MIDDLE EAST: THE FEDAYEEN REVISITED

DURING the day, the summer heat, well over 100DEG, shimmers oppressively over the Jordan Valley. Hardly anything moves. It is only at night that the valley comes to life, for night is the time of the fedayeen, the Arab guerrilla raiders who slip toward the river for another hit-and-run slash at Israel's defenses. "We live like roaches," a fedayeen commando said last week. "I do not like this sneak war. But it is the only way for us. There is no army to fight by our side."

Two years after the Six-Day War, the fedayeen remain the Arabs' main weapon. The cost has been high: by Israeli body count, the fedayeen have suffered 450 dead on Israeli-held territory and an estimated 550 more in clashes across or on the other side of the border; they have also lost 2,000 captured. But at the same time, the guerrillas have forced Israel to maintain its military force at full strength. Ironically, in the course of their war, the fedayeen have also set themselves on a possible collision course with some of the Arab governments who sponsor them. For while Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser now only talks about forcing the Israelis to withdraw to prewar frontiers, the commandos still insist that their goal is the destruction of Israel and the recovery of Palestine.

The Israelis maintain that the fedayeen have not managed to penetrate deeply and in strength, nor have they been able to win over the bulk of the 944,000 Arabs living on the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. Good intelligence and highly sophisticated, hard-hitting defense tactics stop most guerrilla activity on the perimeter of the Israeli heartland. Harsh retaliation by frequent air and artillery and occasional ground strikes has pushed fedayeen bases away from the 1967 borders. Sabotage and terrorism have dwindled in recent months. The Gaza Strip, that beehive of Palestine nationalism, is as quiet as it has been in years, most likely because of growing prosperity. On the West Bank, cultivated acreage has increased sharply. Yet resentment smolders on, occasionally erupting into violence, as it did last week when seven Arabs and four Israelis were killed in rocketings and terrorist incidents. "Don't get the idea that they are beginning to love us," says one Israeli official. "They hate us as much as ever."

Immense Pressures. Israeli officials are convinced that while the fedayeen are constantly trying to build up fresh cells of supporters among Arabs in Israeli-held territory, most of them can be quickly broken up. Still, the fedayeen thrust continues. There are armed incidents almost every day and the guerrillas come with better equipment and more spirit than they showed a year ago. Two recent attacks on fortified Israeli positions were led by officers--a rare event in the past. Earlier this month, in a well-planned strike, half a dozen guerrillas belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (see box, page 42) blew up Aramco's trans-Arabian pipeline linking Saudi Arabia and Lebanon across 25 miles of formerly Syrian, now Israeli-held territory. The Israelis, working with bulldozers to form earthen ramparts, then burning off the oil, had a difficult time keeping 8,500 tons of spilled crude from polluting their major water source in the north, the headwaters of the Jordan River.

The continuing fedayeen push has vastly complicated the prospects for a Middle East settlement. What is more, a number of Arab governments find themselves caught between admiration for guerrilla outfits like Al-Fatah (TIME cover, Dec. 13) and concern over the commandos' popular mystique and the dangers they pose for their own nations. To the children in Arab refugee camps, the guerrillas are heroes and they invariably answer "fedayeen" when asked what they want to be when they grow up. But fedayeen activity, by inviting Israeli retaliation, creates immense pressures on the moderate, unsteady regimes in Jordan and Lebanon. Some compromises have been reached in an effort to avoid friction: in Amman, headquarters of all but two of the eight different guerrilla groups, the camouflage uniforms and Kalashnikov assault rifles of the fedayeen are no longer as conspicuous as they were only a month ago, and relations between the guerrillas and the Jordanian army seem to be surprisingly good. But many Jordanians and some of the older Palestinian refugees are increasingly wary of the fedayeen presence, mainly because they fear Israeli retaliation for guerrilla raids. All of the Arab states close to Israel, in fact, seem agreed that the fedayeen should be curbed to some degree.

In Lebanon, where fedayeen activity is at the root of a continuing government crisis, the regime has in effect banned such activity. Iraq and Egypt have now set up their own guerrilla organizations--with the apparent aim to dilute Palestinian dominance over the commando movement. Iraq stations troops around fedayeen training camps on its soil; Syria trains guerrillas but has been reluctant to allow raids to be launched from its territory adjacent to the Israeli-held Golan Heights.

Saudi Arabia and Lebanon are furious about the attack on the Aramco line, and even Egypt has sounded reproving. Said Cairo's Al Ahram of the fedayeen: "Being commando organizations does not mean that they are beyond questioning." Such friction also works in reverse: there are persistent reports that Al-Fatah has let Mafia-style "contracts" for the assassination of Arab leaders, including Nasser and Jordan's King Hussein, in the event of a real crunch with host governments.

The result is growing pressure for an Arab League meeting at which the relationship between fedayeen and host governments could be threshed out. Such a gathering could possibly produce a split among those Arab nations that would like to clamp down on the commandos, and others, like Algeria, too far away from Israel to worry about retaliation, that blithely and comfortably continue to back a go-for-broke effort.

No Belief. The fedayeen themselves seem undaunted by their high casualties; 50% losses in dead, wounded and captured are not uncommon, and since the beginning of the year, some 200 guerrillas have been killed. They also profess to be unconcerned by the apparent futility of many of their attacks, the intramural rivalries among commando groups, and signs of mounting conflict with other Arabs. They still have money --from Arab governments and private contributions--and enough recruits, and they seem determined to fight on regardless of consequences. As one of Al-Fatah's leaders said last week, "We are now living in a honeymoon with the other Arabs. We don't know when it will end, or who will stay with us. But it does not matter. We will keep fighting --and fight our fellow Arabs if necessary. If the Arabs try to stop us, we will simply go underground and continue fighting. We will not accept anything less than return to Palestine." In the Middle East, where overblown rhetoric is a way of life, the fedayeen give every indication of meaning exactly what they say.

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