A Tactical War of Words : Talks Will Determine Value of What Arafat Says

Washington’s decision to hold talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization has alarmed many Jews, both American and Israeli. It isn’t hard to understand why.

For 13 years, the United States refused to talk to the PLO unless it recognized Israel and accepted United Nations resolutions affirming Israel’s right to live peacefully within secure and recognized boundaries. Later, the renunciation of terrorism was added to those conditions. In Geneva this month, after intense international prodding, and after repeated efforts to avoid doing so, Yasser Arafat finally uttered the words that America was waiting to hear.

For many Jews, the Reagan Administration’s eager acceptance of Arafat’s words, as well as the possible consequences of the talks themselves, provoked alarm.

These Jews can’t easily accept Arafat’s words because they know why, even if he had wanted to, he couldn’t have uttered them before. It would have meant his assassination. If Arafat’s words were considered traitorous capital offenses in the PLO yesterday, those Jews wonder, could they really be gifts of compromise today?

The problem with Arafat’s words derives from the differences that exist among the communities of opinion within the organization he heads--differences about the best way to pursue the conflict with Israel, about the final goal of that conflict and about the meanings that should be given to the words used in that conflict.

Some in the PLO have been ready for several years to recognize Israel and build an independent Palestinian state alongside it in the West Bank and Gaza. For the sake of having something rather than nothing, these Palestinians would have issued Arafat’s Geneva words, in full sincerity, long ago.

A second group of PLO members has recognized the failure of decades of complete rejectionism, in which the possible--a Palestinian mini-state--was spurned in the name of the ideal--the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of its Jews. In recent years, these PLO members have moved to the position that achieving the ideal could be most surely attained by first establishing the mini-state. Once that state was functioning and universally recognized, and once it could serve as a military base, the Palestinians would be in a far stronger position to achieve sovereignty over all of Palestine.

For this second group of PLO members, talk has become a tactical asset in a world that’s eager to hear what it wants to hear. For them, Arafat’s words, which once would have been denounced as traitorous, are now acceptable and even make sense.

And then there is the last group of Palestinians, the ones who still see compromise with Israel as a betrayal of their history, peoplehood and national charter, and who fear that even a tactical acceptance of anything less than all of Palestine, or even mere words to that effect, are not only traitorous but also dangerously capable of lulling Palestinians into what would turn out to be an eternal acceptance of less than what is rightly theirs. Such words, this group has always feared, would win loud applause and small rewards. The applause, together with the rewards, would corrupt even those Palestinian leaders who don’t believe what they are saying into eventually finding reasons to believe it, and to then act on that self-deluded belief.

For this last group of hardest-line Palestinians, increasingly small and isolated within the PLO, Arafat’s Geneva utterances were a bitter and indigestible pill. Though this group was outvoted at the November meeting of the Palestine National Congress in Algiers, it was hardly abolished.

Clearly, though, this last group was not represented by Arafat in Geneva. And clearly, too, the first group was. What many Jews don’t know, however, is how many of the second group--the one that advocates utterance as tactic--were represented by Arafat as well. And what they don’t know either is which group Arafat himself belongs to. Has he really changed? Or has he merely changed his words?

These concerns, however, have not been enough to deter the United States, now that the PLO has issued the utterances expected of it, from talking with that organization. And that constitutes the second cause for new Jewish alarm.

What will be the outcome of these talks? More important, what will the mere fact that talks have begun do to Israel’s position and possibilities, as well as to its relationship with the United States?

To some Jews, the talks threaten to break up the logjam holding back a mighty anti-Israeli stream. For decades, whole groupings of states at the United Nations set an international tone of automatic condemnation of Israel. Recently, America’s own European allies have embraced, seemingly uncritically, statements of Palestinian moderation. These allies have felt, perhaps, that the entire Arab-Israeli conflict and the diplomatic and media attention it has commanded have simply gone on too long. They seem to have decided, in frustration and exhaustion, that any straw, any promise, should be grasped and not too carefully examined, if only to get rid in some magical way of so painful and debilitating a problem.

This is a sentiment that’s easy to understand by any outside observer who has had similar feelings. And precisely because it is so widely shared, many Jews fear that the historic step of U.S.-PLO talks will let loose an unstoppable torrent of further and more dangerous steps, which will ultimately result in an intense international focusing of unbearable pressure on Israel to accept political and security arrangements that will severely and irreversibly threaten its survival.

Are these Jewish fears rational? Can Arafat’s words be trusted? And will America’s talks with the PLO lead to disaster for Israel?

The fears are, to some extent, rational, the words probably shouldn’t be fully trusted, and the talks could, if pursued unwisely, prove damaging, to both Israel and the United States.

But trust isn’t necessary to explore the motivations behind those words, while talks, at this point, probably are. If there is indeed a genuine and abiding readiness on the part of a stable and growing majority of the PLO to accept compromise, and if the talks really do remain exploratory, then even more moderation may evolve from the same conditions that seem to have provoked the moderate words--the sense on the part of the PLO that the old ways haven’t worked and the recognition that, if the Palestinians are ready to compromise, they might yet achieve some part of their dream. That further moderation would be strengthened, in turn, by the reward of increasing American support for increasingly moderate aims. And if that moderation takes the form of deeds as well as words--if the renunciation of terrorism, in particular, is clearly demonstrated--then Israelis themselves may feel more ready to take risks that once seemed to them suicidal. The fears of the hardest-line PLO members, that moderate words will inevitably lead the PLO down the slippery slope of compromise, may then actually be realized--to the benefit of international stability, American interests, Israel and, not least, the Palestinians themselves.

If such real moderation does take place, then the fears of American and Israeli Jews, like the fears of Palestinians, may become prods to compromise, even acceptable. But if it doesn’t take place, then the painful dilemmas posed by the conflict, and the deep exhaustion felt by so many of its onlookers, will persist. And this will result, perhaps, in a refusal by outside powers to listen any more, to do any more, and worst of all, to care any more.