Israel Holds Indirect Talks With PLO, Peres Aide Says

JERUSALEM — Senior Labor Party officials suggested Thursday that Israel has been engaged in an indirect dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization through the United States, touching off a furor that could open a new fissure in Labor’s shaky coalition government with the right-wing Likud Party.

Deputy Finance Minister Yossi Beilin, a top aide to Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, told Israel Army Radio that “for the last two, 2 1/2 months there have been clear and official negotiations between the Israeli government led by Yitzhak Shamir and the PLO, by way of the Americans.”

The assertion was hotly denied by aides to Shamir. But Israel Television reported Thursday night that U.S. Ambassador William Brown had been briefing Peres and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin on U.S. contacts with the PLO in Tunis, Tunisia, and that the United States had been relaying the responses of the two Labor ministers to PLO leaders.

The various reports suggested that Labor ministers in the 8-month-old “unity government” had acquiesced in an indirect dialogue with the PLO even as Shamir and other Likud ministers had formally rejected such contacts.

Shamir and Foreign Minister Moshe Arens have rejected U.S. briefings on talks with the PLO.

In his interview with Army Radio here, Beilin suggested that Likud is pretending to ignore an indirect dialogue with Tunis while tacitly tolerating it. “Whoever doesn’t know” about the contacts, “whoever doesn’t recognize this, whoever hides from this, is like a child who closes his eyes and thinks the world doesn’t see him,” he said.

“We speak to the Americans, raise proposals, the Americans go to the PLO in Tunis,” Beilin said. “They come back to us. If they tell us they talked to the PLO, we shut the door; if they say they spoke to Palestinians, we open it and listen to what they have to say.”

Likud sources offered a different account. Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Shamir loyalist, told Israel Radio that “there could be some private efforts” to communicate with the PLO, but “we of course aren’t responsible for that, and they run contrary to the basic guidelines of the government.”

In Tunis on Thursday, a PLO official told Western news agencies that the organization has held indirect talks with Israel and said the Israeli government has conveyed “ideas and suggestions” through intermediaries.