Israel Denies Raid’s Aim Was to Kill Arafat; Officials Pleased by Reagan Reaction

Israel’s dramatic air strike against Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunisia underlines its determination to keep PLO chief Yasser Arafat out of any Mideast peace negotiations, but it was not specifically intended to kill him, Israeli analysts and officials said here Wednesday.

One day after the surprise attack, the conventional wisdom seemed to be that Israel had struck a welcome blow at terrorism, achieved at an unexpectedly modest diplomatic cost.

Officials conceded that they were surprised but pleased by the Reagan Administration’s reaction, which they saw as virtually unqualified support. President Reagan said Tuesday that retaliation against terrorism is acceptable “as long as you pick out the people responsible.”

Arab demonstrators on the Israeli-occupied West Bank burned tires and held protest marches at two refugee camps and a university, but occupation authorities said the reaction was milder than had been expected.

Briefing by Pilots

Top defense officials Wednesday briefed Israeli ministers and the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on details of the mission. Israel radio reported that among those briefing the “inner Cabinet” of senior ministers were pilots who participated in the raid.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who reportedly initiated the idea for the Tunis raid, told Parliament members that the operation had not been directed against any individual or any meeting of PLO leaders.

Interviewed on Israeli television Wednesday night, Prime Minister Shimon Peres expressed ambivalence over the wisdom of trying to eliminate Arafat and indicated that Israeli officials had no idea whether Arafat would be at the PLO headquarters in a beachfront suburb of Tunis.

‘Someone Would Replace Him’

“I’m not sure we have an interest in taking care of this or that leader,” Peres said in answer to a question. “Someone would replace him. Would he be any better?

“The whole question of personal terror is very complicated,” Peres added. “A nation is usually very careful not to get into personal terror. When we set the date for the (Tunis) operation, we couldn’t know exactly who would be where. This operation was not meant to hit any particular person.”

In Tunis, Arafat said he was near the PLO headquarters when it was destroyed by U.S.-made F-16s but escaped injury because he was out jogging.

“They missed him by seconds,” one diplomatic source here said.

Asked at a press conference Tuesday whether the military had information that Arafat would be at the target complex at the time of the raid, Chief of Staff Moshe Levy would say only, “We knew that he was in Tunisia.”

Seen as Move Against Talks

Palestinian leaders on the Israeli-occupied West Bank said they were convinced that Israel had tried specifically to kill the PLO leader in a desperate attempt to sabotage any new moves by the Arab side toward a Middle East peace settlement.

“For years, the Arabs have done the job for Israel by saying ‘No,’ ” commented Daoud Kuttab, editor of the English-language edition of the newspaper, Al Fajr. “Now there are credible Palestinian voices saying ‘Yes.’ ”

A Western diplomatic source was skeptical, however. “My own intuition is that they did not want to get Arafat personally,” he said. “It would give him such a martyr status.”

Whether Israel is better off with Arafat dead or alive is what leftist Knesset member Yossi Sarid called “the $64,000 question.” Against the danger of creating a martyr to the Palestinian cause, others raise the prospect that by killing Arafat, Israel could cause enough disarray within the PLO to destroy the organization as an effective body.

Arafat in Sniper’s Sights

Former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon confirmed in an interview Tuesday that an Israeli sniper had Arafat in the cross-hairs of his telescopic sight in 1982, when PLO fighters were evacuated during the Israeli siege of Beirut. But the government had pledged to allow the fighters safe passage and “Israel sticks to agreements it has signed.”

Speaking to reporters in northern Israel on Wednesday, Sharon used the Tunisia operation to renew his criticism of what he called PLO command posts in Jordan. The Tunisia attack should “serve as a warning” to Jordan’s King Hussein that he must remove the “terrorist command posts” inside his country’s borders, the former defense minister said.

Israel had charged repeatedly in recent weeks that several PLO offices, including the headquarters of the elite Force 17 commando unit, had been moved to Amman. Yet the military said Tuesday that one of five buildings destroyed in the raid near Tunis was Force 17 headquarters.

Commenting on the apparent discrepancy, Rabin told newsmen: “The PLO headquarters that deal with terrorism are located both in Tunisia and in Amman. There are certain operations that are planned in Tunisia; there are certain (ones) planned in Amman.”

Want PLO Expelled

Hussein and Arafat agreed last February on a “joint framework” for Middle East peace talks in a move that ultimately drew the United States back into efforts to broker an agreement between Israel and its neighbors.

Tuesday’s attack, coming just one day after Hussein met in Washington with President Reagan to try to advance the latest Arab-Israeli peace initiative, was thus seen here as intended to stress that Israel will not accept the PLO as a negotiating partner.

Leftist Parliament member Sarid argued that the Tunis raid had no such subtle aims. “Frankly speaking, I think it has been executed for domestic public opinion purposes and nothing more than that,” said Sarid, who is a member of the Knesset Foreign Relations and Defense Committee.

Eitan Haber, military correspondent for Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest circulation newspaper, wrote Wednesday that the raid represented a return from a defensive posture to “the type of action (the army) and the public likes: (combining) daring, imagination, surprise and good results with the main thing--no casualties.”