Facing Drastic Choices

By William E. Smith. Reported by Johanna McGeary/ Washington and Roberto Suro/ Beirut

Demoralized, the P.L.O. tries to rebuild as a political force

Inside a small farmhouse in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon, eight Palestinian fighters warm themselves around an old kerosene heater. They have spent the afternoon training on a Katyusha rocket launcher that lies beneath crude camouflage in a nearby apple orchard. Most of these men are combat veterans who fled to the Bekaa Valley after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the bombing of West Beirut. Yet the war seems strangely irrelevant to their thinking. "First we will drive the enemy from Lebanon," declares a 20-year-old in a calm voice, "and then we will liberate Palestine."

The leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization may understand the significance of what happened in Lebanon this summer, but the message has not reached all the guerrillas, who are now scattered among nine Arab countries. The P.L.O. spent more than a decade building a military establishment in Lebanon. Now it is gone, and the loss is so profound and irreparable that the very nature of the organization has changed. Except in parts of Lebanon, such as the Bekaa, where they still undertake occasional commando attacks against the Israelis, the P.L.O. fighters have been neutralized, and even in the Bekaa they operate under restrictions imposed by the Syrian army. Though Chairman Yasser Arafat rarely visits it, his only headquarters today is an isolated resort hotel in Borj Cedria, Tunisia, 15 miles from the capital of Tunis and almost 2,000 miles from the Palestinian homeland.

Scarcely 100 days after its forced departure from Beirut, the P.L.O. is in the midst of a frenzied internal debate. Two weeks ago, its 60-member Central Council met in Damascus, and within a few weeks its de facto parliament, the 530-member Palestine National Council, will meet to decide on a future course for the organization. The range of opinion within the P.L.O. is as broad as ever. At one extreme are those who still oppose any sort of negotiation or compromise, and who talk blindly of rebuilding a military force. But they are increasingly being challenged by Palestinians who realize that Israel is moving inexorably toward annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and who are prepared to compromise on certain issues hi order to get a settlement. Says a former West Bank mayor who was banished by the Israelis last year: "If the hard-liners have any alternatives to offer, we will listen. But we are not interested hi dreams any more. The most important thing now is to realize the urgency of the situation."

Of all the members of the P.L.O., the most demoralized are the guerrillas who were shipped off to distant Arab lands. In Tunisia, the 1,000 fighters who arrived last August were given a tumultuous welcome. Some 150 were sent to the P.L.O.'s new headquarters at Borj Cedria, where most of them jogged to keep in shape, participated in political discussions, took French lessons and by last week seemed bored to death. The remaining 850 were sent to a desolate camp at Oued Zarga, 60 miles from Tunis. Within a week, the Palestinian authorities had a near mutiny on their hands. Some of the inmates of the camp, which is surrounded by Tunisian police and army units, reportedly tried to escape to neighboring Algeria but were caught and brought back. Their heads were shaved, and they have since been kept separate from the other fighters. Nonetheless, as many as half of the P.L.O. fighters have somehow managed to leave Tunisia for Syria, Jordan, Iraq and other places closer to home.

In the Sudan, the story is much the same: 518 fighters arrived in August, and only 370 remain today. The Palestinians who live in tents at Mashtal el Bassatin, a Nile village 120 miles north of Khartoum, occasionally call themselves Polisario, after the desert guerrillas of northwestern Africa. Says one: "We did not choose to come here." Discipline at Mashtal el Bassatin has broken down only once: on the day the fighters heard over the radio of the Beirut massacre. Outraged, some of the men set their tents on fire. About 100 of them had relatives in the two Beirut camps, and only a handful have since received news of their families. Arafat caused a near riot when he visited the camp in late September. The fighters mobbed him, out of frenzied enthusiasm. The P.L.O. leadership recognizes the seriousness of the situation at places like Mashtal el Bassatin. Says an official in Damascus: "These young men are a volcano waiting to explode."

With so much of his guerrilla army now neutralized, if not very satisfactorily, Arafat is addressing himself to another challenge: rebuilding the P.L.O. as a political force. At the recent meeting of the Central Council, he defended his support of the Arab peace plan adopted at Fez, Morocco, in September, as well as his plans for closer relations with Jordan. He is well aware of the rising political power of the West Bank Palestinians, a constituency that is fundamentally at odds with the old-line radicals of the P.L.O. Says a Western diplomat in Damascus: "Arafat has always survived as a great mediator of the P.L.O.'s internal problems by finding the lowest common denominator. Now he is facing drastic choices, which one or another of his main groups may not be able to accept."

Arafat's most outspoken opponent is Syrian President Hafez Assad. Arafat is determined to preserve the P.L.O.'s independence, while Assad is seeking to dominate the organization. Assad's great fear is that the Palestinians will reach an agreement with Israel over the West Bank and Gaza, leaving the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 war and has since annexed, in Israeli hands. In an effort to strengthen the P.L.O.'s hard-line factions, Assad has encouraged criticism of Arafat's diplomatic maneuvers and placed frustrating restrictions on P.L.O. fighters within Syria.

For the Palestinians, the most important figure at the moment may be King Hussein, who is due to visit Washington this month. The King is said to share the view that the Arabs must move decisively to secure a peace agreement before Israel's policy of increasing the Jewish population on the West Bank makes any peace settlement impossible. Hussein has told West Bank Arabs that he would be glad to take a more active role in the negotiating process, but only if he has the support of the P.L.O. and the moderate Arab states.

Arafat spent three days with King Hussein last week, examining the opportunities created by President Reagan's peace plan, which calls for an eventual confederation between Jordan and a Palestinian entity on the West Bank. He and Hussein talked about the forms that future negotiations over the West Bank and Gaza Strip might take. One problem they considered is how to get around Washington's refusal to deal directly with the P.L.O. Accordingly, they discussed the idea that the P.L.O. might authorize non-P.L.O. Palestinians to negotiate in the organization's behalf. They also formed what they called a Higher Jordanian-Palestinian Committee to explore the possibilities of cooperation and confederation.

In the meantime, the U.S. was still try| ing, without much success, to I initiate negotiations for the ^withdrawal of Israeli, Syrian iand P.L.O. forces from Lebanon. But the talks were being blocked by an Israeli demand that at least some of the sessions be held in Jerusalem, a request the Lebanese feel they cannot accept without conceding Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem. Deputy Secretary of State Kenneth Dam told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that talks between Israel and Lebanon were the "stimulus" necessary before broader discussions could begin.

The importance of resolving Lebanon's fragile status was underscored when Walid Jumblatt, the influential leader of the Muslim Druze community, narrowly escaped an attempt on his life. When a bomb exploded hi his car, Jumblatt suffered minor injuries, but a bodyguard and at least three bystanders were killed. More than 100 people have been killed in the past two months in clashes between the militia of Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party and the Phalangist-dominated Christian militias known as the Lebanese Forces. Before the latest incident, the government of President Amin Gemayel asked the U.S. to help maintain order by doubling the size of its 1,200-man Marine contingent in .,. Lebanon. The Administra-|tion said it would consider doing so only after the with-Ejdrawal of foreign armies i from Lebanon had begun.

At the same time, efforts to put pressure on the Israeli government to begin negotiations with the Lebanese were being undermined by Congress. The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations unexpectedly boosted the Reagan Administration's aid request for Israel from $2.5 billion to nearly $3 billion. The increase included $350 million in military assistance. "We are now at a touchy time," said State Department Spokesman Alan Romberg. "The danger of this bill is that it would make it far more difficult to bring about a quick and easy settlement in Lebanon." In the longer run, it would also weaken the U.S.'s " credibility in this region, and therefore any attempt to neutralize the P.L.O. hard-liners by encouraging negotiations leading to a settlement that moderate Palestinians can accept. --By William E. Smith. Reported by Johanna McGeary/ Washington and Roberto Suro/ Beirut

With reporting by Johanna McGeary/ Washington and Roberto Suro/ Beirut

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