The Peres gambit.

BElT SHEMESH, ISRAEL

ACCORDING to the Labor Party's chronology of the Israel-PLO accord--most details of which were ironed out near the beginning of February in Cairo--progress toward the deal began only after the party assumed power.

In this official scenario, Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin started the "Gaza-Jericho First" ball rolling at an academic conference in 1992, and the idea was subsequently pursued for a year at a Norwegian university through the offices of Terje Roed Larsen, a social scientist who had been doing research on the IsraeliPalestinian conflict.

But a closer look at the activities that led to the signing in Washington last September tells a radically different story.

In January 1990, Science Minister Ezer Weizman (today Israel's president) met with PLO officials in London. He returned to Israel and reported his meetings to Labor Party head Shimon Peres, who was then a member of the National Unity Government, an uneasy coalition formed after the 1988 elections had failed to give either major party a solid plurality.

Peres was enthusiastic but knew that Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, of the hard-line Likud Party, would never go along. He decided that the only way to exploit the opening was to bring down the government. He assigned the task of keeping the PLO talks alive to his aides Adi Tamir and Nimrod Novick, while asking his deputy Yossi Beilin to join him in breaking up the ruling coalition.

Step one in the plan was to force the ultra-orthodox Shas Party, headed by Interior Minister Arye Deri, to leave the coalition. Peres, as finance minister, was well placed to do this. He had gathered indisputable proof of Deri's large embezzlements and bribe-taking. Beilin approached Deri with the findings and gave him a choice: quit the government or face the legal consequences. Deri chose to lead Shas out of the coalition.

Next, a strong issue was needed as a pretext for a no-confidence motion. This was supplied by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker in February 1990. He asked the Israeli government to support a plan, bearing his name, which implicitly put Jerusalem up for negotiations, a state of affairs both he and Peres knew Shamir could never support.

Shas once again was the instrument: it shocked its supporters by backing the Baker Plan, thereby bringing down the National Unity Government. The party eventually reneged and returned to the Likud fold, but Peres had gained the cover he needed to leave the coalition.

Labor was now in opposition and Peres began planning a victory in the next national elections, scheduled for 1992. Meanwhile, in June 1991 Yossi Beilin traveled to Cairo, leading a delegation of six Labor members of the Knesset. He disappeared from his group for several hours without explanation. Had they known why, they might never have signed on for the Egyptian junket.

What Beilin did was go to the King Hotel to meet two high-ranking PLO officials, Said Kamal, the PLO's representative in Cairo, and Mahmud Abbas, a special envoy from Yasir Arafat. Beilin handed Abbas a written message from Peres, which asked the PLO leader to use his influence to persuade Israeli Arabs to vote en masse for labor in the 1992 national elections. In return, if Labor was elected it would immediately freeze settlements in the administered territories, adopt a land-for-peace diplomacy, and cancel the law prohibiting meetings between Israelis and members of the PLO.

The last promise is significant. Beilin and Peres were both well aware that the former's meeting with Kamal and Abbas was against Israeli law, which as members of the Knesset they were sworn to uphold. Peace activist Abie Nathan had already sat in prison for violating it. Beilin was consorting with the enemy on orders from his superior.

By January 1992 it was becoming clear to Arafat that Shimon Peres would likely lose the party's leadership to Yitzhak Rabin after the elections. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak sent a delegation to Jerusalem to meet with Peres and find out if the deal that Arafat had been offered would be valid if Rabin took over the party. Peres assured the Egyptians that nothing would change, though clearly he knew Rabin would never play along with secret deals with the PLO.

On January 17, James Baker met with Mubarak and told him that the U.S. would begin a campaign to force Israel into freezing settlements. This message was transmitted by the American ambassador to Nabil Shaat, Arafat's diplomatic advisor.

Two days later Beilin was in Cairo on his second known secret mission. Unfortunately for him, he was spotted by Yehoshua Meiri of the Hebrew daily newspaper Hadashot entering the lobby of the Ramses Hilton Hotel. Meiri watched him enter a room, followed a few minutes later by Nabil Shaat. Beilin's secret was out, and two Egyptian newspapers, Al-Gomhouriya and Al-Wafd, disclosed details of the meeting. According to Shaat, who felt free to talk since the story was out, Peres had upped the stakes. If the PLO rallied Arab voters behind Labor, helping it to oust the Likud coalition from power, his government would support an "independent autonomous entity" led by the PLO, i.e., something resembling a Palestinian state.

Although a credible Israeli journalist witnessed the meeting, Shaat confirmed it, and two Egyptian papers printed details of it, Beilin denied that it had ever taken place. Incredibly, the Israeli media missed the story.

Meanwhile, when Shaat returned to Tunis with his report of the promises from the American secretary of state and the leader of the Israeli opposition, not all his colleagues accepted these promises unskeptically. About half the PLO leadership wanted something concrete before agreeing to play ball with Peres.

The skeptics won the day in February, after Rabin wrested the Labor Party leadership from Peres. Rabin had been the defense minister during the first two and a half years of the Intifada, and his measures for quelling the uprising had earned him enemies in the PLO.

Arafat could not ignore the discontent in his own ranks. Soon after Rabin's ascension, the PLO invited the leaders of various Palestinian factions to Cairo. Arafat called for them to close ranks behind one united proPLO party. He promised to deliver enough supporters to the polls to make unity worthwhile, but the politicians could not settle their disagreements and the plan failed.

With the unity scheme unworkable, Arafat sent orders to Arab town councils and village leaders to support Labor. On election day, June 23, Arab voters united behind Labor and made enough of a difference to change the government. Effectively, the PLO had decided who was to run Israel.

As soon as Peres was appointed foreign minister, Arafat demanded that his promises be honored. However, Rabin had different ideas. He felt the Israeli public had elected him personally and not his dovish party. He agreed to promote a settlement freeze but would not change the basis of the peace talks nor permit a lifting of the ban on meetings with the PLO. In response Mubarak sent a now infamous message to Rabin demanding that he live up to commitments made by the party when Peres was the leader. However, Rabin wasn't budging. So once again, on September 11, Berlin embarked on a trip to Cairo. The issue this time was how to conduct diplomacy behind the backs not of the Likud but of his own leader.

Predictably, the Americans pitched in. Just before Beilin's arrival President Bush's special emissary, Dennis Ross, sent a message to Arafat via Shaat promising a restoration of good relations with the U.S. if Israel canceled its ban on meetings with the PLO. In response, Arafat's message to Beilin was that he wanted a change in the law before the American elections.

Beilin explained to the Egyptians that he couldn't deliver that fast without challenging Rabin's leadership, which would have been political suicide. Mubarak asked Arafat to give Peres more time. Arafat adamantly refused and expressed his anger in a letter to Peres accusing him of treachery and threatening to reveal the meetings with Beilin, which in Israel would have been viewed as treason.

Within a few weeks Arafat flew to Sudan to make his peace with the radicals, and Said Kamal leaked details of his meetings with Bei]in, stopping just short of naming him. Meanwhile, the Palestinian delegation was ordered by the PLO to create an aura of crisis and breakdown at the peace talks in Washington.

The Egyptians panicked and Mubarak sent Omar Musa, his foreign minister, to Jerusalem to implore Rabin to honor Peres's promises. To prod the prime minister Mubarak sent a message: he was considering reneging on the Camp David Accords and placing armored units in half the Sinai Peninsula. Rabin, however, would still not agree to Arafat's terms. He sent Musa back to Cairo with an innocuous concession in the autonomy negotiations which expanded Palestinian municipal authority somewhat.

Arafat, not appeased, pulled the joker out of the pack. He announced that he had no choice but to turn over PLO policy to the rejection front. Put simply, he threatened to abandon diplomacy in favor of terrorism. Peres got the message and immediately flew to Cairo, where he assured Musa that he would pull out all the stops to force a change in the PLO-meetings law. Musa informed him that Arafat wanted to send the new Clinton Administration a clear-cut message that the PLO were partners in the peace negotiations. He demanded that the ban on meeting the PLO be removed immediately. On November 25 a Peres ally, Justice Minister David Libai, introduced into the cabinet a bill to rescind the law.

In February, after a long and bitter fight, the law was finally revoked, and Knesset member Yael Dayan was sent to Tunis the next day as a token of the new law. The PLO had altered the results of the Israeli election and had reaped two of the three rewards promised them. All that remained was a return to a land-for-peace approach at the peace talks.

A month later, while Beilin continued his deceit in Oslo and the government offered repeated denials of contacts between Peres's men and the PLO, the road to the agreement hit major snags.

In September, after Rabin had spent months defending his two Shas cabinet comrades on corruption charges, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered him to fire Arye Deri and Raphael Pinchasi. The Labor government was on the verge of losing its majority among Jewish voters and hence its mandate for negotiating an agreement with the PLO.

Although the PLO wanted more time to consider the final mutual-recognition pact, they were told that Labor's days were numbered. It was sign now or never. The PLO relented and both sides rushed into an agreement. Rabin did not even bring the historic treaty to a national referendum for fear of losing.

There is no doubt that Rabin's strings were pulled by Peres, who according to the original coalition agreement in June 1992 was to stay out of the peace talks. Peres disobeyed the edict and, while Rabin became enmeshed in the Deri scandal, cut a deal with the PLO.

Rabin was not informed of the secret negotiations until the second week in August. By then he was presented with a fait accompli. The PLO activists in the territories were already starved into submission and the Israeli public was to be manipulated into acceptance with pro-agreement rallies and favorable media reaction. All that was left for the prime minister was to lift a pen and sign.