Chain of Mideast Events Strains U.S.-Arab Ties : Attack in Tunisia, Hijacking, Intercept Also Hurt Peace Bid

The series of events that included the Israeli raid on Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunis and ended with the U.S. interception of a plane carrying the hijackers of the cruise ship Achille Lauro has generated a new wave of anti-Americanism in the Middle East and severely strained Washington’s relations with its moderate Arab allies.

Also, according to diplomats and government officials in several Arab capitals, it has damaged, if not destroyed, an effort to reach a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement and strengthened radical Arab governments such as Syria’s and Libya’s, while weakening pro-American leaders such as President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan and President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia.

“It is a disaster,” an Egyptian Foreign Ministry official said, “a disaster for us all.”

Round of Violence

The region’s latest round of violence began Sept. 25, when three Israelis were slain by terrorists on board a yacht in a Cyprus harbor. A week later, in retaliation, Israeli jets struck the Tunis headquarters of the PLO, killing 72 people.

A week later, four Palestinians hijacked the Italian ship Achille Lauro and killed an American hostage before surrendering to PLO mediators two days later in Port Said, Egypt.

Given safe passage from Egypt in return for freeing the rest of their hostages unharmed, the hijackers headed for Tunis on an Egyptian airliner. Tunisia, though, refused to let them land and the plane then was intercepted by U.S. jet fighters and forced to land in Sicily, where the hijackers were arrested.

PLO faction leader Abul Abbas, accused of being the mastermind of the hijacking, also was on the Egyptian plane. The United States sought to have him arrested in Italy, but the Italians let him leave the country. The affair chilled U.S.-Italian relations and quickly led to the collapse of the Italian government.

It was not the first time that Americans or Israelis had been the victims of terrorism or the first time that Israel had retaliated against the PLO. Indeed, there have been bloodier and more spectacular examples of both.

What distinguishes these latest events, analysts say, is that never before has such an incident been allowed to get so far out of hand politically. Before the Achille Lauro hijacking, no terrorist incident had caused so much damage to relations between the friendly countries victimized by it.

Handling Did the Damage

In both the air raid and the hijacking, the political damage was done less by the events themselves than by the way they were dealt with by all concerned. As a result, Tunisia and Egypt are furious with the United States, which is angry with Italy and Egypt, which is angry with Tunisia and Italy.

As an official in the Foreign Ministry in Cairo noted ruefully, “Everyone who put his hand in this fire got burned.”

In Egypt, the seizure of the Egyptian plane has been greeted with shock, anger and dismay, and these feelings have not been assuaged by the way in which the incident has been celebrated in the United States.

Dependent on $2.5 billion a year in U.S. aid, President Mubarak initially sought to limit the damage by having his foreign minister denounce the U.S. interception of the airliner in relatively restrained terms. Soon, however, he was forced to escalate his rhetoric to keep pace with violent anti-American demonstrations here and with opposition demands that Egypt sever relations with the United States.

After being denounced by protesters as a coward for failing to take firm action against Washington, Mubarak called the airliner’s seizure an act of “air piracy” and demanded an apology--to which President Reagan has said, “Never.”

Fence-Mending Move

Egyptian Foreign Ministry officials, still hopeful that the damage can be contained, urged the Reagan Administration to at least send a special envoy here on a fence-mending mission. Such an envoy, Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead, is now here, having arrived Saturday night after visiting Rome on a similar mission. But whether Whitehead’s visit will be enough of a face-saving gesture for Mubarak depends on “whether the government can contain the popular uproar against the United States,” a Foreign Ministry official said.

Even if civil calm is quickly restored, most analysts say that it will take months to put U.S.-Egypt relations back on the same level they were on before the Achille Lauro incident and that there will be more anti-Americanism now. “Scars will remain,” said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a respected political scientist at the American University of Cairo.

Beyond the domestic problems it has created for Mubarak, the airliner incident has weakened the position of Egypt and other pro-American states in the Arab world, analysts said.

“The Syrians and the Libyans are holding this up as an example of what America does to its friends,” a Western diplomat said. “Events of the past few weeks have given the radicals much cause to attack the moderates,” he said.

And a Jordanian diplomat said: “Not only the moderates, but the whole cause of peace has been set back by this. How can we continue to say that the United States is the impartial mediator, the party through whom we must talk to Israel, when it does things like this? The United States has stopped being the arbiter of the Middle East conflict and has become a party to it,” he said.

Such bitterness has been reflected in the Arab press. In the Persian Gulf region, newspapers have urged Mubarak, in one editorial’s words, to “liberate Egypt from its American-Israeli-made handcuffs.”

The most frequently recurring theme in such editorials throughout the Arab world has been the Arabs’ loss of trust in the United States, which by applauding the Israeli raid on Tunis and seizing the Egyptian jetliner is seen as trying to sabotage the peace process.

Diplomats and government officials in Tunis say that a distrust, similar to but even deeper than that now in evidence in Egypt, has overtaken U.S.-Tunisian relations in the wake of the Israeli raid and President Reagan’s initial support for it.

While Mubarak has dismissed opposition demands that he sever relations with the United States, President Bourguiba of Tunisia was on the verge of doing so earlier this month, officials in Tunis have said, but changed his mind when the United States abstained from voting, instead of casting a veto, on a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the raid.

Bourguiba ‘Outraged’

The officials said that Bourguiba, a longtime ally of the United States, had expected Washington to be embarrassed over the attack by one of its allies on another. When Reagan quickly defended the Israeli raid as a “legitimate response” to terrorism, Bourguiba was “outraged,” the officials added.

The Tunisian president, like Mubarak, was faced with anti-American demonstrations that threatened to turn against him. Even if the threat to formal ties seems to have been defused, Tunisian officials and Western diplomats alike have said that relations between Washington and Tunis will probably never be the same again.

Harder to gauge but even more serious than the damage to U.S. bilateral relations with its two key Arab allies, officials and analysts say, has been the effect of the past month’s events on efforts by Mubarak, King Hussein and the PLO to restart the Middle East peace process, stalled since Egypt and Israel signed their separate peace treaty in 1979.

Even before this month, the only initiative on the table--the Feb. 11 accord between Hussein and PLO leader Yasser Arafat--seemed to be dying a slow death as the United States balked at sitting down with a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation nominated by Hussein and Arafat. Now, after the seizure of Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists, such a meeting seems out of the question.

Salvage Attempt

It was in an attempt to salvage the peace initiative that Mubarak sought to skirt U.S. objections and to turn the Achille Lauro terrorists over to the PLO, which had promised to punish them, Egyptian officials have said.

Although Arafat denounced the hijacking and denied responsibility for it, his credibility as a potential peace partner was shaken by evidence that the hijackers belonged to the Popular Liberation Front, a PLO splinter group.

By trying to give Arafat a chance to punish the hijackers--senior PLO officials in Tunis predicted that the four would have been executed--Egypt sought to let the PLO leader repair his credibility and remain in the peace process, Egyptian officials have said.

‘Conflicting Purposes’

“The problem,” a Foreign Ministry official said here, was “one of conflicting purposes.” The United States “wanted to strike a ‘blow against terrorism’ by catching the hijackers, while Mubarak wanted to preserve the peace process and minimize the risk of reprisal attacks against the country that will try the terrorists,” the official said.

“The United States, in seizing an unarmed civilian airliner, may have struck a blow against terrorism as it says,” the official added. “But, so far, the only ones who have felt this blow are not the terrorists but the moderates, the governments who thought the United States was their friend.”