Middle East Death Before Daybreak

By Kenneth M. Pierce.

In the predawn darkness, Israeli naval officers spotted the rubber dinghy heading south toward the northern Israeli resort town of Nahariya. Ducking fire, the craft made for the Lebanese shore near the border, where the crew leaped onto the limestone rocks, scrambled to the cliffs above and deployed for battle. As illumination flares from Israeli helicopters lit up the area, the would-be invaders attacked Israeli troops with Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifles and hand grenades. When the shooting ended three hours later, two Israeli soldiers were dead and nine wounded. The bodies of four terrorists, one of them clad in blue jeans and a Che Guevara T shirt, lay sprawled on the white cliffs.

It was one of the worst incidents in the border area since Israel withdrew the bulk of its forces from Lebanon in June 1985 and established a narrow security zone in southern Lebanon. Two Syrian-backed groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the allied Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, claimed joint responsibility for the "seaborne suicide operation." Twelve hours later, Israel countered with a bombing raid that blew up an ammunition dump and several buildings at Ein el Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp near the port city of Sidon on the Lebanese coast.

The timing of the aborted terrorist raid came as no surprise. Only three days before, Jordan's King Hussein abruptly closed 25 offices of Yasser Arafat's Al Fatah branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the capital city of Amman. The terrorist operation was a clear reminder of the P.L.O.'s determination to continue its struggle against Israel in spite of the stinging blow from Hussein. Said an Israeli official: "The P.L.O. wants to demonstrate that it's still powerful in the West Bank and that peace cannot be achieved without it."

Hussein's crackdown caught Palestinian leaders unawares. Without warning, squads of the blue-uniformed Central Security Force spread through Amman shutting down Fatah offices, including the house in the Al Nuzha district that the Tunis-based Arafat used during visits. Jordanian agents seized Fatah documents and applied a seal of red wax to office doors. Arafat's top aide, Khalil Wazir, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Jihad, was told to leave the country within 48 hours when he arrived at his office in the Jebel Amman district. Before embarking on a 450-mile auto journey across the desert to Baghdad, Wazir said, "We are sorry about this decision because we wanted to strengthen Palestinian-Jordanian relations." He added defiantly, "We are not in a cage. We still have bases everywhere, doing the P.L.O.'s work."

Hussein shut down the Fatah facilities to counter what the Amman government saw as a growing P.L.O. threat to the stability of the Hashemite kingdom. More important, the move signaled that Hussein, who broke off relations with Arafat early this year, is no longer interested in a rapprochement with the P.L.O. leader. The move led some to fear P.L.O. reprisals against Jordanian officials and institutions, a concern that stirred memories of the September 1970 P.L.O.-led uprising, known as Black September, that almost unseated the King. In 1971 Hussein's army drove the organization from Jordan. Last week, however, Hussein allowed a dozen non-Fatah P.L.O. offices to remain in Jordan; the King is actively searching for an alternative to Arafat's leadership among moderate Palestinians in Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Along with other Arab leaders, Hussein has long endorsed the P.L.O. as the "sole representative of the Palestinian people."

The tensions between Hussein and Arafat began in February when the King publicly blamed the P.L.O. chairman for the breakdown of his peace initiative. Arafat, Hussein claimed, had welshed at the last minute on a pledge to accept U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, which implicitly recognize Israel's right to exist, as the basis for negotiations with Israel. In exchange for P.L.O. recognition of the U.N. resolutions, Arafat demanded acknowledgment by the U.S. of the Palestinians' right to self-determination, a matter that Jordan and the U.S. viewed as a subject for negotiation rather than a precondition. More recently, Arafat has opposed Hussein's efforts to encourage moderate Palestinians to serve as mayors in three towns in the Israeli-occupied West Bank: Hebron, Ramallah and Al Bireh.

Both Saudi Arabia and Egypt were disappointed by Hussein's decision to ban Fatah. In Cairo, the government of President Hosni Mubarak, a strong supporter of the Hussein-Arafat peace effort, had only recently urged the two to patch up their differences. Observed a Western diplomat in Cairo: "Obviously, it doesn't help Egypt's efforts within the Arab world to develop a moderate front when you have a major feud between the two most important 'moderate' actors." In Israel, Labor Prime Minister Shimon Peres called the Jordanian move a "positive development." He added, "In my opinion, Fatah was the main obstacle to any negotiations."

! In the West Bank, pro-Arafat Palestinians were sharply critical of the King's action. Hanna Seniora, the influential editor of the pro-Palestinian daily Al Fajr, which is published in East Jerusalem, predicted that the move would cost Hussein much of his influence in the West Bank. "It's irresponsible and part of a plot against the P.L.O.," said Mayor Hilmi Hannoun of Tulkarem, a town of 70,000. Similar views were voiced in Damascus by the Syrian-based National Salvation Front, an umbrella group of anti-Arafat P.L.O. factions, which called Jordan's move an attempt to destroy the Palestinian movement.

The expulsion from Jordan, which had become an important political base for the P.L.O. after it was routed from Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion, may encourage the Palestinian leadership to accelerate efforts to return to their former Lebanese strongholds. Wazir claims that the P.L.O., already a growing presence in Beirut's Palestinian refugee camps, has established an enclave in Sidon, only 30 miles from the Israeli border, with some 8,000 civilian workers and fighters. Last week's bloody shootout may foreshadow a new phase of Lebanon-based P.L.O. violence against Israel.

With reporting by Scott MacLeod/Cairo and Robert Slater/Jerusalem