Again, the Palestinians

The Middle East peace settlement that U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had been stitching together suddenly threatened to unravel last week. In a horribly familiar sequence, three Palestinian fedayeen slipped into Nahariya (pop. 21,000), a seaside resort in the Lebanese border area where 48 Israelis had been killed in three earlier fedayeen raids (see map). This time four Israelis died, as well as the three commandos. Israel's initial response was to shell selected targets in southern Lebanon. The raid and the reprisal touched off charges and countercharges, threats and anti-threats around the Middle East that for the first time seriously weakened the Kissinger peace.

In last week's night attack on Nahariya, the Palestinians landed on the municipal beach in a small dinghy and sneaked into town in civilian clothes. They were soon discovered by one of the civilian patrols that have been organized in border settlements as a result of the recent fedayeen raids on Qiryat Shemona, Ma'alot and Shamir kibbutz. Shooting started, and the Palestinians ducked into an apartment house for protection.

Aroused by the gunfire, terrified residents barricaded their doors with furniture. A 38-year-old woman and her two children tried to slip out of the building but were gunned down by the Arabs. The children, aged 10 and 4, were killed instantly; the mother died a few hours later in a hospital. By then Israeli soldiers had ringed the building and had killed all three intruders; one Israeli trooper died in the fighting. In the wake of the Israeli retaliatory attacks following Nahariya, there was strong Arab reaction. Military leaders scheduled a meeting in Cairo this week to plan joint aid for Lebanon. Egypt and Syria threatened to send planes if Israel continued to hit the Palestinian camps, and Syria reportedly dispatched ground-to-air missiles. General Mordechai Gur, Israel's Chief of Staff, warned that "if Lebanon gets serious military aid, the country will become a battlefield," and threatened a pre-emptive attack. Even as the second round of Kissinger's disengagement was calmly ending on the Golan Heights (see fallowing story), the Middle East was buffeted by new war jitters.

The latest round of raids demonstrated that the status of 3.5 million Palestinians must be decided, as President Nixon had been warned in his recent tour of the area, before peace would be possible. Last week's events also showed that the Palestinian issue had become so overriding that moderate Arab leaders were wary about even appearing to be against the fedayeen cause. Sudanese President Jaafar Numeiry announced that he was commuting the life sentences passed on the eight fedayeen who killed U.S. Diplomats George C. Moore and Cleo A. Noel Jr. and Belgian Guy Eid in a raid on Khartoum (TIME, March 12, 1973). The men are now to serve seven years in the "custody" of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Virtual Release. Numeiry then sent the eight terrorists to Cairo, where they are now said to be in jail, awaiting transfer to another Arab country. In protest against Numeiry's move, Washington angrily withdrew its present ambassador, William Brewer, from Khartoum, citing dismay over "the virtual release of these confessed murderers." Despite Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's recent demonstration of friendship toward the U.S., the Cairo newspaper Al Ahram, which frequently prints his views, hailed Numeiry for "understanding the motives that led the Palestinians to appear before Sudanese courts."

Even so-called moderate Palestinian organizations are feeling the backlash of frustration. The Nahariya raid was carried out by members of Yasser Arafat's Fatah, the largest and lately the most reasonable fedayeen group. At a Cairo meeting last month of the Palestine National Council--a kind of parliament in exile--Arafat had to modify his views somewhat to please fedayeen extremists.

Along with other relatively moderate leaders of the P.L.O., Arafat leans toward an interim settlement that would establish a mini-Palestine out of Gaza, the Hemmeh region beside the Sea of Galilee, and the West Bank, formerly part of Jordan, where 700,000 Palestinians live fairly peacefully under Israeli occupation. But fedayeen extremists demanded that such a government be a "fighting authority" and that establishing a mini-Palestine be considered only the first step toward recovery of all of old Palestine. As a result, Arafat apparently shifted Fatah to the attack at Nahariya.

For the moment at least, Israel is steadfastly opposing any conciliatory overtures to the P.L.O. Visiting Nahariya last week, Premier Yitzhak Rabin pledged "an epoch of perpetual war against terrorism." Israel's government so far refuses to deal with any Palestinians except those who live in Gaza or on the West Bank, and then only as Jordanian citizens. The Israeli government will not accept the concept of a Palestinian state except as a demilitarized area under Jordanian control.

Obvious Party. This impasse will have to be resolved before disengagement talks with Jordan can begin or full-scale peace talks involving Egypt and Syria can succeed. The problem is that no way to break the deadlock has yet been figured out. The obvious party to do it is the U.S., in the person of Henry Kissinger. At present, the kind of crisis situation that Kissinger needs to start a fruitful dialogue does not exist. Washington's relations with the Palestinians are even worse than its relations with Damascus were when the Israeli-Syrian disengagement talks began. Equally important, neither Israel's fragile new coalition government nor Jordan's harassed King Hussein is in any position to make territorial or political concessions.

U.S. officials are now talking about the "legitimate interests" of the Palestinians, but major breakthroughs are still a long way off. Meanwhile the fedayeen organizations are likely to become even more unsettling in the Middle East --particularly by means of armed assaults--than they have been up till now.

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