Middle East: Holy Terror

New killings and a crackdown

Sectarian murder, that tit-for-tat madness so familiar to residents of war-torn Lebanon, found a new venue last week in the streets of Israel and the occupied West Bank. In the Israeli port of Ashdod, 22 miles from Tel Aviv, an Arab grenade exploded on a crowded bus, killing three Israelis and wounding ten others. Responsibility for the action was claimed by the Black June terrorist group, a breakaway faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization based in the Syrian capital of Damascus. Only three days earlier, a bus carrying some 60 Palestinian laborers from their West Bank homes to work in Jerusalem had been raked with submachine-gun fire by two masked gunmen. Seven Arabs were wounded, two seriously.

The differences between Lebanon and Israel stood out sharply, however. Within 24 hours after the West Bank shooting, Israeli security forces had begun a crackdown on one of the country's most disturbing phenomena, the rise of Jewish terrorism. Members of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, arrested seven U.S. citizens and subsequently detained four of them on suspicion of complicity in the attack on the Palestinian laborers. The four detainees were later identified as active members of the ultra-nationalist Kach movement, led by Meir Kahane, founder of the U.S.-based Jewish Defense League. In another raid, Israeli police arrested three fundamentalist Jews who reportedly confessed to involvement in an abortive attempt last January to blow up Jerusalem's two most important Islamic shrines, the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Days later, the police uncovered a major arms cache near Jerusalem, including grenades, antitank weapons and mines, some still in Israel Defense Forces casings. Said a Shin Bet official: "It is impossible to be sure that we have managed to put an end to Jewish terrorism, but we have moved some steps forward."

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, unlike his predecessor Menachem Begin, is eager to demonstrate evenhandedness in opposing both Jewish and Arab terrorism. There is good reason to do so. In the past four years, fanatical Jewish activists have launched more than 40 terrorist operations against Arab and Christian homes and institutions in Israel and the West Bank. Among the more spectacular crimes: the attempted assassination of three West Bank Arab mayors in June 1980 and an assault last summer on Hebron's Islamic University in which three Arabs were killed and 33 wounded. Responsibility for the latest West Bank machine gunning was claimed by a unit of the clandestine organization TNT, a Hebrew abbreviation for Terror Against Terror.