Time Is Running Out : Israel grows impatient as the P.L.O. finds no home

Israel grows impatient as the P.L.O. finds no home

A deceptive calm descended late last week on the rubble-strewn streets of West Beirut.

Irrepressible merchants set up makeshift stands to hawk books, camping lanterns and underwear in front of shuttered stores. Shoppers discovered to their delight that abundant supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables had filtered through a leaky Israeli blockade posted along the Green Line that divides the capital. In the surrounding hills, Israeli soldiers played Ping Pong or strummed guitars to pass the idle hours. As a silver kite bobbed brightly in a stiff breeze, an Israeli officer sighed in amazement: "This is a surrealistic war."

Yet lurking beneath the placid facade were gathering tensions that threatened to bring the Israeli siege to an imminent and bloody climax. After weeks of intense haggling, negotiations to transfer some 6,000 Palestinian guerrillas encircled inside West Beirut to another Arab country came to a virtual standstill when Syria refused again to offer them sanctuary. Moreover, the Israelis charged that Palestine Liberation Organization Leader Yasser Arafat had no intention of leaving Beirut and that he was deliberately dragging his feet in order to avoid a direct Israeli attack on his stronghold. In East Beirut, the director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, David Kimche, bluntly warned U.S. Special Envoy Philip Habib that a final assault on the Palestinian positions could become inevitable, if the deadlock persists. Said Kimche: 'Time is running out. They better take us seriously."

Alarmed by Israel's mounting impatience, President Reagan dispatched an urgent letter to Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, noting that "we may be but a few days away" from an all-out Israeli attack on West Beirut. The Administration's chief concern was to secure Israeli forbearance until Reagan can meet with Foreign Ministers Prince Saud al Faisal of Saudi Arabia and Abdel Halim Khaddam of Syria in Washington this week. "The No. 1 problem is still where the P.L.O. will go," says an Administration analyst. "I suppose the issue will come down to just how much money the Saudis are going to pay whoever takes the P.L.O."

Reagan also sent a message to Syria's President Hafez Assad, urging him to reconsider his refusal to accept the Palestinians. But Assad flatly turned Reagan down, stressing that Habib's prime mission should be not the evacuation of P.L.O. guerrillas but the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon. In any event, the Syrians insisted, the P.L.O. leadership had made no formal request for sanctuary in Syria. Nonetheless, Arafat admitted in Beirut that a proposal for Syria to take in Palestinian fighters was "under discussion" and that he was interested in such a move because "my main headquarters is still in Syria, and we have our camps and military bases there."