Middle East Fallout of an Ugly War

By William E. Smith.

"The price is heavy indeed, but we have paid heavy prices in the past . . . I should like to ask every Israeli citizen: If it were your son who was being held in captivity, how would you expect me to conduct myself as Minister of Defense?"

So said Israel's Defense Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, last week as his government completed the most controversial prisoner exchange in the country's history. The swap was lopsided: 1,150 Palestinians and Lebanese, including scores of convicted terrorists, for three Israeli prisoners of war captured in Lebanon in 1982. It involved complex arrangements, took almost 24 hours to accomplish, and spanned half a dozen cities and towns in the Middle East and Western Europe. And it occurred only shortly before Israel's national unity government, headed by Prime Minister Shimon Peres, quietly began withdrawing the last army units from Lebanon, thereby ending after three years a war that has borne bitter fruit for Israel.

As the prisoner exchange played itself out, Lebanon once again was in turmoil. In Beirut, Shi'ite militiamen battled with Palestinians for control of three Palestinian refugee camps on the southern edge of the city, two of them Sabra and Shatila, where the infamous 1982 massacre took place. In the Christian eastern sector of the capital, a car bomb of unexplained origin killed 55 people and wounded 176. In Cairo, in the meantime, the Egyptian government announced that it had narrowly averted the car bombing of a diplomatic mission, presumed to be the U.S. embassy. And in Kuwait late last week, the ruling Emir, Sheik Jaber al Ahmed al Sabah, narrowly missed death when a car bomb exploded in his motorcade. The driver of the car, who was killed in the attack, apparently was a member of Islamic Jihad, the Shi'ite extremist group.

The Israeli exchange had been elaborately orchestrated. Negotiations had gone on for 16 months between Israel and a small faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Through the protracted bargaining, former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky had served as an intermediary. Finally, at dawn last Monday, a dozen buses carrying 394 Arab prisoners drove to Ben-Gurion International Airport, outside Tel Aviv, where the men boarded three Israeli air force jet transports for Geneva. At approximately the same hour, the three Israeli prisoners took off from Damascus, the capital of Syria. On arrival in Geneva, the Arab prisoners remained aboard the Israeli planes, parked in a remote corner of the airport and surrounded by blue-bereted Swiss security commandos, until the Israelis were flown in. The laborious exchange dragged out over eleven hours. At about the same time, 151 Arab prisoners were released by Israel on the Golan Heights and handed over to Syrian and Lebanese authorities, while 605 others were bused from jails in Israel and the Israeli- occupied territories to their hometowns in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. There they were greeted by cheering crowds. The following morning the plane carrying the released Israelis, a sergeant and two privates, touched down at Hatzor Air Base, south of Tel Aviv, where the men were immediately surrounded by ecstatic relatives and friends.

But the jubilation was not shared by all Israelis. Public satisfaction over the return of the soldiers, the last prisoners known for certain to have been in Arab hands, was overshadowed by unease over the price the Israeli government had paid.

The concern had little to do with the numbers involved. Israel had released around 4,481 Egyptian POWs after the Six-Day War in exchange for eleven Israelis, and in November 1983 had traded 4,500 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners for six of its own. The problem this time was that the freed Arabs included 167 prisoners who had been convicted of involvement in terrorist acts in which Israelis had been killed. Furthermore, almost half of those released were being permitted to return to their homes in Israel or the occupied territories. Among those released was Ahmed Zmurid, who had been serving a life sentence for his participation in a 1968 car bombing in Jerusalem in which 15 people died and more than 50 were injured. Others were Adnan Kleihal and Sudhi Naarani, who were jailed for life in 1975 for planting a bomb in the students' cafeteria at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. Perhaps the best known was Kozo Okamoto, 37, a pro-Palestinian Japanese terrorist who was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in an airport massacre of 26 people in Israel in 1972. The Japanese government formally expressed regret over Israel's decision to release Okamoto and said it would attempt to bring him back to Japan to stand trial on murder charges. But Okamoto, like many of the others released this week, was flown directly from Geneva to Libya.

Among Israelis, the harshest reaction to the exchange came from Jewish settlers in the West Bank, who clashed with celebrating Palestinians and protested against the action of the Israeli government. In Hebron, a handful of settlers raced to the spot where a busload of Palestinian prisoners was arriving and began firing semiautomatic weapons into the air to disperse a crowd of 200 Arabs. Some of the settlers cried, "Death to the Arabs!" Hundreds of West Bank settlers demonstrated outside the Knesset. Their demand: release of 27 Israelis who have been convicted of terrorism or who are charged with being members of a Jewish extremist group. The settlers' efforts were supported by leading figures in the Likud bloc, a partner with Peres' Labor Party in the national unity government. The Likud's leader, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, said in a radio interview that he favored the release of the Israeli extremists "if only they publicly express their remorse at what they have done or intended to do." Even more adamant was another powerful Likud member, Industry and Trade Minister Ariel Sharon, the former Defense Minister who planned and carried out the invasion of Lebanon. Said Sharon: "It is unimaginable that after the release of the most terrible murderers . . . we should keep the Jewish underground prisoners under lock and key."

Serious questions about the wisdom of the exchange were also raised in other areas. Said Clinton Bailey, an Arab-affairs expert at Tel Aviv University: "The release of all these convicted murderers is going to confuse the issues of justice and respect for the law and make it very difficult to counter Jewish extremist demands." Others argued that the release would make it harder for Israel to maintain its traditional position that there can be no negotiations with terrorists and no compromise with terrorism. But to Peres and his Labor Party colleagues, the prisoner swap was an essential step in ending the war in Lebanon and in living up to another long-standing policy: that Israel will do everything in its power to bring its POWs home. Insisted Defense Minister Rabin: "I don't feel any moral right to say to a captured soldier and his family that he should be left to rot in prison because the price is too high." In Lebanon, meantime, the instability precipitated by the war continued to grow. Sporadic fighting has been going on for weeks among several Lebanese factions, and last week bitter clashes erupted between the Shi'ite Amal militia and Palestinians. Nobody seemed to know exactly what started the latest confrontation, but the significance was obvious: the Lebanese Shi'ites, the largest population group in the country, remember the steely grip the P.L.O. maintained over southern Lebanon before the 1982 Israeli invasion, and are determined that the Palestinians never regain their power.

Amal militiamen invaded three refugee camps south of Beirut expecting an easy victory, but they ran into fierce resistance. After several days of combat, an estimated 350 people had been killed and nearly 1,600 wounded. Amal Leader Nabih Berri asserted that P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat had provoked the clashes in order to stage a "theatrical return to the south, something we will not permit." In Jordan, where he had been meeting with King Hussein, Arafat called for an end to the battle, which he blamed on his enemies the Syrians.

In the midst of the fighting in West Beirut, a car bomb was detonated in Christian East Beirut, killing the driver and 55 passersby, including ten children who were trapped in a blazing bus. No organization claimed responsibility for the blast, the worst in East Beirut since the one that killed President-elect Bashir Gemayel in September 1982.

There was no mystery about who was responsible for the Kuwaiti bombing. As Sheik Jaber traveled in a motorcade along a waterfront road on the way to his office at the Sief palace, a small Japanese-make car drove head-on into the convoy. The vehicle exploded, killing the driver, two guards in the convoy's two lead cars and a passerby. The Emir, who was traveling farther back in the motorcade, escaped with minor cuts. In a telephone statement, Islamic Jihad, or Islamic Holy War, claimed responsibility for the attack, and once again demanded the release of 17 terrorists being held in a Kuwaiti jail.

Amid the mayhem, Jordan's King Hussein was continuing his efforts to win U.S. support for the wider Middle East peace initiative he launched with Arafat in February. Last week, after meeting with Arafat in Amman, the King flew to Cairo to brief Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on progress. This week Hussein arrives in Washington for discussions with President Reagan. His aim: to win Washington's backing for talks between U.S. officials and a joint Jordanian Palestinian peace delegation. Such a meeting would be followed, according to Hussein's plan, by direct Arab-Israeli negotiations over the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The King believes that this may be the last, best chance for the U.S. and its allies to negotiate a Middle East peace -- and hopes that Reagan will agree.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Roland Flamini/Jerusalem