THE GUERRILLA THREAT IN THE MIDDLE EAST
The revolution of Fatah exists! It exists here, there and everywhere. It is a storm, a storm in every house and village.
FAITHFUL and unfailing as the muezzin's call from the minaret, that heady cry goes out nightly from a radio station in Cairo to the Arab lands. It is the "Voice of El Fatah," speaking for the Arab commando organization whose bands of raiders cross each night into hated Israel, bent on bringing death, destruction and terror. To Arabs huddled in wind-chilling refugee tents outside
Amman, sipping thick coffee in the drawing rooms of Damascus, or lounging in the common rooms of the American University of Beirut, the Voice brings welcome--if often inaccurate--news.
The fight against Israel continues, it asserts, despite the Arabs' humiliating defeat in last year's war. Each night new Arab heroes are born, fresh revenge is meted out to Israel, a portion of Arab pride is restored. Amid the breathless bulletins and the florid rhetoric of propaganda, there are the underground's customary coded messages: "M.H.: the bird is back in the cage"; "Attention Green Lion: the gift has been received."
On Fatah's signal, a band of Arabs sets out across the Jordan River on rafts made from tractor tires, carrying their Russian-made Kalashnikov assault rifles in waterproof inner tubes. In the darkness they land, make their way inland, plant a mine, ambush an Israeli patrol or throw a grenade, then scramble as best they can for home. The odds are heavily against their making it back, for many are caught or killed by efficient Israeli security forces. But the rewards are high, as posthumous compensations go. They are martyrs to all Arabs, their photographs and tales of their exploits are displayed in Cairo and Amman. Under the rules of jihad, or holy war, proclaimed against Israel by Moslem leaders from 34 countries last October, those Arabs who fall in battle are accorded the reverence of prophets and go straight to paradise.
The Elements of Instability
The Fatah is one of several similar clandestine organizations. While no one can be sure of the exact numbers involved, Fatah is the most prominent and the largest of them. To the Israelis, the raiders are terrorists and thugs, inept and indiscriminate in their missions. To the Arabs, they are freedom fighters in the best guerrilla tradition, skilled in the arts of the commando and the saboteur. The world knows them best as the fedayeen, meaning "men of sacrifice," a disparate group of clandestine plotters often at odds with one another, who play a large part in keeping the Middle East on the edge of war.
There is no more perilously unstable area in the world. Israel, despite its overwhelming victory in last year's war, grows increasingly frustrated as it finds peace with its encircling Arab neighbors still beyond reach. The Arab countries, their armies and air forces rebuilding with major Soviet aid and advice, refuse to accept fully their defeat or abandon completely their long-range goal of eliminating Israel. The more responsible Arab leaders, including Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jordan's King Hussein, know that any early attack on Israel would only result in another resounding defeat. But in a measure they are prisoners of their Arab masses, long fed on the oratory of hate and revenge and embittered by the 26,000 sq. mi. of Arab territory--taken from Jordan, Syria and Egypt--now occupied by the Israelis.
Despite their common adversity, the Arabs are as quarrelsome and mistrustful of one another as ever. Iraq, for example, has sent troops to bolster shattered Jordan's defenses against Israel, and King Hussein worries about the Iraqis in his midst almost as much as he does about Israel. The U.S. is committed to peace in the area and to Israel's right to exist; but also vitally needs to establish better relations with the Arabs, most of whom regard America as simply the backer and ally of Israel. In this situation, Washington can do little beyond attempting to keep a reasonable balance of arms among the antagonists.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, more influential in the Arab world than ever be cause of its arms shipments, has staked its own claim to the use of the Mediterranean for its expanding navy, sharply increasing the danger of a direct U.S.-Russian confrontation on the high seas should a new Middle East war break out.
For more than twelve months, United Nations Special Representative Gunnar Jarring has patiently sought grounds for agreement, and at least succeeded in becoming an intermediary whom both sides trust and through whom they have begun, in a fashion, to talk to each other. In the bitter history of Arab-Israeli relations, that is no mean accomplishment. Though his mandate was due to expire this month, both sides want him to stay on the job. One of the reasons is that Israel's stunning victory in the Six-Day War introduced at least a small element of reality into the Middle East impasse. Before the 1967 war, the only issue was Israel's existence, a matter clearly not negotiable at a conference table between the Israelis and the Arabs. But the matter of recovering the occupied territories is negotiable--theoretically. In the discussions with Jarring, the Israelis so far refuse to give up any of the occupied territories without guarantees of progress toward a full Middle East settlement. The Arabs in turn so far refuse to talk about a se tlement until the Israelis return the Arab lands.
At times last week it seemed that the area's fourth war in two decades was al ready in progress. Israeli and Jordanian artillery opened up on two successive days. For the first time, Israelis also hit at the 15,000 Iraqi troops stationed in Jordan, who recently started firing their long-range, 122-mm. Russian heavy guns into Israel. Israeli jets flashed across the cease-fire lines three times to bomb the area around the Jordanian town of Irbid and hammer at the artillery positions of the 421st Iraqi battalion. Deep inside Jordan, Israeli commandos blew up two vital bridges connecting Amman and the port of Aqaba (see map).
In the past, the United Nations has merely deplored violations of the truce and urged all parties to get on with negotiations. Last week the great powers gave fresh evidence of their heightened concern that the fighting might get out of hand. Russia publicly urged a political settlement, declaring for the first time that it would not "permit" a resumption of war--whatever that meant. Washington registered its anxiety by calling in the Israeli and Jordanian ambassadors. They were warned against the dangers of continuing to violate the tattered cease-fire agreement that ended the Six-Day War.
It is in this tense milieu that the Arabs' "men of sacrifice" operate, in a defiant effort to exploit its instabilities to their own ends. The fedayeen, who owe no fealty to any government, are responsible only to themselves, and view any settlement as a betrayal and a disaster. They possess the power to sting Israel into repeated reprisals, and perhaps to whip Arab popular opinion to such a pitch that not even Nasser with all his prestige might dare a settlement with Israel. In Jordan, their primary staging area, they constitute virtually a state-within-a-state and could probably topple King Hussein and take over his splintered kingdom if they chose. And their power and influence are increasing all the time.
The Palestinian Diaspora
The primary sources of fedayeen strength are the Palestinian refugees, now 1,500,000 strong, who for 20 years have been a scattered and forlorn people, possessing neither a country nor any say in the harsh events profoundly affecting them. Dispossessed of their homes, lands and sense of nationhood when Israel was founded in 1948, they dispersed throughout the Middle East. They endured the scorn of their host populations toward outsiders, although the most skilled and educated came to dominate many areas of Arab intellectual and commercial life. Those that did not assimilate settled in crowded camps, mostly in Jordan and the Gaza Strip, where they lived a miserable, subsistence life, fed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
For 20 years they have been pawns in Arab politics, nourished on promises of a return to Palestine and a passionate hatred of Israel. Today the camps house 540,000, including 350,000 new refugees who fled the occupied territories after the June War. The camps seethe with frustration and anger, and provide a rich source of recruits for fedayeen. Says the mother of one dead commando: "I am proud that he did not die in this camp. The foreign press comes here and takes our pictures standing in food queues, and they publish them and say 'Look at this nation of beggars.' This is no life. I am proud to send my second son to replace the first, and I am already preparing my eight-year-old boy for the day when he can fight too."
With the fanaticism and desperation of men who have nothing to lose, the fedayeen have taken the destiny of the Palestinians into their own hands. Peace in the area would hurt their cause by removing the support of other Arabs. They have no brotherly concern for the ambitions of Nasser--and certainly not for, as one fedayeen communique puts it, the "slave traffickers in the U.N. lobbies" and their efforts to act as mediators in the Middle East.
In the aftermath of the Arab defeat, the fedayeen are today the only ones car rying the fight to Israel. The guerrillas provide an outlet for the fierce Arab resentment of Israel and give an awakened sense of pride to a people accustomed to decades of defeat, disillusionment and humiliation. In the process, the Arabs have come to idolize Mohammed ("Yasser") Arafat, a leader of El Fatah fedayeen who has emerged as the most visible spokesman for the commandos. An intense, secretive and determined Palestinian, he is enthusiastically portrayed by the admiring Arab press as a latter-day Saladin, with the Israelis supplanting the Crusaders as the hated-and feared-foe.
It was the Israeli victory last year that, as one fedayeen commander puts it, "handed us the Arab people on a golden platter." Students quit their classes to sign up as terrorists. Doctors abandoned their practices in Beirut and Cairo to come to Jordan to attend wounded fedayeen. Arab businessmen offered supplies and purchased weapons, and the Saudi and Kuwait governments began diverting to fedayeen coffers funds usually contributed to Jordan's budget. Individual contributions by the thousands poured in from Arabs throughout the Middle East and those abroad; the wife of Saudi Arabia's King Feisal sent $4,500. In the coffee bars of Beirut, young Arabs peddle El Fatah stamps, to be used like Christmas seals, bearing a picture of a burned child and the words "Shalom and Napalm"--a reference to the use of napalm by Israelis in last August's reprisal raid on the Jordanian town of Salt. Other stamps show a guerrilla fighter, a monument to martyrs or Jerusalem, with the slogan: "Palestinian Resistance." The money raised, of course, goes to buy bullets.
Contributing to the fedayeen mystique is their shadowy organization, which somehow manages to appear to be everywhere in the Arab countries. At the airport of Amman, dark-suited youths sidle up to customs officers as crates marked "Palestine Nation, Amman" or "Freedom Fighters against Israel, Amman" are unloaded, and whisper, "For the fedayeen." Customs formalities are cut short, and the supplies are whisked away. The goods may be headed for any one of more than 50 bases maintained by the fedayeen in the Jordanian mountains east of Wadi Araba, the desert valley that stretches from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba.
No one knows how many Arab commandos roam about in that desolate stretch, from which raiders set out nightly, but estimates range upward from 10,000. Besides their base camps, there are other installations as well. The feda yeen maintain at least a dozen underground field hospitals and supply depots, as well as training camps for ash-bals, or tiger cubs--refugee children who are taught the art of guerrilla war beginning at age eight.
Ambassador Extraordinary
The fedayeen are most secretive of all about their high command, though the largest organization, Arafat's El Fatah, is said to be ruled by a committee of wealthy civilians in Damascus. Nor does anyone really know very much about Yasser Arafat, though everyone in the Arab world knows who he is. As El Fatah grew and felt the need for a visible spokesman, he became its ambassador extraordinary to the Arab world, its chief fund raiser and its field commander in Jordan. Arafat (his code name is Abu Ammar) sits at a wooden desk in his headquarters in Amman, dealing with a procession of couriers like a general on a field of battle, which in a sense he is. When a guerrilla comes in to report a successful raid, Arafat's eyes, bulging almost to the panes of the dark glasses he wears day and night, dance with delight. He speaks softly and turns aside all questions about himself: "Please, no personality cult. I am only a soldier. Our leader is Palestine. Our road is the road of death and sacrifice to win back our homeland. If we can not do it, our children will, and if they cannot do it, their children will."
Arafat's career in a way mirrors the history and thrust of the fedayeen. Born in Jerusalem, he spent his early childhood in a house within a stone's throw of the Wailing Wall. The area today is marked by the Israelis for bulldozing. Of that prospect, Arafat says bitterly: "We will see that our homes are re built." Descended from Palestinian no bility, Arafat learned early what dispossession meant. According to one story widely told in the Middle East, his family has been disinherited of enormous wealth for 150 years through a legal tangle that deprived it of land once owned in downtown Cairo. Arafat's father spent a lifetime trying to reclaim the land in the Egyptian courts but was overruled first by King Farouk and then Nasser. There are those who suspect that that may be one factor in Arafat's occasional lack of enthusiasm for Egypt's ruler.
A teen-age gunrunner in the 1948 war with Israel, Arafat afterward enrolled at Fuad I (now Cairo) University, where he majored in civil engineering--and in Palestinian nationalism as president of the Palestine Student Federation.
After graduating, he worked in Kuwait, editing an ultranationalist magazine on the side. In 1955, he appeared in Cairo attending officers' school, where he specialized in explosives. He graduated as a lieutenant just in time to share in another Arab defeat, at Suez a year later.
That debacle only confirmed Arafat's conviction that the Arabs could never de feat the Israelis with conventional armies. Throughout the 1950s, he had organized "cells" among Palestinian students abroad and studied the techniques of Algerian guerrillas. At that time, Nasser had organized forerunners of today's fedayeen among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and used them to stir up the border, a role they took on with sufficient enthusiasm to help bring about Israel's decision to launch the 1956 war.
After Suez, El Fatah-was founded as a strictly Palestinian force outside Nasser's reach.
Not until 1964 was El Fatah ready for its first raid, sabotaging an Israeli water-pumping station. It was an "experimental era," recalls Arafat, when El Fatah staged only one raid a week, testing out attack techniques, taking notes on Israeli defenses and reaction times, and filing away the information to be used in future battle plans. "We were also experimenting with public opinion all through this period," Arafat's top aide told TIME Correspondent Edward Hughes last week. According to the dictum of Mao Tse-tung, guerrilla fighters must be able to live among a friendly population like fish in water. But El Fatah at that time "had no audience. Without the people to listen to us, we had no sea to swim in--the fish had no oxygen."
The Expansion of the War
After last year's war, El Fatah found itself not only swimming in popular support but also possessed of a sudden bequest of weapons left by the retreating Arab armies. The battlefields were littered with arms, and for two weeks, El Fatah teams took camels into the Sinai desert to collect machine guns, rifles, grenades and bazookas before the Israeli salvage squads. Four heavy trucks were found in Golan, along with two tons of ammunition and weapons. A Bedouin offered to sell 150 Kalashnikov rifles for $140. El Fatah gave him twice as much. Another Bedouin found a Syrian helicopter and built a tent to hide it for the El Fatah men. But when they arrived, they had no helicopter pilot along, so the craft was destroyed. A cache of eight tons of TNT, too heavy to carry away, was buried in the Sinai: "We don't have to carry explosives into that area. It's there waiting for us," Arafat says.
By August 1967, El Fatah was ready to try to launch an underground revolt among the Arabs on the now occupied West Bank. Hundreds of guerrillas trekked across the Jordan River, only to be rounded up by Israeli forces. To head off any future attempts, the Israelis blew up the homes of any Palestinians who cooperated with Arafat's men. El Fatah's next phase was a campaign that sent smaller groups to hide in caves or live with sympathetic Arabs, and venture out at night to set mines or time bombs. Israel hit back at their riverside guerrilla camps, forcing El Fatah to move its bases farther in land. Despite these setbacks, the fedayeen have been able to step up their operations to as many as two dozen a day. Though El Fatah hotly rejects being called terroristic, it has also turned increasingly to attacking Israel's civilian population. The methods are brutal and indiscriminate, random terrorism for terrorism's sake without any military value --a bomb in a crowded cinema, a grenade thrown in a schoolyard, a mine planted for anyone who comes along. Last week a 17-year-old Los Angeles girl, Sari Roberta, who had gone to Israel to serve as a volunteer worker, lost her right leg when she stepped on a mine.
By laying down a strict policy of staying out of Arab politics on the ground that, as Arafat says, "one enemy at a time is enough," El Fatah has so far been able to operate independently in the host Arab countries--chiefly Jordan. Disputes with rival fedayeen organizations are another matter, and on one occasion two groups of raiders almost shot it out, each thinking the other was Israeli. Last month, the fedayeen set up a council to coordinate raids between El Fatah and its two chief rivals, the Palestine Liberation Force and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or P.F.L.P. (inevitably pronounced "flop" by Westerners on the scene), a militantly leftist merger of several splinter organizations on the scene.
* The name is an acronym derived from the Arabic words Harakat al Tahrir al-Falastin, or Movement for the Liberation of Palestine. Its initials, H.T.F., form the Arabic word for death. They are ingeniously reversible to F.T.H., pronounced "faht," meaning conquest --hence El Fatah or, as it is less commonly spelled, El Fateh.
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