Middle East: Bombs, Passions and Farewells

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"Someone shouted, 'Israelis, Israelis!' Staring upward, I could see two parachutes with men who looked as tiny as marionettes, drifting downward—one toward the Christian sector, the other toward us. There were shots of celebration, at the prospect of having an Israeli pilot falling right into their hands. The two parachutes turned out, however, to have borne the pilots of two Syrian MiGs that were lost in aerial dogfights with the Israelis." The other Syrian pilot was later delivered with great ceremony to the Lebanese presidential palace by Bashir Gemayel, commander of the Christian Phalange forces.

Why did the Israelis stage their aerial attack on Lebanon last week? The P.L.O. regarded it as a subtle ruse, designed to provoke a P.L.O. artillery bombardment of northern Israeli settlements. That would give the Israelis a solid excuse to make their long-awaited ground attack. In a series of meetings with his guerrilla chieftains, Arafat insisted: "We must not do what the Israelis want us to do." Hard-line Palestinian factions and several of the Lebanese militias aligned with the P.L.O. favored immediate retaliation. Arafat insisted on caution and moderation. Once more, for the moment at least, he held the radicals in check.

The nine-month cease-fire along the border has changed the strategies of both the Israelis and the P.L.O. Until last year, each side could launch an occasional raid without worrying too much about serious retaliation, but that is no longer so, especially for the P.L.O. Says a Western diplomat in Beirut: "Under the old system of a little fighting every once in a while, Arafat could pursue diplomatic and political respectability for the P.L.O. and still keep his revolution alive. The cease-fire has taken the fire out of the revolution, and total war with Israel could destroy it completely. Arafat would no doubt like something in between." So, for the moment, he is counseling his comrades to be patient, even though some sort of P.L.O. counteraction is doubtless inevitable.

What lies ahead? The signers of the Camp David accords—Egypt, Israel and the U.S.—have been focusing on the final Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai for so long that they have rarely tried to look much beyond it. The region's most daunting problem is as obvious as ever: the need for a political settlement involving the 1.3 million Palestinians of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The question is how to achieve it.

Robert Neumann, a former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, argues that the long-stalled autonomy talks have a "zero probability of success" because the Egyptian and Israeli views on Palestinian autonomy are irreconcilable. That may be true. The Reagan Administration, which apparently still feels that the autonomy talks are the best vehicle at hand, has been slow to address itself to the problem of the Palestinians. With the Sinai finally returned, an objective that was once also considered to have little chance of success, the most critical remaining obstacle to peace in the region may finally receive the attention it deserves.

—By William E. Smith. Reported by David Aikman/ Jerusalem and Roberto Suro/ Beirut