Israel Intends to Low-key Its Complaints on U.s.-plo Contacts

The Israeli Embassy in Washington has “voiced Israel’s regret” to the U.S. government at America’s contact with the PLO in connection with the evacuation of civilians from Beirut, a Foreign Ministry spokesman here reported today. But within hours, Premier Yitzhak Rabin, speaking in the Knesset, made it clear that Israel intended to keep its protest low-keyed.

If the U.S.-PLO contacts developed into proper diplomatic ties, Rabin said, this would be a serious matter. However, that was not the case at the present time, and it was misguided for MKs or the media here to misrepresent the situation or deliberately inflate it, Rabin warned. The Premier referred to official U.S. statements explaining that the contacts with the PLO denoted no change in policy but were to be seen strictly in the context of the evacuation.

The Foreign Ministry statement also sought to put the American clarification on record. Israel had “noted,” the statement said, that the U.S. government had informed her that these contacts were purely in a humanitarian context and out of humanitarian motivation, and did not represent any change at all in the U.S. position regarding the PLO. Officials here are reacting cautiously to reports from Lebanon and Syria during the past 24 hours that the PLO and Syria have reached agreement over the Lebanese crisis.

According to these reports, the PLO, apparently having been badly mauled in the fighting, and fearing further Syrian pressure, has agreed to the reinstatement of a sovereign Lebanese government under the newly elected President Sarkiss and has agreed also to abide by the “Cairo agreement” which limits PLO freedom of movement inside Lebanon. The new agreement also reportedly limits the PLO to camps in the northeastern part of Lebanon, along the Syrian border.

But officials here were not prepared today to hail the reported agreement as necessarily marking the end of the 16-month bloodbath in Lebanon. They noted that the agreement, though extensively reported in Arab media, had not been officially announced nor had any joint Syrian-PLO statement been issued, as would normally be expected. They preferred, therefore, to await developments before making a definitive analysis of this latest event.