World: ATTACK ON BEIRUT: ISRAEL’S BIGGEST REPRISAL

ALONE among the Arab states sharing borders with Israel, tiny cosmopolitan Lebanon had escaped direct involvement in the Middle East’s frequent outbursts of hostility. Like Arabs everywhere else, the Lebanese of course paid lip service and tithes to the Arab cause against Israel, but they were far more interested in commerce than in aggressive politics. The Beirut government dutifully declared war against Israel during last year’s Six-Day War—and sent two fighters on a sortie southward toward Tel Aviv. When one was shot down, Lebanon happily withdrew from the campaign, its duty done.

Last week violence came to Lebanon with a vengeance. In perhaps the single most audacious military exploit in their already spectacular history, Israeli forces swept down in helicopters on Beirut’s busy international airport, through which thousands of Arab and Western tourists and businessmen pass each day. In 45 minutes, the attackers wreaked an Israeli-estimated $100 million in damage. A dozen Lebanese civilian planes were destroyed or heavily damaged, hangars and fuel dumps set afire, all apparently without loss of life to either side. It was a swift, surgical and devastating raid, carried out in the most unlikely of places—and it once again raised the stakes in the Middle East, edging the area closer to another full-scale war.

It was also an action certain to bring down upon Israel fresh accusations that it overreacts to Arab provocations. The incitement in this instance had taken place only two days before, at Athens’ international airport. There, a New York-bound Boeing 707 belonging to El Al, the Israeli airline, and carrying 41 passengers and a crew of ten had just moved away from its loading ramp when two men dashed onto the runway. Opening a canvas travel bag, they snatched out an automatic rifle and four incendiary grenades and fired a fusillade of bullets at the fuselage. They killed one passenger.

Fiery Mangled Metal. The gunmen carried leaflets from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Arab guerrilla outfit that hijacked an El Al airliner last July. In Beirut, P.F.L.P. immediately distributed a triumphant communique identifying the terrorists as Mahmoud Mohammed Issa, 25, and Maher Hussein Yamani, 19. They now face possible death sentences in the Greek courts.

In accordance with a policy of holding Arab governments responsible for fedayeen terrorism, Israel quickly blamed Lebanon. The terrorists, said a Tel Aviv statement, had flown to Athens from Beirut’s airport, and belonged to a group of Arab saboteurs based in Lebanon. “The mark of Cain is on the heads of the perpetrators,” declared Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. The Middle East has learned to take such Israeli warnings seriously, and Lebanon braced for some sort of reprisal. It came within 48 hours, but on a scale no one would have dared predict.

After dark on the Jewish Sabbath, a team of Israeli commandos, their faces blackened, descended on Beirut international airport, located only five miles from downtown and on the edge of the city’s suburbs. As an Israeli spokesman told it later, one group, equipped with smoke bombs, coolly set up a roadblock to keep Lebanese troops away. The others, ignoring parked foreign-flag aircraft, headed straight for the planes of the country’s lines: Lebanese International Airways, Middle East Airlines and Trans-Mediterranean, a cargo carrier.

Under orders to prevent bloodshed if possible, they ordered the stunned airport crowd away, using bullhorns and speaking in English and Arabic. Then they methodically went from plane to plane—one was a Middle East Airlines Boeing 707 just about to depart for Saudi Arabia—at gunpoint ordering passengers to disembark, then planting explosives under the wings. One after another, the aircraft were blasted into fiery mangled metal. For good measure, the commandos also set fire to hangars and oil-storage tanks.

Despite the explosions and the flames in the night sky, Lebanon’s armed forces were curiously slow to react. Lebanese air-force jets were based only 40 miles away, but none scrambled to challenge the Israeli choppers. Some Lebanese soldiers did advance toward the Israeli roadblock, but retreated when the commandos fired warning shots. A mobile Lebanese antiaircraft battery finally trundled up an hour after the attack began—and 15 minutes after the Israelis departed.

Home Unscathed. The commandos left behind an expensive rubble of metal. Lebanese authorities admitted to losing all the Lebanese-owned aircraft on the ground at the time, perhaps eleven in number. The Israelis put the figure damaged or destroyed higher, at twelve to 14 planes.

All the raiders returned to base unscathed, but Israel’s image did not fare quite so well. The attack on relatively peaceable Beirut seemed a case of excessive vengeance hardly tailored to the crime of the two Arab terrorists in Athens. The pair happened to set out on their mission against an Israeli airliner from Lebanon—but could have started from anywhere. In any case, they and their extremist colleagues are now largely operating independently of all Arab governments. The U.S. State Department called in the ranking Israeli diplomat in Washington to protest the raid “in the strongest possible terms.”

Phantom Timing. The latest round of provocation and reprisal indicated that if there is ever to be a break in the Middle East’s deadly cycle, it is unlikely to be accomplished by the Arabs and Israelis alone. The mounting hostilities hold the threat of involving the U.S. and Russia, as protector-states of the combatants. The conflict has already drawn the superpowers into a renewed buildup in the area. Russia has refurbished the Arab armies at a cost of more than $1 billion. Early last week, to redress the balance, the U.S. concluded negotiations to sell

Israel 50 Phantom jet fighters; the timing of the deal’s announcement had the virtue of drawing the Arabs’ wrath to an Administration that will soon be out of office, instead of to President-elect Richard Nixon.

With the new Administration, the U.S. will have an opportunity for new diplomatic beginnings. Ever since Nixon’s special envoy, former Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, toured the Middle East last month and called for a “more evenhanded” policy, the Arabs have been encouraged, rightly or wrongly, to hope for new understanding from the U.S. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser wired Christmas greetings to Nixon, a gesture that he never accorded President Johnson, and there is widespread expectation that diplomatic relations with the U.S., broken off by Nasser during the Six-Day War, will be restored shortly after Inauguration Day.

Vital Interest. So deep are the wells of hate in the Middle East that perhaps no political leader could now withstand the consequences of a compromise settlement to end the mounting hostilities. If that is the case, says Charles Yost, who was named by Nixon two weeks ago to be his U.N. ambassador, “the necessary initiative can only come from outside”—preferably in agreement with Russia and negotiated through the U.N. That would represent a significant departure from U.S. policy, which up to now has been based on the premise that Arabs and Israelis should settle their own affairs. Writing in the January Atlantic, Yost argued that it would also recognize the fact that the “really vital interest of both powers in the area is to control and remove the grave threat to their own security.” The events in Athens and Beirut last week underscored how increasingly grave the threat of a new war becomes with each passing day in the tense Middle East.