PLO Showing Little Sign of Readiness to Resume Negotiations with Israel

The Palestine Liberation Organization is showing little sign of readiness to resume negotiations with Israel.

This was the general assessment here Monday night after an Israeli delegation that had unexpectedly flown to PLO headquarters in Tunislate Sunday night was due to return to Israel, apparently empty-handed.

Talks between PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and U.S. State Department envoy Dennis Ross, who held a separate meeting in Tunis on Monday, also failed to produce positive results.

The Israeli delegation, which was led by Uri Savir, director-general of the Foreign Ministry, had been authorized to tell the PLO that Israel would accept discussion of any item the PLO wanted to place on the agenda — as long as the talks resumed quickly and followed the guidelines of the self-rule accord hammered out last year by Israel and the PLO.

Before the delegation’s return, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said that time was working against both sides.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, asked whether he was optimistic about an early resumption of the negotiations, replied very cautiously that his only reason for optimism was the conviction that neither side had any choice but to go ahead.

The meeting between Arafat and Ross, which reportedly lasted five hours on Monday, failed to reach a breakthrough as a result of continued PLO demands for providing security guarantees for Palestinians in the wake of the Feb. 25 murder of 29 Palestinians at a Hebron mosque by an Israeli settler.

Ross, the U.S. coordinator of the Middle East peace talks, declined to discuss the status of the negotiations with reporters after he emerged from his meeting with Arafat.

But PLO officials reportedly stated the Arafat-Ross discussions had led nowhere, with the United States refusing to support the PLO’s demands.

In the wake of the Hebron killings, the PLO has been calling for an armed international presence in the territories to protect Palestinians, the dismantling of those Jewish settlements which present the biggest threat to Palestinian safety and the disarming of Jewish settlers when they are traveling outside their settlements.