Training for Terror

From the refugee camps, and from universities that are often staffed with zealous Palestinian professors, come a steady stream of several hundred recruits a month--more, in fact, than El Fatah can handle. It accepts Palestinians for the most part, and only those who pass rigorous medical tests and an examination by a team of psychiatrists. A recruit must also pass a final, brutal test of fortitude. He is handed a large box containing the body of a newly killed dog, still bleeding profusely. As the blood seeps out, he is told, "Inside this box is a wounded comrade. Take it and carry it around the block and bring it back here." The recruit is not inclined to ask questions. If he vomits or faints on the spot, he is gently steered to an easier job as a courier, or told to go home and simplv spy on his neighbors. If he passes, he is sent to one of dozens of different training camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

Outside Amman, children, aged eight to twelve, from the Baq'aa refugee camp, are trained in commando techniques. They are given rigorous calisthenics and obstacle-course training, taught to handle rifles and machine guns, and instructed where the larynx, heart, liver and intestines are located, the better to thrust a dagger in the right place. Daughters of dead fedayeen are sent to schools run by the "Martyr Family Welfare Service," where they are taught to chant: "I have broken mv chains. I am the daughter of Fatah! We are all commandos." Refugee women are trained in first aid and in handling weapons.

In El Fatah's headquarters buildings in Amman, a hectic bustle reflects the growth of the movement. Switchboard operators bellow into makeshift World War II British field telephones, trying to make contact with branch offices in Salt or Irbid. Most communication is still by handwritten letter, carried by couriers on bicycles, in Jeeps or on foot. When a dusty Arab arrives with a tightly wadded piece of paper, Arafat scribbles an answer in the margin, then sends the courier off again. Agents arriving in little black Volkswagens dash up for conferences. A white ambulance pulls up bearing the insignia of the Red Crescent, the Moslem equivalent of the Red Cross. When a cargo of green filing cabinets was unloaded last week, a guerrilla with a .45 stuck in his belt smiled: "Our accounting department has arrived."

These days El Fatah hardly has time to fight as it copes with the avalanche of aid. Stacks of bandages, food and ammunition are piled everywhere. Sometimes the arriving shipments include beer. It is not drunk; the fedayeen sell it and use the money to purchase arms. Some of the fedayeen weapons are purchased directly, but some are contributed by Arab governments, particularly Egypt, Iraq and Syria, which help out in other ways as well. A Syrian raider captured by the Israelis revealed that he had been trained by Egyptian army officers.

There is no evidence of direct Russian aid to the fedayeen. Any aid they might want to offer can be funneled through the Arab governments. Direct Soviet aid might endanger the Kremlin's ties with those governments. Also, Moscow may well view the fedayeen as a dangerous and uncontrollable factor in the Middle East equation. While the Soviets may or may not want a genuine peace in the area, they clearly do not want a new war now--and another likely humiliating Arab defeat that could destroy their influence in the region.

Nor are the fedayeen getting aid or inspiration from the world's other main revolutionary fount, Peking. "We read

Mao, but he isn't really relevant," says a young raider. To the fedayeen, the model and example is the Algerian revolution. For ideology, they look to its apostle, Frantz Fanon, the late Martinique-born Negro psychiatrist, who preached in The Wretched of the Earth that for oppressed and colonized people of the world "violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect."

In the view of the Palestinians, Israel is an imperialist colonial power occupying their land. With no hope of driving the Israelis out themselves, the Palestinians aim to provoke Israel into taking over so much territory that it finally chokes on a glut of Arabs within its borders. Moreover, says Arafat, "the very process of Israeli expansion will extend the war of liberation into all the countries bordering on the occupied territories, and they will take up the struggle in defense of their own existence"--perhaps with Russia this time drawn in on the Arabs' side.

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