MIDDLE EAST: Putting on the Pressure

Arab efforts to push a Palestinian solution make Israel edgy

Even in the euphoria following the historic Camp David agreements last September, everyone knew the hard part was yet to come. While Egyptian-Israeli relations began a new era, the central issue of the Middle East remained unsettled: the fate of the Palestinian people. The Arab states basically favor an independent sovereign state for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, a home both for Palestinians already living there and for millions now in the diaspora. The Israelis, appalled at the notion of a hostile state, perhaps run by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, on Israel’s very border, are determined that, whatever happens, the Palestinian “entity” shall not be wholly independent and shall not control its own security—or be able to threaten Israel.

Last week tensions flared between Washington and Jerusalem, based on growing Israeli suspicion that U.S. dependence on Arab oil was shifting American priorities in the Middle East. Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan warned in an interview that the Carter Administration was undertaking a review of strategy toward the Palestinians that amounted to not just an erosion but a shift in U.S. policy toward Israel, to Israel’s detriment. It was a result, he said, of “American concern about economic and energy problems, concerns about quantities of oil and prices.”

At the Sunday meeting of the Israeli Cabinet, Moshe Dayan lashed out at practically everybody. He strongly criticized the economic policies of his own government—in part, perhaps, because he is trying to fill the political vacuum caused by the illness of Premier Menachem Begin, who is still recuperating from a mild stroke. But he saved the best part of his fire for the U.S., warning it against recognzing the P.L.O. or in any other way strengthening the chances of a wholly independent Palestinian state’s develop ing in the West Bank and Gaza.

At the end of the stormy, five-hour session, the Cabinet voted to warn the U.S. to keep its commitments to Israel, notably the promise to veto any attempts by the Arab states to alter United Nations Resolution 242, which in 1967 implicitly acknowledged Israel’s right to exist.

The Israelis want no part of a new resolution that might also acknowledge the Palestinians’ right to a sovereign state. The threat may have been precipitated in part by Israel’s domestic political uncertainties, but there was no mistaking its seriousness: to withdraw from the stalled negotiations for “autonomy” of the occupied West Bank and Gaza if the U.S. presses too hard for a rapprochement with the P.L.O. that set off the Israelis this time seemed to be an intricate power play orchestrated by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the P.L.O. The shape of this three-pronged diplomatic maneuver launched earlier this summer had become apparent only a short time earlier: 1) The Saudis had raised their oil production by 1 million barrels a day in early July on a three-month basis, thereby easing the shortage that had led to gas lines in May and June in the U.S 2) The P.L.O. had seemingly adopted a far more moderate policy line than it usually takes. 3)Kuwaiti diplomats at the U.N. proposed a draft resolution that would, in effect, tie Israel’s right to exist, as implied in Resolution 242, with international recognition of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. Through this ingenious strategy, so the hypothesis went, the moderate Arabs were gently nudging the Carter Administration to come to grips with the Palestinian problem by October. If by that time the U.S. failed to respond to the Arab appeal and continued to yield to Israeli obstinacy, the Saudis could simply cut back on their oil production, once again causing the U.S., and its President, acute distress.

As reconstructed by U.S. experts on the Middle East, the Arab scheme stemmed from P.L.O. Leader Yasser Arafat’s growing difficulties earlier this year.

His allies in Syria and Iraq had become more and more preoccupied with pressing domestic problems. Israel, in the meantime, was steadily pounding away at P.L.O. refuges in southern Lebanon.

Aware of Arafat’s desperate need for a new approach, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Fahd invited him to Riyadh in June. At that meeting, Fahd convinced Arafat of the need for the P.L.O. to build a new relationship with the U.S.

Toward that end, Fahd argued that the P.L.O. should curtail its terrorist activities for a time, while the Saudis offered the U.S. their million-barrel-a-day oil production bonus—or “Fourth of July present,” as King Khalid described it at the time. Kuwait was brought in on the deal to make use of the abilities of its representative on the current U.N. Security Council, Ambassador Abdalla Yaccoub Bishara.

The diplomatic strength of the moderate Arabs has been bolstered in recent weeks by improving ties between Saudi Arabia and Iraq, the world’s leaders in both current oil production and in known reserves. Saddam Hussein has just emerged as the anti-Communist ruler of Iraq, crushing his opposition in the process; only last week his government executed 22 people, including several top officials, for alleged sabotage. Like the Saudis, the new Iraqi rulers are acutely worried about the risks of terrorism. So they are particularly anxious to reduce the chances of P.L.O.-inspired violence.

Israeli fears of political pressure were heightened by clear signals in recent weeks that the P.L.O. might be prepared to embrace Resolution 242 and accept Israel’s right to exist in exchange for Palestinian self-determination and national independence. Mindful of Israeli sensitivities, U.S. officials flatly ruled out voting for any draft that endorsed an independent Palestinian state, but they have not dismissed the idea of approving a milder resolution that would affirm the Palestinians’ legitimate political rights. Such phraseology would merely align the language of 242 with the Camp David accords, and Carter Administration officials doubted that it could lead to an imminent U.S.-P.L.O. dialogue. Still, such a diplomatic flirtation jolted the Israeli government. So did U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s warning last week that Israel may have violated a 1952 military aid agreement by using American-supplied jets in raids on southern Lebanon.

The Arabs’ carrot-and-stick diplomatic approach caught the Carter Administration off guard. The President’s ambassador-at-large in the Middle East Robert Strauss, mistakenly reported last month that the Saudis were downplaying any possible link between their gift of increased oil production and diplomatic progress on the Palestinian issue. During his appointed trip to Strauss Riyadh, felt in that fact, the the newly Fahd was deliberately distinguishing between the two issues by introducing them separately and without any reference to “linkage.” A U.S. expert concluded later: “It was classic Bedouin hospitality to avoid controversial subjects during a get-acquainted visit.” The fact is that Saudi leaders have said time and again for that past six years that there is an intimate connection between the oil and Palestinian issues. Arafat certainly talks like a man who believes he has that kind of muscle behind him (see interview, following page).

In any case, the Israelis, led by Interior Minister Yosef Burg, were in a defiant mood when the autonomy negotiations resumed last week in a hotel atop Mount Carmel overlooking Haifa harbor. After Egyptian Premier Mustafa Khalil announced that Egypt would support a U.N. resolution dealing with Palestinian rights, one of the Israeli delegates, Justice Minister Shmuel Tamir, charged in a volley of diplomatic overkill that Egypt was “endangering the whole current peace process.” The Egyptians insisted that they wanted the new resolution as means of bringing the Palestinians into negotiations. If the autonomy talksfail, they contended, a U.N. resolution endorsing Palestinian rights could serveas a fall-back position, a basis for subsequent negotiation. Eventually, the twosides settled down, but in truth the negotiators are merely shadowboxing untilMenachim Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat hold their next meetingin early September.

Israel is feeling particularly edgy these days because its relations with Western Europe, and particularly West Germany, are also at an alltime low. In January, Bonn sent a group of antiterrorist experts to Beirut to discuss ways of curbing political violence with a P.L.O. security team. The Israelis saw the move as a first step toward diplomatic recognition. In June the European Community took a strong stand against Israel’s policy of establishing new Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Then in mid-July, Arafat flew to Vienna to hold talks with Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and West German Social Democratic Party Chairman Willy Brandt. Again the Israelis blamed Bonn for countenancing the courtesy. Next month, in either Kuwait or Paris, the European Community will hold discussions with the moderate oil states led by Saudi Arabia.

The subject: some kind of arrangement to guarantee oil supplies to the Europeans and to guarantee price stability to the Arabs. Once again, the Israelis hold the West Germans chiefly responsible for the growing cooperation between Europeans and Arabs. Says an Israeli diplomat angrily: “We can’t just brush aside the past.” Bonn’s view was that Jerusalem’s reactions were largely emotional. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt is known to be impatient with Begin, whom he regards as holding too narrow and too rigid a position on the Palestinian question.

The Administration set to work trying to soothe Israeli anxieties, which of course, are shared by many American Jews. The President telephoned Menachem Begin to congratulate him on his 66th birthday. He invited Israeli Ambassador Ephraim Evron to the White House for a working lunch. He assured the Israelis that American policy toward their country had not changed.

That is true, as far as it goes. But Carter is convinced, as are U.S. allies in Western Europe, that unless the Palestinians can be persuaded to participate in the autonomy plan, the whole fragile goal of a wider Middle East peace is in jeopardy. All the ferment in the Middle East, Israel’s uneasiness, Arab efforts to influence events in new forms, are part of that difficult, unsettling, but necessary process.