Shoring Up a Shaky Calm

The Nixon Administration has decided to sell more airplanes to Israel. Technically, the decision could have been announced last week. But Washington held off for fear that the plane sales would spawn a new outburst of anti-American violence and could lead to new fighting in Jordan between the fedayeen and King Hussein's army. Nonetheless, this week, before his Sunday departure on a twelve-day tour of the Far East, Secretary of State Rogers is expected to announce that Washington has reviewed the request in the light of shifting factors and has now decided to accede to at least part of it.

Israel will certainly not get all 125 planes. In fact, no specific number of jets will be mentioned in Rogers' statement. Rather, the U.S. will indicate readiness to provide a continuing supply to replace planes shot down over the Suez Canal area, where Israelis and Egyptians have been fighting bitter battles for 15 months. No planes will be replaced if they are shot down deep over Egypt. At the same time that Washington announces these limited jet sales, the U.S. will press both Israel and the Arab states to move toward compromises that might lead the way to a genuine Middle East peace.

Virulent Reactions. The change of mind on Washington's part is due mainly to a major change in the Middle East since Israel originally made its request nine months ago. By installing Soviet missiles in Egypt and stationing Russian pilots there in combat readiness, Moscow mounted a challenge that the U.S. was forced to meet. The announcement of additional U.S. planes to Israel is certain to set off virulent anti-American demonstrations throughout the Arab states. One American was killed, another kidnaped and 34 more held hostage by guerrillas two weeks ago in the course of clashes between Arab fedayeen and Jordanian troops. The reaction to U.S. jet sales to Israel --particularly since Israeli Phantoms on two occasions have been responsible for heavy civilian casualties in Egypt --could be much worse.

Washington was loath to disturb the shaky calm that has settled over Jordan since the fighting in Amman ended. King Hussein survived an assassination attempt and the street battles that killed an estimated 250 people. But the conflict was the third such hostile episode between King and fedayeen, and Hussein's power has been sapped by each confrontation.

Armed guerrillas roam at will throughout Jordan. The guerrillas act as their own police, and Jordanian police are powerless to do anything but go along with them. Hussein, in a postbattle press conference last week in the royal cinema of his Basman Palace in Amman, vowed that he would not abdicate. "I am not the type of person who can quit," he said. "This nation is part of me and I am part of it." But the King rules at the pleasure of the fedayeen, and his throne rests on the will of Fedayeen Leader Yasser Arafat as much as anything.

Arafat's price for propping up the King was the dismissal of Hussein's uncle, Major General Sherif Nasser Ben Jamil, as commander in chief of the Jordanian army, and his cousin, Brigadier General Sherif Zeid Ben Shaker, as head of the 3rd Armored Division, which guards Amman and is anti-fedayeen. Hussein acceded to the demands, but he has so far not given in to an ultimatum that the two men must leave the country. At his press conference, the King professed his loyalty to both. As long as they remain in Amman, the threat of a fourth round of fighting is real.

Arafat, in trying to cool the situation in Jordan, must deal not only with Hussein but with a splintering guerrilla movement as well. His own Al-Fatah, with 40,000 men, is still the dominant fedayeen organization. Fatah's aim is the dissolution of a Zionist Israel and the establishment of a multiracial Palestinian state. Lately, however, Arafat has had to deal with guerrillas more militant and Marxist than he; they not only want to recover Palestine but also intend to reform Arab society. The most outspoken of these is George Habash, 44, a physician who heads the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The P.F.L.P. seeks to pressure the U.S. to back away from Israel or suffer economically: P.F.L.P. guerrillas have already hijacked a TWA jetliner to Damascus and blown up the Tapline through which U.S. oil companies move Saudi Arabian oil to the Mediterranean. Most significant, it was Habash's guerrillas who provoked the recent battles with the army in Amman and who took the American hostages.

Tripoli Summit. Arafat, as elected leader of the guerrillas' central committee and head of a provisional Palestinian parliament in exile, sits as an equal with Hussein, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and other heads of government of the 14-nation Arab League. His guerrilla movement has received unstinting praise from socialist leaders like Nasser and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and ample funds from conservative rulers in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. But the radical guerrillas are something else. They raise the specter of Arab fighting Arab rather than Israel. With the Jordanian events as a leading item on the agenda, Gaddafi last week welcomed other leaders to an impromptu Arab summit in Tripoli. Although some invitations went out scarcely a day before the conferences began, six government leaders came. Among them was Hussein, who felt secure enough to travel.

Another item on the Tripoli agenda was peace, or at least ceasefire. Nasser, who was there, was recently interviewed for U.S. television by Harvard Law Professor Roger Fisher. In the interview, aired last week, the Egyptian President proposed terms for a ceasefire. If Israel would agree to withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 war, he said, Egypt would agree to a six-month cease-fire to carry out the withdrawal. Israel would also have to restore "Palestinian rights"--complying with the U.N. November 1967 resolution on the Middle East--meaning presumably that it would repatriate or compensate a million or more Arab refugees. In return, Nasser said, Egypt was prepared to accept the existence of Israel and its borders as they were before the Six-Day War. From Nasser, this was a new and intriguing offer.

Nasser has often before made conciliatory sounds in interviews with Westerners while continuing to say something quite different to his own people. Israel has usually reacted to Nasser's proposals with hawkish outrage. This time, however, it matched Nasser's pliancy with reduced intransigence. One Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem suggested that the time had come for "constructive ambiguity." Israel heretofore has insisted that negotiations be hammered out in face-to-face meetings, but in this instance the government would be willing to be ambiguous. For domestic political reasons, Israel cannot discuss "withdrawal" from occupied territories, but it would be willing to dicker about "redeployment." In Rome, on an official visit last week, Foreign Minister Abba Eban told newsmen that Israeli policy calls for the non-acquisition of occupied territories, but for just and secure borders. Sighed one State Department man when he heard the comment: "Now if we could only get Goldababy to say the same thing and make it official." But the somewhat conciliatory attitude was likely to be swept away, at least for a while, in the storm of Arab protests that are virtually certain to be set off by the announcement on the plane sales to Israel.

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