Bullets, Bombs and a Sign of Hope

Any government of Israel will do everything in its power in order to cut off the hands that want to harm a child. Premier Golda Meir, in a TV address last week from Jerusalem

Both the Bible and the Koran make sternly clear the manner in which injury is to be avenged. "Thou shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth," says the Book of Exodus. In Sura II of the Koran the Prophet advises: "O believers, prescribed for you is retaliation touching the slain; freeman for freeman, slave for slave, female for female." Unfortunately for the Middle East, this sense of bitter, retaliatory justice persists to the present day.

Bloody Victims. Last week it was invoked again with horrifying consequences. Three Palestinian guerrillas crossed over the Israeli border from Lebanon, took 85 teen-age schoolchildren hostage in a daylong drama and murdered 26 Israelis before they themselves were slain. Next day Israeli jets retaliated with deliberate strikes against Palestinian refugee camps and commando bases in Lebanon. Their bombs and rockets left 50 people dead and more than 200 wounded.

The back to back massacres were dreadful enough in themselves: the world was stunned by photographs of lifeless children, bloody victims, agony-stricken mourners. Beyond that, the two days of insensible terror threatened to accomplish what fanatics on either side hoped they would: break up the disengagement talks that U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has been conducting between Jerusalem and Damascus. Actually, the terrorism appeared to have had an opposite effect. The horror of what had happened and what else might occur emphasized the necessity for peace. At week's end, after his fourth shuttle round trip of the week, it seemed as if Kissinger was about to make a dramatic breakthrough. U.S. diplomats said that Syria had tentatively agreed on an Israeli proposal for disengagement of the warring forces and were prepared to sign an agreement in Geneva.

Kissinger had been increasingly optimistic about a successful outcome of the talks as he began the third week of talks on his fifth visit to the Middle East since November. But then at midweek came the raid by the Palestinian guerrillas in the border town of Ma'alot which Kissinger formally deplored as "mindless and irrational."

The attack on the schoolhouse at Ma'alot did not come entirely as a surprise. Last week marked the 26th anniversary of Israel's founding, according to the modern calendar.* With Golda Meir's approval, National Police Chief Shaul Rosolio went on television to alert against possible Palestinian attacks marking the date. Early last Tuesday morning, guards discovered that some commandos had punctured a 10-ft.-high protective fence and crossed over the border from Lebanon north of Ma'alot (which means "heights" in Hebrew).

The broad, carefully smoothed patrol road that Israel maintains along the border in order to turn up trespassers showed the boot prints of fedayeen moving onto the Israeli side. Roads were sealed off and army patrols sent out to hunt down the marauders.

Hint of Danger. Even as these special precautions were under way, 103 students, aged 14 to 17, from a religious high school in Safad--along with a rabbi, nurses, teachers and two security guards--prepared for their annual three-day field trip through the scenic hills of western Galilee. In all, 180 students were eligible for the trip. In light of the alert, the families of 77 refused to let their children go. Principal Shimon Ben-Lulu was upset over their recalcitrance. "The route has been examined," he insisted. "We have authority from the army, and guards will be along. Everything will be all right." One student said later that he had been warned his report card would be withheld if he did not make the trip.

The students' first day was routine. The only hint of danger came when a side trip into a wadi, or dry river bed, had to be canceled after an army patrol told the teachers that Palestinian guerrillas might be hiding there. At dusk, the school caravan reached Ma'alot, and the travelers bedded down in sleeping bags in the town's three-story concrete school building. Students and teachers took turn staying awake along with the guards. But the weapons that the adults had brought along--an Uzi submachine gun and some bolt-action rifles--were left in a truck outside; a Ministry of Education rule forbids firearms in any building where students are assembled.

The trio of commandos, dressed in jeans and carrying knapsacks filled with explosives, first surfaced at midnight along the Safad road two miles from Ma'alot. One of them stepped into the highway and attempted to stop a truck carrying seven Arab women home to the village of Fassouta from night-shift work at a nearby textile plant. When the truck driver, aware that an alert was on, refused to stop, two of the Arabs opened fire. One woman was instantly killed, another mortally wounded, and all the others were hurt. The truck's engine was shot out. Driver Faiz Saad coasted silently down a hill into a Jewish border village, where he gave the alarm.

By 3 a.m. the three Palestinians had reached Ma'alot. They began pounding on doors of an apartment building.

"Open up!" one yelled in Hebrew. "We are police looking for terrorists." Most of the inhabitants, sleepy and frightened, refused to comply with the demand. But a forester named Joseph Cohen, 48, opened his door--and was immediately cut down by automatic-weapons fire. His son Eliahu, 4, was also killed, and his daughter Miriam, 5, wounded. His wife Fortuna, seven months pregnant, tried to flee the intruders, but was machine-gunned. The only one in the family not killed or wounded was 16-month-old Yitzhak Cohen. He never attracted attention by crying; he is a deaf-mute.

Moving back into the street, the Palestinians stumbled onto a municipal worker named Jacob Kadosh, 59. "Who are you?" they asked. "A Jew," said Kadosh. "Which way to the school?" demanded the Hebrew-speaking Arab. The puzzled Kadosh pointed, and then was shot in the shoulder. The three men advanced to the school, 100 yds. away, and were inside before the guards realized that they were there. Waving guns and hand grenades, the Palestinians jolted the sleeping students awake with kicks on the feet. "Lakum, lakum [Get up, get up]!" they yelled. Fifteen students, a few teachers and the rabbi realized what was happening and leaped out windows of the three-story building; some of them landed painfully on the gravel 20 ft. below. "I figured first it was a kid playing tricks," said one 16-year-old later, recalling the invasion. "But then I saw men with machine guns and packs, wearing dark glasses. A window was broken, so I jumped out."

Separate Rooms. The commandos still had 85 students as hostages; they put the boys in one large room and the girls in another. "Do as we say," said the Hebrew-speaking commando, "and no one will get hurt." A nurse in the party was given the names of ten political prisoners that the Arabs wanted released in exchange for the students. The list included eight Palestinians serving rife sentences in Israeli jails on charges of murder and sabotage; it also specified Kozo Okamoto, one of three Japanese terrorists who shot up the Tel Aviv airport two years ago, killing 27 people (TIME, June 12, 1972). Since Okamoto went to prison, the Israeli embassy in Bangkok has been raided, an airliner has been skyjacked and eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics have been slain by Palestinian guerrillas demanding his release. The terrorists who killed 18 people at Qiryat Shemona last month made the same demand.

In Ma'alot, the terrorists announced that they represented the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a fedayeen group headed by Nayef Hawatmeh (see box page 27). The three Arabs--later identified as Ali Ahmed Hassan, 27; Ahmed Saleh Nayef, 20; and Ziyad Abdel Rahim, 22--threatened to kill all of their young hostages unless their orders were followed. "Six o'clock will be the end," they warned.

Their threats galvanized Israeli officials into action. Army units, including an elite team of 25 special troops with trained snipers, were helicoptered into Ma'alot. Moshe Dayan, Defense Minister in the caretaker government, and General Mordecai Gur, the new Chief of Staff, joined them. The ashen-faced Dayan was quickly recognized by Ma'alot citizens. They called him "son of a prostitute," jostled him and demanded better protection. In Jerusalem, Israel's Cabinet began a meeting that lasted ten hours. It made a collective decision that Israel, for the first time ever, would meet terrorist demands. "One does not conduct war on the backs of children," Mrs.

Meir explained afterward.

Bullhorn Dialogue. By sunrise Wednesday the Palestinians had fastened explosives round the school building and wired the charges to detonate.

Whenever anyone got too close, they opened fire with their Russian-made Kalashnikov submachine guns. An Israeli soldier, home on leave in Ma'alot and watching as a bystander, was hit in the throat by a burst of fire and killed.

At noon, a boy and a girl were freed to report that their companions were still all right. The boy fainted. The girl sobbed so heavily that she could scarcely convey the news. The commandos and Israeli army officers conversed in a running dialogue by bullhorns. The Palestinians demanded that the French and the Rumanian ambassadors to Israel be sent to negotiate for them. The P.D.F.L.P. terrorists now insisted that two Israelis sentenced to 15-year jail terms last year for spying in behalf of Syria were also to be freed. "You had better hurry," the guerrillas warned. "Or at 6 o'clock you are going to get 85 dead bodies." "Be patient," an Israeli called out in reply. "Don't do anything rash. God willing, everything will be all right."

An hour before the deadline, the French ambassador, Jean Herly, finally appeared. But negotiations were beginning to go badly. For one thing, it had taken several hours for the Israelis to round up the prisoners to be released, since they were being held in ten different jails. There was also a problem in trying to get a United Nations plane from Cairo that would ferry the prisoners from Ben-Gurion Airport to Damascus. Compounding the confusion was the fedayeen's complicated plan for effecting the release of the prisoners they sought. The prisoners and half the hostages were to be flown to Damascus. There, a code word (Al Aqsa, from the famous mosque of Jerusalem) would be given to the French ambassador to Syria, who would relay it via Paris to Ambassador Herly at Ma'alot. Only then would the hostages be released. The situation, said Major General Shlomo Gazit, Israel's intelligence chief, became "a mission impossible."

As the deadline approached, the Israelis pleaded for more time, but the commandos refused, saying that they had no authorization to extend the limit. At 5:27, General Gur gave the order to open fire on the school. The firefight lasted only twelve minutes, but as Gur said later, "they were the longest minutes of my life." Israeli soldiers under a barrage of fire managed to reach the explosives and neutralize them. One of the three Palestinians was immediately killed by sniper fire. Another was wounded, but was still able to toss grenades and fire his automatic weapon pointblank at the screaming students.

Gur said later that he could see the girl students being shot one by one. Israeli officers said that they found ten girls dead, each with a bullet in the neck.

TIME'S David Halevy was among the first to enter. "Gray smoke enveloped the school," he reported. "Going inside, I passed a wall; on it was an ecology Slogan, FOR HEALTH AND CLEANLINESS. Lying next to the sign were two pretty, crying, bloodstained girls with chest and leg wounds. Soldiers were shouting 'Stretchers! Bandages!' and children were being carried out on the shoulders of soldiers to a first aid station.

Mostly Girls. "I raced up to the second floor. A group of dead kids were lying in a corner. Their bodies were clustered in grotesque positions -- as if they had died trying to protect one another.

One girl was lying on her back, her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. Her body was cut in half at the waist. Most of the injured seemed to be girls. That was the shocking thing. They were beautiful girls with ugly wounds on their faces. Their clothes had been shredded, and there were open wounds on their breasts and legs. The movement of stretchers seemed endless."

The carnage, once the shooting ended, included 17 teen-agers dead and 70 wounded. Five of the wounded died afterward in hospitals. All three commandos had been shot dead inside the school. The national wound for all of Israel was almost as great. In Jerusalem, Israel's Parliament suspended debates as Knesset members hunched over transistor radios to pick up news reports. The funeral of the dead students next day was an occasion for national mourning -- and national anger. In Safad, where 10,000 people gathered as the children were buried, frantic mourners disrupted the services with cries of "Maver Imechablim [Death to the terrorists]!" Israeli President Ephraim Katzir, who led the mourners, had to be hustled to safety by security men as the crowd, seeking a scapegoat, turned on him.

While the funerals were taking place, 36 Israeli jets were wheeling in from the Mediterranean to strike their heaviest blow ever at Lebanon. Flights of Phantoms and Skyhawks, carrying 250 tons of bombs, swept in under a bright blue afternoon sky. Air raid sirens sounded in Beirut, and residents apprehensively searched the skies. Beirut's airport was hastily shut down, and incoming jet liners were waved off.

Psychologically, the Lebanese were more or less prepared for some form of Israeli retaliation. Earlier that day, Foreign Minister Fuad Naffah had summoned the ambassadors of the U.S., the Soviet Union, China, Britain and France. Well aware that Israel had previously responded to fedayeen raids by attacking Lebanon, Naffah asked -- futilely, as it turned out -- that their governments pressure Israel into restraint.

Search for Survivors. The air assaults were far more devastating than the Lebanese or the Palestinians could have expected. This time the Israelis hit not just fedayeen strong posts but also camps occupied by civilian refugees. One group of planes struck the Burj el-Barajneh camp on the outskirts of Beirut, which is operated by the United Nations Relief, and Works Agency.

Ten other targets were hit. The greatest death and destruction occurred around the ancient city of Sidon. The heaviest casualties were at Nabatieh, another refugee camp populated by about 5,000 Palestinians. The Israelis hit there in waves; two hours after the initial attack, more jets swooped down even as rescue workers were still clawing through the rubble for survivors. In the multiple strikes a total of 30 people were killed and at least 100 wounded. The camp was so badly damaged that bulldozers were brought in to level it. "No matter which way I looked, I did not see a wall standing," reported TIME'S Abu Said. "The camp looked more like a roadbuilding project than a place to live. There must have been more bodies buried under Nabatieh. The smell was very strong."

'Ain el Hilweh, with 20,000 people the largest of UNRWA'S 15 camps in Lebanon, was also bombed. On the edge of the camp--its Arabic name means "eye of the beautiful"--three four-story apartment buildings were hit; at least seven people were killed and 20 wounded. Roads out of 'Ain el Hilweh quickly clogged with cars as well as people trying to escape on foot, carrying hastily stuffed suitcases and bedding and dragging along frightened children. Red Crescent and Red Cross ambulances found it difficult to get through.

Before the retaliatory attacks, Arab newspapers and radio broadcasts had predictably put the blame for the slaughter at Ma'alot on Israel because its soldiers had attacked the school building. ISRAEL MURDERS ITS OWN CHILDREN, bannered Beirut's pro-fedayeen daily Al Moharrer. The raids on Lebanon only heightened anger against Israel. "This is nothing," said Ali Hussein Badran, 65, a camp dweller who was still dazed by the destruction that had rained down on him in 'Ain el Hilweh. "I left my farm behind in Palestine. Now I have lost my home again. But with God's help I will stay, no matter how many houses I lose. And my children and my grandchildren will be commandos."

For the Lebanese, the Israeli attack aroused not only fury but also frustration. The government in neighboring Syria adamantly backs the fedayeen movement but has the muscle to keep the guerrillas within its borders on a tight leash. Lebanon, on the other hand, has never been able to control the thousands of armed commandos who live within Israel's most vulnerable and militarily impotent neighbor. Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat and other fedayeen officials have their headquarters in Beirut. Moreover, the fedayeen military equipment is probably more modern than that of Lebanon's 16,000 man, U.S.-supplied army. After last week's raid, commando Jeeps appeared carrying SA-7 Soviet antiaircraft missiles.

The most crucial question involving the Middle East massacres was their effect on Henry Kissinger's peace mission. Rather than aborting the talks, stark terror apparently convinced the negotiators that they should work more earnestly. During his most recent round of shuttle diplomacy, the Secretary of State flew seven times round trip between Jerusalem and Damascus. At week's end he was scheduled to drop in on Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in Cairo and then return to Washington. But then, as both sides appeared ready to agree to a line on which they would disengage, he postponed his trip home and stayed on to work out details.

"Purple Line." Kissinger had persuaded the Israelis to extend to the Syrians what the Israelis described as their maximum concessions. They were willing to withdraw from most of the territory in Syria that they had captured last October, and even from some land on the Golan Heights west of the "purple line," as the post-'67 war boundary is colored on Israeli maps. The Israelis were also willing to give up much of the bomb-blasted Golan town of Quneitra and allow a limited number of Syrian refugees to return there. Their conditions for disengagement included a United Nations buffer zone, a limited-arms zone on either side of the buffer and a system of U.N. arms inspections of the thinned-out opposing forces, which Kissinger must now work out.

Until last week, some Kissinger aides said, Syrian negotiators had spent their time vetoing Israeli proposals. But in the final stages of the latest Damascus-Jerusalem shuttle, they made a few tentative proposals of their own. One was for either Syrian or Syrian-U.N. administration of all of Quneitra. Equally important, Damascus agreed to accept a U.S.-Soviet guarantee that Israel would eventually pull back from all captured Syrian territory rather than insist that Israel make a politically awkward public pledge to do so. The pull back, however, had to be the first item on the agenda at the peace talks in Geneva.

In private discussions after Ma'alot, Syrian officials did not condone the Arab raids or condemn Israel for retaliating. To U.S. diplomats that was a clear sign that the Syrians -- despite their support of the Palestinian cause -- did not want last week's twin massacres to interfere with negotiations. When Kissinger at one point suggested that the talks could be postponed temporarily, both sides insisted that he continue.

Even before the weekend expectalion of a diplomatic breakthrough, no one seriously believed that the horrifying massacres alone were sufficient excuses to plunge the Middle East back into a state of war. For a resumption of wholesale hostilities, Arab hawks would need not only Syria's but also Egypt's support, and President Sadat has firmly turned his country away from battle and toward peace talks. The Egyptians pointedly returned the territory around the Suez Canal from military to civilian control last week, and demobilization of the army was under way.

The real fear is that any interruption of peace efforts would encourage Arab hard-liners who want the peace talks halted. Initially, last week's events seemed to favor these militants. After the air strikes against Lebanon, fedayeen leaders charged that Israel was conducting a war of genocide and threatened still more retaliation. "If they want that kind of war, so be it," said one. Rumors circulated in Israel that Libya had paid the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine $6.3 million for attacking Ma'alot. There were also stories that fedayeen were being trained in East Berlin to resume the underground "war of the spooks" that raged through western Europe last year, leaving dead dozens of suspected spies and undercover agents on either side (TIME Feb. 12,1973).

Israelis accepted such reports grimly. Ma'alot was the latest in a series of blows that have battered the national psyche since October. Israelis since the war have felt increasingly insecure. The war was costly, economically as well as in lives lost. The country was unprepared to fight, and faith in the army has been replaced by investigations to assess blame. Israel is moving from a past that its people understood to a fu ture that is still not clear, and the transition is making them moody.

Much of that public anger last week was directed against Kissinger for pressuring Israel to make concessions and for shifting U.S. Middle East policy into an evenhanded approach toward Arabs and Israel. Crowds demonstrated in Jerusalem whenever Kissinger appeared. Some chanted "Jewboy, Jewboy," a reference to reports that the U.S. President had used that slighting epithet in describing Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon papers.

Majority of One. The tension and unease were heightened by the unset tled state of Israel's domestic politics. After three weeks of dealing, Premier-Designate Yitzhak Rabin was still un able to form a viable coalition to take over the government from Mrs. Meir. Early last week he appeared to be gathering a bloc of 61 Knesset votes, which would have given him a majority of one in the 120-seat Parliament. After Ma'alot, however, there were calls for a na tional unity government that would in clude the right-wing hawks of the Likud (union) opposition bloc. The last time that such a coalition was formed in Is rael was in June 1967, after Gamal Abdel Nasser blockaded the Straits of Tiran and Israeli Premier Levi Eshkol revamped his Cabinet to prepare for war. Rabin and most Labor Party leaders so far are unwilling to let the right-wing opposition into the government. Instead, the Premier-designate last week went to President Katzir and received an extra week's grace for further Cabinetmaking consultations.

A new Israeli government will probably not take control until the disengagement discussions are completed. For one thing, Israel is not likely to let Golda Meir retire in the middle of such crucial negotiations; for another, Rabin is one of the negotiators and he has had scant time in the last few days to worry about domestic politics. Moreover, there is still much left to be done in working out the details of troop pullbacks and U.N. participation. Meanwhile, Kissinger has been informed, Syria intends to continue fighting around Mount Hermon to keep the pressure on Israel.

Nonetheless, last week's announcement of a tentative agreement was a hopeful breakthrough, and chances seem good for agreement on the remaining disputed points. Said one U.S. diplomatic spokesman: "All of the parties have gone too far down the road to break off now."

A Chronology of Horrors

In a curve of horror that has steadily risen since the Six-Day War of 1967, Arab and Israeli terrorists and counterterrorists have taken the conflicts of the Middle East well beyond desert villages, into the streets of European cities and along the world's airways. Some of the grim highlights:

DEC. 28, 1968. After a fedayeen attack on an El Al plane in Athens, in which one passenger is killed and another wounded, Israeli commandos retaliate by attacking Beirut Airport, destroying or damaging 13 planes.

MAY 22, 1970. Eight children are killed and 22 wounded when a school bus in northern Israel is hit by three bazooka rockets fired by fedayeen who have crossed the border from Lebanon.

SEPT. 6, 1970. In a skyjacking spectacular, Palestinian commandos divert four British, Swiss and U.S. airliners with more than 400 passengers aboard to Egypt and Jordan. All the planes are eventually blown up.

MAY 30, 1972. Three Japanese terrorists belonging to the Red Army guerrilla organization open fire with automatic weapons and grenades in Lod Airport killing 27--more than half of them religious pilgrims from Puerto Rico--and wounding 70.

SEPT. 5, 1972. In Munich, "Black September" terrorists kill eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the Olympic Games. Five of the terrorists are killed and three captured.

FEB. 21, 1973. Israelis, in retaliation for Munich, raid refugee camps in Lebanon killing 31. They also shoot down a Libyan airliner that strays over the Sinai killing 107 aboard.

MARCH 1, 1973. Black September terrorists execute three diplomats, including the arriving and departing U.S. ambassadors and the Belgian charge d'affaires at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum, the Sudan.

APRIL 10, 1973. Israeli commandos, in a raid at Beirut, kill 17, including three high-ranking Palestinian guerrilla leaders, and wound several others.

AUG. 4, 1973. Arab terrorists kill five and wound 55 New York-bound TWA passengers at Athens airport, mistaking them for tourists headed for Israel.

SEPT. 28, 1973. Two Palestinian gunmen take three Soviet Jewish emigres hostage aboard a Vienna-bound train in an eventually successful attempt to close down the Israeli refugee processing center in Austria.

DEC. 17, 1973. Palestinian commandos shoot up Rome airport, blow up a Pan American jetliner and hijack a Lufthansa plane to Athens and Kuwait; 33 are killed.

APRIL 11, 1974. Three Arab commandos seize an apartment building in Qiryat Shemona in northern Israel; the commandos and 18 Israeli men, women and children are killed.

People of "The New Diaspora"

The massacre at Ma'alot was carried out, surprisingly, not by traditional fedayeen hard-liners but by a group that has recently advocated a settlement that would leave pre-1967 Israel intact.

Those who died in that raid and in the Israeli retaliatory attacks on Lebanon were at least in part the victims of a painful soul searching within the guerrilla movement, an attempt to strike a balance between Palestinian politics and pressure for an overall Middle East settlement. "Now everybody can see that the moderates, too, believe enough in the cause to die for it," says one Palestinian writer.

The cause, of course, is an independent Palestine: a new nation that would provide a home for Jews as well as for some 3.2 million Palestinian Arabs, many of whom fled or were ousted from their homes by the creation of the state of Israel and the wars of 1956 and 1967.

Virtually every Arab nation recognizes the Palestine Liberation Organization as an umbrella-like group that represents the Palestinian people. But there are divisions within the P.L.O. about how best to achieve the goal of a Palestinian state. Hardliners led by George Habash, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Abdel Wahab Kayyali, head of the small, Iraqi-backed Arab Liberation Front, want the immediate replacement of Israel by a new, secular democratic nation for Jews and Arabs alike. Moderates led by Yasser Arafat, leader of both al-Fatah and the P.L.O., are willing initially to accept something considerably less: a kind of mini-Palestine to be composed of some Israeli-occupied territories. These include the West Bank of Jordan, the Gaza Strip, and the Hemmeh region to the southeast of Lake Tiberias. Though they too want a much larger Palestine, they fear that further delay in creating their country might mean an end to their identity as a people, spread as they are throughout the Arab world.

The group that carried out the attack on Ma'alot was one of the less significant of the moderate factions. The Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (P.D.F.L.P.), led by Nayef Hawatmeh, 39, a Christian and a Marxist who was born in Jordan, has about 500 members. Only last March, in an interview with American Journalist Paul Jacobs that was printed by the Israeli paper Yediot Aharonot, Hawatmeh said that he wanted to establish a dialogue with Israel.

Why did the P.D.F.L.P. suddenly stoop to the kind of act associated with radical fedayeen groups like Black September? Some observers believe that Hawatmeh, who had been criticized by hard-liners for the interview, wanted not only to avoid the accusation that he was selling out but also to show how effective a Syrian-style talk-fight could be.

At a press conference in Beirut after the Ma'alot raid, he announced that the attack had been designed to disrupt the Kissinger peace talks. Hawatmeh charged that the talks threatened to create a Syrian-Israeli disengagement that would "mean the surrender of the Palestinian people."

For the past 26 years the Palestinians have provided much of the fire of Arab nationalism and hatred of Israel.

Paradoxically, the Palestinians are in many ways like the Jews. They even call their wanderings over the last quarter-century "the new diaspora." Better educated on the whole than any Arabs other than the Lebanese--some 68,000 Palestinians hold university degrees--they form a business and professional elite in the Arab world. In Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf, they dominate the civil service, diplomatic corps and educational system. Of the 3.2 million Palestinians, approximately 1.5 million live in Jordan (including the West Bank). Another 400,000 live in Israel, 350,000 in the Gaza Strip, 300,000 in Lebanon, 160,000 in Syria, 50,000 in Iraq, at least 80,000 in Kuwait, and large numbers in Persian Gulf states, Saudi Arabia and Libya.

About 600,000 live in refugee camps, and several thousand are fedayeen.

Today, more than ever before, the Palestinians are determined to remain a separate people and have their own nation. "We are part of the Arab world," says a young Palestinian radical. "But we also are something distinct. At the moment, we are a hand of the Arab body, a hand that strikes. But we want to keep our distinctive nationality because we want to know who we are."

The search for identity begins and ends in the dry hills of ancient Judea.

"Remember, our people have been on that land for thousands of years," says Youssef Sayegh, an economics professor at the American University of Beirut.

"We are Arabs, but our link of Palestine transcends our Arabism. Our attachment to the land of Palestine has been continuous--until the state of Israel was created. The Jews sought identity in linking their peoplehood to the land, and now the Arabs of the new diaspora are doing the same thing." Even the Palestinians in Beirut or Riyadh consider themselves, in their final analysis, refugees, and many cling to their United Nations refugee card as a symbolic sign of their nationality. Palestinians everywhere contribute generously to the Palestinian cause, including many donations to the fedayeen.

Beyond their sense of kinship and yearning for a homeland that many have never even seen, the Palestinians are divided as to methods and short-term goals. With unhappy accuracy, one member of a militant commando organization says, "We don't even agree on exactly how much territory we must have or what methods we must use to gain that territory." Despite this surface disunity, the Palestinians, as the massacre at Ma'alot too well demonstrated, are a potent force that must be dealt with if peace is to come to the Middle East.

The Golan Heights: No Place to Hide

Despite diplomatic hopes that a cease-fire deal was in the offing, low-level fighting along the Syrian-Israeli front continued for the eleventh consecutive week since the cease-fire was broken. Artillery duels flared, armored forces clashed, and both sides claimed to have inflicted casualties. Last week military officers from Israel and Syria escorted 14 American journalists (who had been traveling with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger) on separate trips to the Golan Heights. Among them was TIME Correspondent John Mulliken, who sent this report:

On Monday the Israelis took us to Quneitra, capital of the Golan. Before Israel captured it in the 1967 war, it was a town of 20,000 Syrians. Today Quneitra sits smashed to bits, lifeless, under the blazing Middle East sun. It is this desolate ruin that the Syrians so desperately want to recover and rebuild.

We climbed Avital, one of three hills west of Quneitra, and looked across the flat plain that is Syria. It was easy to feel in the pit of your stomach why the hills mean so much to the Israelis. They command the entire plain. Suddenly, as if to confirm our musings, there were bursts of dirty smoke followed by bangs. The Syrian guns were at work, and the Israelis fired back. "It is an artillery war," explained an Israeli colonel.

"That is why we need the hills."

A few hundred meters away, behind the crest of Bental, another of the hills, is Merom Golan, one of the 17 Israeli settlements in the Golan. Begun a month after the end of the Six-Day War, Merom Golan now has a population of 300, including 100 children. We passed homes under construction. Each house, finished or not, had its red-and-black-striped bomb shelter. When the war erupted last October, the settlement was evacuated. After four days the men returned to work the land. This year they will harvest the first fruits of the apple and plum trees. "We are settlers," says the acting secretary of the settlement, a young emigrant from Rumania. "We will do what the government decides, but we want to stay where we are."

Eerie Drive. The following day, after taking the Kissinger shuttle to Damascus, we were driven by the Syrians in the direction of Mount Hermon, along a completely unprotected road. There were few houses. Once in a while we spotted an antiaircraft site or Soviet rocket installations. The drive was eerie. We felt as if we were standing absolutely naked in a town square. Anyone could look down at us from Mount Hermon and even from the smaller hills below it. There was no place to hide.

Our Syrian escort officer, a young lieutenant who spoke fluent English, explained that before the 1967 war, 150,000 Syrians had lived in the Golan. Today almost none do. (The Israelis insist that no more than 70,000 Syrians ever inhabited the area.) "It is our land," said the lieutenant. "It has never been their land. They lie when they say they need it!"

Our convoy reached a bunker, behind which and out of sight stood a battery of Soviet-made 122-mm. guns. When they opened fire, we saw their shells explode inside Israeli lines about one mile away. "It is a daily thing," a Syrian officer said. "We try to stop them from improving their positions." It was not too long before the Israelis responded. American-made 155-mm. shells burst on either side of the bunker.

Inside the bunker, Brigadier General Ali Hussein, the Syrian sector commander, offered us tea and baklava. Hussein, who spent one year training in the U.S. at Fort Benning, explained that in former days "the Arabs and Jews lived with each other. They used to love each other. But then came Israel and forced the Arabs out. Then came the feeling of hostility."

By late afternoon, we were back at Damascus' airport. Weary from yet another conference with Syrian President Assad, Henry Kissinger told the crowding local press that there had been progress but no agreement. Then he flew off to Jerusalem to try once again to reason the two sides into not shooting at each other.

*Actually, the holiday was celebrated on April 25, in accordance with the ancient Hebrew calendar.

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