The Catalogue of Violence

To that fantastic end, the fedayeen have staged some 1,000 incidents over the last year, and killed or wounded over 900 Israelis. When a school bus struck one of their mines last March, 28 children were wounded and two adults killed. In August, the guerrillas managed to terrorize the population of Jerusalem and in the bargain set off an anti-Arab riot by a series of grenade attacks. In September, they struck for the first time at Tel Aviv, where a commando bomb in a wastebasket outside the bus station killed one Israeli and wounded another ten.

To date, the fedayeen's most damaging operation was a bomb in Jerusalem's Mahaneh Yehuda marketplace last month. It killed twelve civilians and wounded 53. Embarrassingly for the guerrillas, two rival groups claimed credit, but the Fatah man, a burly, mustachioed Arab dressed in dungarees and a dirty white sweater, told the more convincing story, and the fedayeen council granted the glory to El Fatah. Arriving back at Arafat's headquarters in suburban Amman, he related that he wore a stolen Israeli policeman's uniform, drove a small, British-built delivery van to .the market, and parked it while armed terrorists covered him from nearby hiding spots. The van was loaded with 300 Ibs. of TNT, 30 Ibs. of gelignite and several cases of scrap metal to serve as shrapnel, all topped by beer bottles filled with a mixture of oil and gasoline. He set a small, pencil-shaped fuse timed to explode an hour later, and was three-quarters of a mile away when he heard the blast. He escaped by hiking the 22 miles from Jerusalem to the Jordan River.

In the complex world of the Middle East, no one can ever be sure whose set of claims is true. El Fatah has publicly taken credit for blasting the garage of former Israeli Chief of Staff Itzhak Rabin, even though he has no garage, and for wounding Defense Minister Moshe Dayan last March, who was actually hurt in an archeological cave-in. After Israel's independence day parade last May, El Fatah crowed that "a suicide force managed to reach the rear of the parade and shell it with rockets and mortars. Our forces destroyed a number of tanks that were seen to go up in flames." This remarkable event was entirely invisible to Israelis and foreign dignitaries watching the parade. When a $1,000,000 fire damaged Tel Aviv's Lydda Airport in October, El Fatah promptly took credit for setting it. The Israelis insist that the blaze was started accidentally by a welder's torch.

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