Terrorism in Tel Aviv

MIDDLE EAST

The announced goal of El Fatah, the Arab terrorist organization, is to provoke Israelis into a pogrom of Arabs living in Israel and thereby shatter all Israeli hopes for peaceful coexistence in their occupied territories. Last week, in the latest of a series of bomb attacks, Arab terrorists struck for the first time in Tel Aviv and succeeded in rousing an angry Jewish response.

The attack came at noon, in the form of three gelignite time bombs wrapped in plastic bags and dropped in litter baskets in downtown Tel Aviv. All three detonated within 20 minutes.

One bomb went off on a platform in the busy central bus station. Another exploded beside a nearby vegetable market. The last blasted the exterior of a movie house. One Israeli was killed, and 50 others were wounded, most of them by flying fragments of metal.

Unwitting Allies. As El Fatah had evidently hoped, a crowd of angry Israelis pounced on and beat every Arab it could find in the vicinity. As police, aided by soldiers on leave, rushed to protect Arab passersby, the mob surged into neighboring Jaffa's Arab quarter, smashing Arab shops as it went and finally gathering around the police station, where 400 Arabs were being held in protective custody.

For all the mob's fury, many citizens saw the futility of playing into El Fatah's hands. Some helped police disperse the mob; others gave sanctuary to their Arab neighbors. "The hooligans and inciters to pogroms," said the Tel Aviv Ha'aretz next day, "must be considered active, if unwitting, allies of the Arab terrorists."

Temperatures further cooled when police announced that they had rounded up 23 Arab suspects, two of them high school students captured moments after the bombs went off. The students confessed, and police said that they were members of a terrorist gang that set off three bombs in Jerusalem last month, one of which had sparked a similar Israeli rampage against Arabs. In the future, Tel Aviv will be safer, if not so clean: as a precaution, the city's sanitation department removed its metal litter baskets from the downtown streets.

Home from Algiers. No one knew for sure how much El Fatah's terrorism would harden Israeli opinion against any diplomatic peace efforts by the government. Foreign Minister Abba Eban last week scored a diplomatic success of sorts by gaining the release of an Israeli Boeing 707 that had been skyjacked by El Fatah agents and held in Algiers with twelve passengers since July 23. Since in this case Israel had little bargaining leverage, it had to make a reciprocal gesture: the release of 16 imprisoned Arab terrorists.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.