The Scene Changes

Late in a day that saw the Reagan Administration having trouble finding its own unambiguous voice, the State Department, in an abrupt and dramatic reversal of a 13-year-old policy, announced that the United States is now prepared to open direct talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

As Secretary of State George P. Shultz explained it, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s statement earlier on Wednesday removed previous “ambiguities” and met longstanding American demands that the PLO accept U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, recognize Israel’s right to exist and renounce all forms of terrorism. And so what Arafat’s speech to the United Nations on Tuesday didn’t do in American eyes his press conference one day later accomplished. The PLO, denounced by Shultz only a few weeks ago for its involvement in terrorism and rejected as a suitable partner for dialogue just hours earlier by President-elect George Bush, has now suddenly acquired a large measure of political respectability.

That respectability, a White House statement makes clear, will be quickly withdrawn if Arafat fails to enforce his renunciation of terrorism. A heavy burden thus falls on the man who identifies himself as the leader of the Palestinian revolution to show that he indeed controls the disparate elements that make up his organization. No less a burden falls on those from the PLO who will meet in Tunis with the American ambassador. The United States expects that dialogue to be serious, substantive and pointed, as Shultz emphasized, toward bringing about direct negotiations between Palestinians and Israel on the future that they are fated to share together.

U.S. willingness to talk with the PLO does not, Shultz made clear, mean or imply acceptance of any of the PLO’s territorial or political claims. It means that the United States is prepared to explore whether the PLO in fact is ready to take part in a realistic political process. Talking with the PLO in no way diminishes the U.S. commitment toward preserving Israel’s security and well being.

Many Israelis, and certainly Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, won’t see it that way. Conditioned for good reasons to regard the PLO only as an organization committed to terrorism and to Israel’s elimination, they almost certainly will respond to the U.S. decision with anger, alarm and even defiance. In the end it is possible that Israeli suspicions about the PLO’s good faith may be confirmed. For the time being, though, the United States thinks that it sees a major change in direction by the PLO, and the possibility for a break in the impasse at long last. In an eloquent and succinct summation of U.S. policy in the Middle East, Ambassador to the United Nations Vernon Walters spoke of how “tired” the world has become with the endless Arab-Israel conflict. Perhaps it is the weariness factor as much as anything else that has moved things to this point. In any event Washington thinks that new possibilities are at hand, and is determined to explore them.