Israel: Returning Fire

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Attacks both inside and out

The operation might have been torn from the pages of the Little Drummer Girl, John le Carré's Middle Eastern thriller. Three young Palestinian terrorists slip across the Lebanese border into Israel, where a man with a Lebanese passport and a woman with one from the U.S. supply them with weapons. Then, on a sunny morning last week, the three drive a rented red Autobianchi up crowded King George V Street in West Jerusalem. Two of them enter a sporting-goods store and, in Arab-accented English, nervously ask to try on some jeans.

When they emerged from the changing room, one was carrying an armload of grenades and the other, described as too young even to shave, was wielding a machine pistol. "He pressed the gun to my temple," said Sales Clerk Rani Cohen, 18, recalling his turbulent first day on the job, "and we looked each other in the eye." But the Arabs inexplicably spared Cohen, raced into the street and for seven frenzied minutes wildly bombarded the area with grenades and bullets. Their fire was promptly returned by several quick-witted citizens. By the time the smoke cleared, 46 civilians were wounded but none, miraculously, had been killed.

Indeed, the only fatality of the elaborately conceived, but amateurishly executed, maneuver was one of the terrorists. A second was apprehended a few blocks away, and the third arrested outside Jerusalem. All three, reported Israeli authorities, belonged to a pro-Syrian radical faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization known as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Although bombs have exploded around Jerusalem three times in the past four months, the latest assault was darkly acclaimed by the Syrian paper Al Baath as the dawning of a new era of guerrilla activity.

Such external threats merely compounded the internal traumas confronted by the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Only last month the opposition Labor Party forced Shamir to schedule early elections for July 23. Soon afterward, it became apparent that Deputy Prime Minister David Levy, a popular Sephardi who was defeated by Shamir for the leadership of their Herut Party last September, still harbored designs on that position. Shamir was, in a sense, saved only by the bell: just three hours before Levy was widely expected to make formal his challenge on national TV, he received a pointed phone call. "I don't think a contest would be good for the movement at this time," he was reportedly told by Ze'ev Binyamin Begin, a 41-year-old geologist who also happens to be the son of Israel's former Prime Minister. Fifteen minutes later, Levy decided against running.