Word: fedayeen
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DESPITE a winter of unremitting violence in the Middle East, it seemed last week that both the Israelis and the Arab fedayeen commandos were mounting spring offensives of strike and counterstrike. Israeli jets pounded guerrilla bases in Syria and Jordan. Fedayeen bombs exploded in Jerusalem and Lydda. Yet the two events that may affect the area's future more than the violence had to do with changes in leadership. In Israel, the sudden death by heart attack of Premier Levi Eshkol (see box following page) opened the possibility of a struggle for succession. In Syria, a forced change...
Active Self-Defense. At Eshkol's last Cabinet meeting, the Israeli government decided on a new policy to deal with the fedayeen: "active self-defense." as Foreign Minister Abba Eban put it, or waging war directly on the commandos, without regard to their host countries. If that amounted to recognition of the commandos as an independent force, it also assured them of a more harrowing existence. Hardly had the decision been announced when Israeli ground troops attacked a Jordanian police station suspected of being a jumping-off point for fedayeen raids. One Israeli soldier was wounded in an hour...
...first time since the Six-Day War, Israeli jets attacked in Syria. More than a dozen planes bombed and strafed two fedayeen camps, one of them on the outskirts of Damascus. As usual, the roar of rockets was followed by a war of words; the Israelis claimed that as many as 80 fedayeen were killed and two Syrian MIG-17s shot down. The Syrians claimed to have downed three Israeli jets, and the fedayeen claimed that the attack had wounded only two guerrillas, while killing five civilians in a nearby washing-machine plant (the Syrians reported 15 dead...
...guerrillas also stepped up their war, as weather improved. The fedayeen planted a package of explosives outside the British consulate in Jerusalem, presumably in response to reports that Britain intends to sell tanks to Israel, reports that London declines to confirm or deny. Another bomb went off in the marketplace of Lydda, wounding an Arab grocer. In Jordan, fedayeen leaders took to moving from camp to camp, fearing assassination by Israeli infiltrators. King Hussein temporarily closed down Amman airport, and Egypt's Nasser declared a state of emergency...
Jordan River to Jerusalem, and each morning the first order of the day is inspection. The dirt tracks that lead through Kallia's fields must be minutely examined for mines that fedayeen infiltrators from Jordan may have planted during the night. Until that task is completed, no one is allowed to venture out of the settlement to farm. The boys do the rough work in the fields, the girls work in the kitchen and care for Kallia's menage of 450 ducks, eight dogs and a mule...