It’s Time for the U.S. to Do Business With Yasser Arafat Again : Diplomacy: With the Mideast peace talks at a standstill and Hamas gaining clout, Clinton must renew contacts with PLO.

WASHINGTON —  “We shall do everything in our power to undermine and derail negotiations between our Palestinian brethren and Israel,” a young leader of the Islamic fundamentalist movement known as the Hamas was telling me a year ago in Gaza. “And, believe me,” he added, “we shall kill and kill if necessary!” His target was the U.S.-sponsored peace talks, then just under way in Madrid, between Palestinians and Israelis.

Today, it has become tragically clear that he was right about the lethal power of Hamas to sabotage the negotiations. The talks, recessed last December, are at a standstill. They have produced no tangible results and it is unclear when they will restart. If the United States is to salvage the Middle East peace process, as promised by President Bill Clinton, it must embark on an immediate diplomatic offensive in the region. The first step should be to resume official contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization, broken off three years ago.

It may be ironic to regard Yasser Arafat as a moderate among today’s Palestinian leaders, albeit he foolishly--but briefly--supported Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf War. The reality, though, is that there are no plausible alternatives.

It was Arafat who, after a long career in anti-Israeli terrorism, forced the Palestinian National Council, at its September, 1991, congress in Algiers, to authorize Palestinians in the occupied territories to negotiate their future with Israel under U.S. auspices. Hamas, which then held one-third of the council seats, boycotted the congress, in effect, breaking its ties with the PLO as the umbrella Palestinian statehood organization.

Unfortunately, however, Arafat, along with Israel and the United States, catastrophically underestimated the growing power of Hamas. When I saw Arafat at his Tunis headquarters a few weeks after the PLO congress, he contemptuously dismissed the fundamentalists as a loud and violence-prone minority. He confidently claimed the loyalty of the highly sophisticated, moderate Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories, which daily consulted with Tunis as its delegation negotiated with the Israelis.

Whether Arafat chose to minimize the Hamas factor because of his isolation in Tunisia or because of his unfamiliarity with the new Islamic phenomenon (which would be surprising, but not impossible), the central fact is that Hamas has been responsible for the bulk of violence in Israel and the occupied territories in the last year, including the killing of five Israeli soldiers, which led to the expulsion to Lebanon of more than 400 members of Hamas last December.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s stated justification for deporting the Palestinians was his desire to break the back of Hamas before it became even more dangerous to Israel’s stability. But it turned out to be a spectacularly ill-advised decision, jeopardizing, among other things, the future of Israeli-Palestinian talks. What Hamas fundamentalists had hoped for--playing the roles of “freedom fighters” and martyrs--they got.

Rabin’s move compelled Palestinian moderates, as well as Arafat, to join the cause of the expelled fundamentalists to avoid losing the support of their constituencies. Indeed, last week the PLO urged the U.N. Security Council to slap sanctions on Israel if the Hamas were not readmitted. Palestinian and other Islamic fundamentalists, meanwhile, were handed another extraordinary bonus. Although Security Council resolutions were invoked to justify the U.S.-led air attacks on Iraq, no effort has been made to enforce the U.N. resolutions condemning the Hamas expulsion.

It thus appears vital for the United States to come to the aid of the Palestinian moderates even as Iran is openly backing Hamas and all fundamentalist movements along the southern rim of the Mediterranean and in the Persian Gulf. Otherwise, power will continue to flow to Hamas among Palestinians, and, sooner or later, the moderates will no longer command support at home in the occupied territories for continued negotiations with Israel. This, in turn, would invite a new phase of violence in the occupied territories and Israel proper, with all hope gone for the peaceful settlement the United States had sought to bring about.

Under the circumstances, Washington has every reason to avert a confrontation with the PLO at the United Nations Security Council. If the two collide, the moderate Palestinian delegation would likely be unable, for political reasons, to return to Washington to renew talks with Israel.

This is an extremely delicate moment for the Clinton Administration to reopen dealings with the PLO, but it is fair to assume that Rabin would quietly approve it--he understands the current predicament. Renewing contacts with Arafat would reaffirm U.S. recognition of the PLO as the only legitimate Palestinian voice in negotiations with Israel. Naturally, the restoration of the U.S.-PLO link would not alone defuse the rising influence of Hamas. But it would be a powerful symbol to still uncommitted Palestinians who may chose to side with the moderates--if the PLO retains influence and international prestige. One would hope, of course, that in supporting the PLO, the United States would not be perceived as a foe of Islam.

It should be simple to restore the PLO connection. It began during the Reagan Administration, after Arafat pledged in a Geneva speech, in December, 1989, to recognize the existence of Israel and to refrain from terrorism. The on-and-off dialogue between U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia Robert H. Felletreau and the PLO’s foreign-policy expert Yasser Abed Rabbo marked, in effect, the opening of a new chapter in active U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East.

George Bush “suspended” the dialogue in June, 1990, when Arafat failed to promptly condemn an attack on Israel by guerrillas of the PLO renegade Abu Abbas faction. But even in Israel today, key personalities in the ruling Labor Party are urging direct Israeli-PLO talks, and the Israeli Parliament recently lifted a longstanding ban on contacts between Israelis and the PLO.

Obviously, Palestinian-Israeli talks cannot be insulated from the latest crises--Hussein and a rearming Iran--sweeping the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. But if the peace talks are allowed to collapse because of the Hamas campaign--and because of U.S. refusal to return to the only existing political and diplomatic option--the young Hamas leader’s threat could turn into a terrible reality. The United States is the only power capable of preventing new disasters in the region. Diplomatic rhetoric will be inadequate. It will be a crucial early test of Clinton’s foreign-policy leadership and vision.