspects that Rabin’s primary fear is not of giving up territory but that Arafat will go in triumph to Jericho and use it as a base for building a Palestinian state.

“Arafat is starting to worry, somewhere in his subconscious, that the Israelis are out to get him,” an adviser said. “And once he starts to believe they’re out to get him personally, the whole game will change.”

Yet Arafat is playing his own game of nerves. Far from admitting defeat or abandoning deadlines, the PLO leader is preparing to hold the Israelis to the June deadline envisioned in the agreement for withdrawal from population centers in the West Bank and preparation for elections.

Under these circumstances, he says, why argue any further over the size of the Jericho self-rule enclave?

Those closest to the PLO leader say he will hold out for more concessions. But in the end, he will go back to the peace talks because he has no choice.

“Arafat cut all his back roads both to the Palestinian people and to the Arab world, and he knows he will not be accepted if he tries to come back to them now,” said a senior PLO official who has opposed the Gaza-Jericho plan.”

PLO officials committed to negotiating the Gaza-Jericho agreement say two things must happen for the negotiations to resume.

First, Israel must come forward with a credible package of protections, which at minimum disarms Jewish settlers entering Palestinian population centers, releases more prisoners and provides for a temporary international presence in the occupied territories.

Then, they say, the Israelis must return to the bargaining table, not to haggle over details but to implement the spirit of the agreement. This means, they admit, a dangerous commitment on both sides to the idea that a former enemy can be trusted.

* PRAISE FROM U.S.: Warren Christopher calls Arafat ‘indispensable’ to peace. A8