A BROTHERHOOD OF TERROR

Despite last week's punitive invasion of Jordan, Israel faces increasing danger from a growing army of Arab terrorists. Jordan is fairly exploding with these new commandos, who infiltrate Israel in ever greater numbers for ever more damaging raids that are sometimes held only hours apart. They come from all parts of the Arab world, belong to several groups and are variously equipped--but they are united in their determination to make a battlefield of Israel. TIME Correspondent Edward Hughes spent much of the past two weeks examining the terrorists and their goals. His report:

IN the back room of a stucco house in the hills of Amman, a grave young Palestinian university student squatted on the floor and told eleven friends that he had just joined a guerrilla unit to fight the Israelis. "Any age, any size, either sex," he said. "It makes no difference. They are on my land, and I shall kill them." In his shell shattered villa overlooking the River Jordan, Citrus Grower Raouf Halabi, 50, a graduate of Beirut's American University, reported proudly that his riverfront groves have become a nightly jumping-off place for raiding parties into Israel: "'Welcome,' I say to them. They are fighting for us. Is anyone else?"

Such is Jordan's mood toward the men it calls fedayeen --the Arabic word for freedom fighters. Though he has in the past often declared his opposition to the terrorists King Hussein last week changed his tune, defended 'those who struggle against Israelis occupying Arab territory. But to a population that is 60% Palestinian, 100% Arab--and sick to death of being humbled by Israeli planes and tanks--the fedayeen already have become national folk heroes. Accounts of their successful sabotage missions are headlined in the press. Photographs portraying their martyred dead are plastered all over Amman.

Much as he would like to throw the guerrillas out, Hussein no longer has the power even to hold them in check. Last month he dispatched 20 carloads of troops and police to order a guerrilla unit to leave the refugee camp at Karamah. When it arrived, the column was surrounded by machine-gun-toting commandos, quickly withdrew when the fedayeen commander delivered a matter-of-fact announcement: "You have three minutes to decide whether you leave or die." The rest of the Arab world has taken up the fedayeen with nearly unanimous vigor. Iraq and Syria offer training programs for several thousand commandos. The Persian Gulf states, led by Kuwait, raise money for them through a 5% tax on the salaries of their tens of thousands of resident Palestinian workers, and a recent fund drive in Lebanon brought in $500,000 from Beirut alone. So much money is flowing in that fedayeen organizations now guarantee lifetime support for the families of all guerrillas killed in action.

There are now nearly 20,000 fedayeen in Jordan v. scant hundred or so before the war--and their ranks are swelling daily. Whereas all guerrilla operations used to be controlled by the disreputable (and now discredited) Palestine Liberation Army, there are at least halt dozen independent fedayeen organizations, most of them less interested in playing Arab politics (as was the P.L.A.) than in fielding effective guerrillas. The largest, and to all appearances the most dynamic, of them all is Asita (thunderstorm), the paramilitary arm of a broader political group named El Fatah, whose commandos call themselves storm troopers.

Asifa's storm troopers have little in common with the illiterate and ill-equipped irregulars who used to sneak into Israel. Roughly half of them are college graduates or students, and all are rotated regularly in and out their civilian jobs, a practice that makes guerrilla fight ing more attractive and assures Asifa penetration into all levels of civilian life. They undergo formal guerrilla train mg at bases such as the Karamah refugee camp, which was the mam target of last week's Israeli assault. To main tain a semblance of secrecy, Asifa is organized into c. like "elements" of 30 to 40 men, each of which takes orders only from a central high command. It also tor-bids its members to use their correct names, assigns each a number or pseudonym instead.

The secrecy is not entirely effective. Somehow, Israeli intelligence gets wind of Asifa operations with such regularity that up till now some 80% of all infiltrators have been killed or captured. The ones who do get through, however, do enough damage to keep Israeli life thoroughly on edge--such as last week's bombing of ; busload of children and even attacks on coastal Tel Aviv. It is an open secret that Asifa has marked Defense Minister Moshe Dayan for assassination and has sent a top agent into Israel to do the job. And, if the organization's leaders are to be believed, they will soon have enough available guerrilla power to stage sustained attacks on small Israeli army units.

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