A New War of Attrition

EXPLODING parcels suddenly turned up in Arab mailboxes last week, only a month after a similar wave of deadly letter bombs had been sent from Amsterdam to Israelis round the world. In Beirut, one package exploded in the central post office, injuring three workers; another blew up in an export-import firm operated by a Palestinian, wounding a secretary and an office boy. A letter bomb to a Beirut newspaper was disarmed. In Cairo, postal employees spotted and defused a package mailed from Belgrade. In Algiers, a package wounded the secretary of the Palestine Liberation Organization office, to whom it had been addressed. In Tripoli, meanwhile, an official of the same group, Mustafa Awad Zeid, was blinded by a letter bomb that exploded as he opened it.

Danger in Europe. So went the continuing underground war between Arabs and Israelis. After the massacre of eleven Israelis at Munich (TIME cover, Sept. 18), an Israeli diplomat was killed in his London office by an exploding letter bomb. Four weeks later in Rome, an Al-Fatah propagandist who worked as a translator for the Libyan embassy was killed by a dozen shots that hit him as he walked out of his apartment house. Rome police have still not been able to decide whether his assailants were Israelis or members of the anti-Palestinian Jordanian intelligence service.

The war is played most dangerously in Europe, where agents of all sides can move about with relative freedom. European authorities, however, have increased precautions, especially at airports, and terrorists are occasionally tripped up. Anti-metallic detectors clanged last week in Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. Customs men searching two bags were surprised to discover one crammed with pistols and ammunition, the other with hand grenades, five detonators and 21 letter bombs similar to those sent to Israelis in September. Airport police promptly arrested a Palestinian traveling to Caracas on an Algerian diplomatic passport. The man, identified as Ribhi Khalum, 33, was released after he insisted that someone else had given him the bags to carry to Caracas.

West Germany, with the tragedy of Munich fresh in mind, has taken harsher measures against Arabs than has any other European nation. Bonn has banned the 1,000-member General Union of Palestinian Workers and the smaller General Union of Palestinian Students. The government, conscious of 55,000 Arabs living in the country, said it had acted to prevent "the transfer of violent conflicts" to West Germany. Bonn also expelled 44 Arabs suspected of political activity contrary to German law, tightened up visa requirements and established an elite police force to deal specifically with subversion and terror. But Bonn's proposals for a pan-European anti-terror force similar to Interpol were coolly received by Britain and France, as dangerous to both individual rights and to the two countries' relations with Arab states.

The French, indeed, refused earlier this year to extradite to London an Algerian identified as the terrorist who machine-gunned the limousine of the Jordanian ambassador and almost killed him. Instead, the man--to unspoken British relief as well as French--was returned to Algiers, at Algerian request, to face unspecified and probably fictional "criminal charges." In Britain, Israelis and Arabs both complain that security is too lax. Israeli Ambassador Michael Comay canceled a trip to the British Labor Party Conference at Blackpool four weeks ago after police refused to guarantee his safety.

Whitehall has asked Jordan's King Hussein, who is particularly security-conscious after at least nine attempts on his own life, to withdraw his three children from British public schools this year because police could not promise them adequate protection. Daughter Alia, 16, will be privately tutored in Amman while sons Abdullah, 10, and Feisal, 9, have entered a U.S. prep school. Hussein has all but given up traveling by car into Amman from his hilltop Al Hummar palace, and prefers to go by helicopter instead. When he does venture out in his white Mercedes, he keeps a machine gun tucked under his knees and is accompanied by six Land Rovers filled with Bedouin troops.

The U.S. meanwhile is taking its own precautions to prevent terrorist acts. The 6,000 Arab students now in the country have been screened by federal authorities, and some with outspoken Palestinian sympathies are under surveillance. Congress hurriedly passed a bill that made it a federal offense--and thus empowers the FBI to act immediately--to murder, kidnap or assault any foreign visitor. Security is especially tight in Manhattan; 40 Executive Protection Service officers and 30 Secret Service agents have been added to the force of 120 or so New York City police who regularly guard United Nations delegations.

In most instances however, the tightest security is provided by the Israelis or Arabs themselves. Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban traveled from New York to London recently as "Mr. Green." Israeli tourists are warned not to carry Hebrew-language newspapers or magazines when they travel, to watch their bags, and to move about only in groups. El Al has stopped sticking VIP labels on the tickets of important passengers and while the airline still will provide El Al flight bags, it also cautions travelers not to use them openly abroad. Israelis are also instructed not to hold conversations in Hebrew; the 107-member Israel Philharmonic on a recent, high-security Western hemisphere tour spoke mostly German. They are taking the new travel instructions with good humor. "You can usually hear Israelis a mile away," says Pinhas Molad, general secretary of the Israel Tourist Agents Association. "If fear of terror keeps them from speaking at the top of their lungs in Hebrew, then it will have done our image abroad a good turn."

Like the Blitz. Israelis stationed overseas have come to feel like frontline combatants in what one Tel Aviv columnist calls "our new war of attrition." They are provided with government security suggestions that cover four pages. Embassies and consulates have been converted into veritable fortresses; in Manhattan, for instance, a potential visitor to the Israeli consulate not only has to pass a policeman but also faces locked doors, and must identify himself over an intercom before he is allowed to enter. In a European school for 1,500 Jewish children, security men have joined the faculty this term as coaches or "assistant administrators." "It's like the blitz," comments William Frankel, editor of London's Jewish Chronicle. "The abnormal has once again become normal."

Arabs stationed in Europe are equally careful. They are hounded by, among other dangers, what appears to be low-level Israeli harassment. Members of something called the "World Organization for Individual Welfare and Security, European Branch" have tossed rocks through embassy windows and sent Arab diplomats letters calculatedly filled with frightening detail. "The fact that you are married to an English girl will not help," goes one such letter. "We have watched you drive unharmed around London in a blue Mercedes while your country condones terrorist activities. Don't blame anyone if something happens to you." Says one recipient: "I used to stroll along Oxford street on my lunch hour. I don't now."

Palestinian guerrilla leaders are as edgy as anyone. When George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, recently entered Beirut's American University Hospital for treatment of a heart condition, a squad of bodyguards donned hospital white and took up positions near his bed. "All we're trying to do," says a Palestinian fighter who has had one colleague blown up when he started his car and another maimed by an explosive package, "is postpone our own execution."

Blind terror demeans both sides and gains neither any advantage in their long and painful war. But once it has begun, terror becomes increasingly difficult to contain. Many Middle Easterners, indeed, find an ominous link between their own inability to reach peace and the new ease of travel and communication within the Common Market. "The future of Europe," says an Israeli diplomat, "may only make it more possible, perhaps inevitable, that our enemies will find it easier to fight us there rather than at home."

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