Arab mayors are maimed as West Bank violence takes a grisly turn
Early one morning last week in the israeli-occupied territory of the west Bank, Karim Khalaf, mayor of the resort town of Ramallah, left his rambling stone house to drive 1½ miles to his city hall office. As Khalaf, 43, turned the ignition switch of his green 1980 Cadillac, a bomb exploded beneath his feet. A gardener working in the rear courtyard ran to the car and pulled the screaming mayor from it.
Exactly 30 minutes later, in the Arab industrial city of Nablus, 35 miles north of Ramallah, Mayor Bassam Shaka’a, 49, said goodbye to his wife Anaya and his son Nidal, 18. Ordinarily, Nidal performed the chore of starting up the engine on his father’s battered 1966 Opel, which was parked in the family courtyard, but on this morning the youth was studying for his high school exams. As the mayor started the ignition and depressed the clutch, a bomb exploded, severing both of his legs. Nidal ran to the car, and cradling his father in his arms, carried him to a neighbor’s automobile for the half-mile drive to Rifediya Hospital.
At about the same time, a municipal driver in the city of El-Bireh, adjacent to Ramallah, arrived at the home of Mayor Ibrahim Tawil, 41. He told Tawil of the explosion of Khalaf’s car and warned the mayor not to use his own car. Later, when an Israeli army demolition expert approached the locked garage where Tawil’s Peugeot was kept, a bomb planted in front of the door exploded, blinding the soldier.
The car bombs that maimed the two Palestinian mayors and the Israeli soldier had been preceded, after dawn, by the detonation of a time bomb in the Arab marketplace of Hebron, 30 miles south of Ramallah. Seven Palestinians were injured in the explosion. Said one Hebron resident: “God blinded the criminals and made them set it at 6 a.m. instead of 8. Otherwise many more of us would have been killed or injured.”
In terms of casualties, last week’s West Bank bombings were not nearly as serious as countless acts of Arab terrorism against Israel, or countless Israeli military strikes against Palestinian bases. At the end of last week, in fact, Israeli jets and armored units launched still another raid against Palestinian bases and refugee camps in southern Lebanon. In several other respects, however, the assassination attempts were, without question, among the most shocking and ominous developments in the West Bank since the Israeli conquest of that region in 1967.
In Washington, the Carter Administration reacted with alarm and anger, fearing that the bombings could lead to a more serious unrest. At the U.N., the Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the bombings. In every Arab capital, from Cairo to Baghdad, governments attacked Israel for its domination of the Palestinians. And within the West Bank, the local population reacted with rage. Strikes were called, but were quickly broken by Israeli soldiers, who ordered shopkeepers not to close, and in some cases broke open locked doors. When Mayor Shaka’a was moved to a hospital in Jordan, crowds of Palestinians cheered him and threw flowers on the ambulance in a show of emotion that combined sympathy with protest.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the bombings was that they were the work of experts. The attacks had been well planned and coordinated by a team of terrorists; they clearly were not random acts by one or two individual troublemakers. The grim possibility was that the mayors had been the targets of an underground Jewish terrorist organization. If this should prove to be true, it would introduce a new and frightening dimension into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The three mayors concerned are all considered anti-Israeli militants. They belong to an organization called the National Guidance Council, the purpose of which is to coordinate strategy with the Palestine Liberation Organization on the West Bank and Gaza. Beyond that, all three are sympathetic to the most radical factions of the P.L.O., and at one time or another have been in difficulty with the Israeli military authorities.
The 2,200-sq.-mi. West Bank has been in almost constant turmoil since the signing of the Camp David accords in September 1978. In the past two months the bloodshed has intensified. Jewish settlers on the West Bank, who constitute about 2% of the population of the region (excluding East Jerusalem), have stepped up their demands for the support of the Israeli authorities, and the government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin has been eager to oblige. When extremist followers of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, founder of the Greater Israel Movement, illegally attempted to re-establish a Jewish presence in the Arab city of Hebron after an absence of more than 40 years, Begin allowed them to remain. In January, after a Jewish student was killed by a sniper’s bullet in Hebron, the Israeli government approved the building of two religious schools in Hebron’s former Jewish quarter.
Those decisions led directly to more violence; six Jews were killed and 16 were wounded, presumably by Arab terrorists, outside the Hadassah clinic in Hebron. Among the victims was a follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the fanatical Kach movement and former head of the Jewish Defense League. Vowed Kahane: “Two teeth for a tooth!” Israeli authorities later arrested and imprisoned him under an administrative detention order. In the meantime, Jerusalem police discovered an arms cache on the roof of a Jewish religious school in the Old City. The investigation of the bombings focused on both Kach and a little-known shadow world of underground terrorist organizations. One anonymous telephone caller to an Israeli news service claimed responsibility for the West Bank explosions in the name of the “Israeli Freedom Fighters Movement—TerrorAgainst Terror.” Nobody, not even the Israeli security apparatus, seemed to know much about the identity of such groups.
In a speech to the Knesset last week, Prime Minister Begin denounced the West Bank bombings as “crimes of the gravest type” and promised that those responsible would be brought to justice. But by his intransigence on the question of Palestinian autonomy and his policy of coddling the extremist Jewish settlers and their backers, Begin himself had contributed to the climate of violence. As the Jerusalem Post said last week, the bombings were part of “a process whose roots lie in the concept of perpetual Jewish rule in the West Bank, but whose shoots are the denial of coexistence.”
A week earlier, Begin had been shaken by the resignation of his popular Defense Minister, Ezer Weizman. Some observers thought Weizman’s defection would hasten the fall of Begin’s government and the calling of new elections, which are due next year. But Begin appears to have weathered the storm. He avoided a split in his conservative Likud coalition by taking over the Defense portfolio himself; and despite a noisy fight with his conservative Agriculture Minister, Ariel Sharon, Begin won a vote in the Knesset last week, 59 to 48.
Harsh criticism of Begin and his conduct of Israel’s affairs came from outside Israel too. As one U.S. State Department official put it, “Begin has gone too far, not once but several times. The situation in the West Bank is dynamite, and no one over there is acting to defuse it.” The U.S. believes that a P.L.O. conference held in Damascus two weeks ago marked the end of a diplomatic emphasis and a probable resumption of terrorism. Furthermore, Washington expects the P.L.O. to retaliate for the West Bank bombings. Says an American official: “The situation is made to order for those Palestinians who want to make the West Bank a battlefield.” Said the deputy commander of Al-Fatah’s military wing, Abu Jihad: “Revolutionary operations will take place within the next few days or weeks.”
Western Europeans are so concerned over the deteriorating situation in the Middle East that one British official describes the region as a “political Mount St. Helens.” The Europeans are fearful that the Carter Administration will not press very hard for a peace settlement until after the November elections, and for several weeks have been talking about proposing a new U.N. resolution that would affirm not only Israel’s right to exist with secure borders but also the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. The Europeans were annoyed last week when Jimmy Carter bluntly announced that the U.S. would veto any such Western European measure in the U.N. Security Council. And they were not surprised last Thursday when the U.S. abstained from the Security Council resolution condemning the bombings; the resolution passed by a vote of 14 to 0.
The Western Europeans were more impressed with the concern of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat that it might be a mistake to tamper with Resolution 242, lest this incite the Israelis to drop out of the peace negotiations entirely. Instead, when European Community leaders meet in Venice this week, they are expected to adopt a declaration advocating Palestinian self-determination and a role for the P.L.O. in the peace process.
In the West Bank, the bombings left the Palestinian population more desperate than ever. Said one businessman: “The Jews want us out. If the government can’t do it, the settlers will be only too willing to try.” Concluded an East Jerusalem resident: “We find ourselves caught between the P.L.O. and the Israelis. Each wishes to destroy the other. We fear we will be destroyed in the process.”
ncG1vNJzZmismaKyb6%2FOpmaaqpOdtrexjm9vbnBgbX5wtdKrmJ6kXanEsHnTnpytoF2bvLN5wGarqKeknXw%3D