Israeli White Paper Cites PLO Terrorism

JERUSALEM —  Israel’s Foreign Ministry released Friday a white paper on Palestine Liberation Organization activity that is to be the cornerstone of what a senior official described as a worldwide “information campaign” aimed at discrediting the PLO as a possible participant in Middle East peace talks.

The 27-page document charges that since Yasser Arafat took control of the PLO in 1969, it has carried out about 8,000 terrorist attacks in which 650 people, mostly innocent Israeli civilians, have been killed. It blames the organization for 360 terrorist incidents, planned or committed, since last Feb. 11, when Arafat and Jordan’s King Hussein agreed on a “joint framework” for peace negotiations.

Release of the white paper coincided with the wounding of an Israeli tourist guide by knife-wielding youths in the village of Sabastia, near Nablus on the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River. The attack was the latest in a series of terrorist incidents that has left 16 Israelis dead and 100 wounded since the first of the year.

The army imposed a curfew on the Arab village and conducted a house-to-house search for the attackers, who were described by three Danish tourists the guide was taking around the village. It was not clear whether the youths acted on their own or were part of some organized group.

Arafat and other PLO officials loyal to him have denied complicity in recent terrorist incidents, including the Yom Kippur slaying of three Israelis on a yacht in Larnaca, Cyprus, and last week’s hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, in which a partially paralyzed American Jewish passenger was slain.

Israel says it has “absolute, complete, and irrefutable proof” that Arafat loyalists perpetrated the Larnaca and Achille Lauro incidents with Arafat’s knowledge.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry official said Friday: “The decision to launch the information attack (against the PLO) was made last week sometime, at the beginning of the Achille Lauro affair. We thought people were being misled and it was time to put it right.”

Israel wants to exclude the PLO from any Middle East peace negotiations, and has been trying for months to pressure Hussein into breaking with Arafat and entering direct peace talks.

The white paper, titled “The PLO’s Outlook and Goals in the Wake of the Hussein-Arafat Agreement of Feb. 11,” will be translated into five languages and distributed worldwide. It is said to be based partly on previously unpublished intelligence information, some of it obtained from captured Palestinian terrorists.

It quotes one prisoner, not identified by name, as saying that a key Arafat loyalist, acting under Arafat’s orders, convened a meeting at the Regency Hotel in the Jordanian capital of Amman last December to plan stepped-up terrorist operations against Israel.

It said that the same PLO official, identified as Abu Tayeb, commander of an elite commando unit called Force 17, met in his Amman office at least twice this year with West Bank Palestinians to give them money and directions for terrorist attacks in the Israeli occupied territories.

Israel has charged that Force 17 was responsible for last month’s slayings in Cyprus.

The white paper quotes a captured terrorist as saying that a PLO official who had been scheduled to meet this week with the British foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, has taken part in planning Force 17 operations and is in charge of supplying the unit with weapons.

Britain abruptly canceled what would have been a precedent-setting meeting after the PLO official, Mohammed Milhem, refused to sign a statement renouncing terrorism and accepting Israel’s right to exist. The PLO later denounced the statement as one-sided.