Moderate Palestinian Has Key Talks Role : Diplomacy: Faisal Husseini heads committee to oversee negotiations. He has been reviled by both sides.

Faisal Husseini had lost 10 pounds and plenty of patience when he heard the news about the beach raid. The Palestine Liberation Organization, in one of its fits of miscalculation, had sent commandos to attack the waterfront in Tel Aviv.

The rationale for the raid was confused and ultimately futile. And the Palestinians’ capture--they never fired a shot--left Husseini humiliated. He had been holding a protest hunger strike over the killing of seven Palestinian laborers by an Israeli gunman. His strike was supposed to herald a new battle tactic for the Palestinians--civil disobedience. But the PLO had other ideas.

“People outside should leave the struggle to us,” he complained after hearing of the beach raid.

The May, 1989, incident appeared to spell the end of the influence of moderates such as Husseini, the heir to the leadership tradition of a prominent Jerusalem family. The PLO of the rifle and clenched fist seemed to be on the rise again.

But less than two years later, Husseini and a group of like-minded local leaders are key figures with the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East peace conference in Madrid. They reflect a preference for persuasion over force and compromise over absolute demands. Thrust into the heat of difficult negotiations, their image has been superimposed over the familiar stubbled-chin visage of PLO chief Yasser Arafat.

Husseini is heading a “guidance committee” that will oversee negotiations and maintain contact with the PLO. Palestinian insiders say the talks to watch are not so much the ones between the Palestinians and Israelis but those between Arafat and Husseini.

Husseini’s ability to persuade the PLO to compromise on a step-by-step process of freeing the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Israeli control will go a long way toward setting the agenda for the talks.

If he succeeds, it will be the first time that the Palestinians will have forgone maximum demands in favor of recognition of Israel and setting the limits of their own claims within the defined area of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“This is a stage that follows many catastrophes,” Husseini told a rare town meeting with Palestinian activists recently. “Today, we are entering a new phase. We are heading toward political discussions, a new reality.”

Husseini led the Palestinian negotiations with Secretary of State James A. Baker III to set up the talks. His family has long been involved in Palestinian politics, and he is trying to end a long losing streak.

In the 1920s, his grandfather, Musa Kassem Husseini, once a mayor of Jerusalem, tried to talk the British out of giving Jews a homeland in Palestine. A cousin, Haj Amin Husseini, the chief Muslim leader at Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, began a campaign of bloodshed to halt Jewish settlement in the 1930s that ended with intra-Palestinian fighting. He was driven out by the British and died in exile.

Faisal’s father, Abdel Khader Husseini, was killed in a battle with Israeli troops during the 1948 war over Palestine and is one of the chief figures in the Palestinian pantheon.

Faisal Husseini, 50, was jailed three times by the Israelis and has been vilified by militant Israeli and Palestinian nationalists alike. Once, when he was called in for questioning by Jerusalem police, Israeli onlookers spat at him and screamed, “Stinking Arab, we shall destroy you!”

Youthful Palestinian extremists, considering him a traitor to their cause, often throw stones at his house and scrawl graffiti on his front wall.

His expressions of moderation attract such venom. In 1988, his first words after his release from a spell in jail were: “We are fighting to free our people, not to enslave any other people. We are fighting to build our state, not to destroy any other state.”

Husseini has spent much of the last three years trying to patch up feuds among Palestinian factions and working to woo Israeli peace parties to support a Palestinian state. It’s not clear how much success he has had in either effort.

Husseini argues that Palestinians should go to Madrid, saying that with world politics dominated by the United States, the Palestinians have little choice but to throw in their lot on the side of strength.

The delegation includes a range of Palestinian opinions that are sometimes at odds with one another.

The chief negotiator, viewed largely as a figurehead, is Haidar Abdel-Shafi from the Gaza Strip, who just two weeks ago spoke out firmly against the talks.

The chief spokeswoman is Hanan Ashrawi, a comparative literature professor who was educated in the United States. Her wit and command of English have made her a familiar voice to the American public.

But among some Palestinians, her markedly moderate views have made her a target of criticism; she has never acknowledged allegiance to the PLO. In comments to a reporter the other day, she took a swipe at the group’s traditionally bombastic rhetoric.

“We are not hung up on slogans,” she said. “Now, finally, is a time for substance.”

Ashrawi’s inclusion on the guidance committee raised such a storm that another woman was named to it--Sahira Kamal, a longtime activist and head of a PLO-affiliated women’s organization.

The negotiators include a pair of former jail inmates to give the team a flavor of the intifada, or Arab uprising. Some Israeli politicians have objected to the inclusion of the ex-convicts as well as to Saeb Erakat, a Jerusalem newspaper editor who has taken pains to tell every reporter who asks that he is representing the PLO.

Elias Freij, the unsinkable non-PLO mayor of Bethlehem, is also on the talks team and is letting everyone know that if the Palestinians had listened to him, they could have had negotiations such as these years ago. “I have been saying for years we have to recognize Israel,” he remarked. “I never paid attention to slogans.”