The night before the Israeli elections, Jerusalem Bureau Chief Donald Neff and Correspondent David Halevy had an exclusive interview with Shimon Peres, the man they expected to become the next Premier. The trouble was, admits Neff, "like just about everyone else, we had picked the wrong side."

To Neff, as to most Middle Eastern observers, "Menachem Begin's victory was more than an upset. It was a conundrum. What did it mean--for peace, for America, for Israel, for the Palestinians?" Our cover story this week, written by Associate Editor Spencer Davidson, assesses those questions. Along with it is the interview that Neff and Halevy had with Menachem Begin after his party's victory. Neff thought the security man guarding Begin's apartment looked familiar, and, says Neff, "he was. It was the same guard we had encountered a few days before at the office of Shimon Peres. The torch had passed. It was a new story."

We have another new story to tell in our CINEMA section this week, the tale of a movie with such uncontrived innocence and sheer fantasy that it may start a trend in the film industry. We first heard about Star Wars from Associate Editor Gerald Clarke, who was in Los Angeles to search out SHOW BUSINESS stories. Getting word of a film that was to be given an unusual Sunday-morning preview in San Francisco, he flew north and was in the theater at 10 a.m., along with several hundred screaming children, a scattering of sci-fi film buffs and Director George Lucas. The first thing Monday morning, Clarke was on the phone to New York, suggesting a major story.

"It's a movie you have to love," he said.

Eleven days later, Los Angeles Bureau Chief William Rademaekers got to see Star Wars. His verdict: "Pure fun." Rademaekers interviewed Lucas for ten hours, mostly at the Twentieth Century-Fox studio, where final cuts in the film were being made. "There were no director's luncheons at the Brown Derby," says Rademaekers. "Instead, it was 'lunch' at 3 a.m. in a hash house, then back to the studio to follow Reel 12 for the 114th time, with Lucas painstakingly going over the sounds of music, footsteps and explosions."

It was in a warehouse in Van Nuys, where the film's special-effect scenes were shot, that Rademaekers noted yet another mystery of the movie: "I could touch the props but never really grasp the magic that made them into planets, moving spaceships--an entire world."

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