Incident at Samu

For two years, Arab terrorists had been averaging three raids a month inside Israel, blowing up a house here, a bridge or water pipeline there. Last month, in their most daring exploit yet, they even reached the outskirts of Jerusalem, where they bombed an apartment building only a mile from the home of Israeli Premier Levi Eshkol. Sometimes they crossed over from Lebanon, sometimes from Syria, where they were actually based. But more often, they sneaked in through Jordan, where King Hussein seemed powerless to stop them. Last week, Israel finally struck back with the white-hot fury of the desert sun itself, launching its biggest, bloodiest, boldest reprisal since the Suez campaign ten years ago.

Bullhorns & Hot Coffee. The target was the tiny (pop. 4,000) village of Samu, three miles north of the Israeli border, a frequent staging area for terrorists. At dawn one morning last week, 4,000 Israeli troops, riding in Jeeps, personnel carriers and five Patton tanks, rumbled across the frontier, overwhelmed an eight-man police post and swept into Samu, routing sleepy-eyed residents out of their homes with booming bullhorns. While Israeli troops calmly sipped hot coffee on Samu's main street, demolition teams dynamited 46 empty houses, and three tanks reduced the local mosque to rubble.

Outside of town, meantime, troops barricaded the main highway and waited for the Jordanian soldiers they knew would be rushing over from nearby Hebron. Sure enough, 20 truckloads soon roared into view, slowed down for the barricades and ran into a murderous ambush. Not one truck got through. Overhead, four Jordanian Hawker Hunter jets rushing to the rescue suddenly found four faster Israeli Mirages on their tails; one Hawker Hunter was shot down, the others beat a retreat. Four hours after the invasion began, the Israelis finally withdrew, sowing a path of land mines all the way back to the border. Both sides claimed only minor casualties, but total dead and wounded amounted to 100 or more, almost all of them Jordanians.

A "Regrettable" Target. Why did Israel attack Jordan rather than Syria, which was the guerrilla home base? That was what Israel's angry opposition parties demanded of Eshkol after the invasion. In a special parliamentary debate, Eshkol ticked off 14 major acts of sabotage carried out from Jordan in the past year, climaxed by a land-mine explosion that killed three Israeli troops on Nov. 12. "It is regrettable," said Eshkol, "that this particular act of aggression came from Jordan." But since it did, he picked Jordan as his target. "No country where the saboteurs find shelter and through whose territory they pass on their way to Israel can be exempt from responsibility."

What Eshkol left unsaid was his certainty that, so-called Arab unity being what it is, Jordan would find itself with far less Arab support than Syria, which is much closer to Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. And sure enough, Jordan's Arab partners waited until the Israelis had withdrawn before coming forth with their indignant vows of support. Hussein's only real vote of confidence, in fact, came in a special session of the United Nations Security Council, where Russia joined the U.S., France and Great Britain in rare agreement and condemned the Israeli attack. U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg termed the raid "inexcusable" and pushed for a formal U.N. resolution censuring Israel.

More Shooting Than Talking. The fear haunting the U.N., of course, was that continued terrorism against Israel might trigger an even bloodier reprisal next time, and possibly even a full-scale Middle East war. For his part, Egypt's Nasser, the key to any Arab war against Israel, hopes to head off a major conflict--at least, right now. With 40,000 of his 200,000 troops committed in Yemen, Nasser is in no position for another big campaign. So he is trying to soften up the Syrians and persuade them to lay off the terrorism. Fortnight ago, Nasser signed a mutual defense pact with Syria's Premier Youssef Zayyen, putting both armed forces under a joint command and giving Egypt a strong say in Syrian military matters.

Within 24 hours after the Israeli raid, Nasser sent a special "military mission" to Damascus to talk further about terrorism and the Middle East's sharpening tensions. As the Egyptian negotiators began the discussions, the Syrians made conversation in other ways. For four days straight, Syrian hill positions ten miles north of the Sea of Galilee traded shots with Israeli patrols across the border.

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