Temple Attack Sparks Cabinet Clash in Israel

The Sabbath slayings of 21 Jews in an Istanbul synagogue triggered a Cabinet clash in Jerusalem on Sunday and intense speculation over the timing and target of what is foreseen here as an inevitable Israeli retaliation.

“Look,” commented one government official, “we as a Jewish state cannot sit idle and see Jews being massacred in a pogrom. One way or another we’ll have to take an action. Where and how and what--this is up to us.”

Two Arab gunmen turned Istanbul’s Neve Shalom Synagogue into a house of carnage Saturday when they used automatic weapons and hand grenades to kill 21 Sabbath worshipers and themselves. A handful of survivors said the attackers poured gasoline on some of their victims and set the bodies afire.

Senior Israeli ministers had been expected to discuss possible responses to the synagogue attack at their regular Sunday Cabinet meeting. Instead, the session was cut short as the result of an angry exchange between Prime Minister Shimon Peres and right-wing Trade Minister Ariel Sharon.

Session Cut Short

Their confrontation was resolved much later in the day when Sharon retracted in writing a charge he made Saturday that the Istanbul terrorists had been encouraged by “peace overtures and concessions” made by Israel under Peres’ leadership. Israel radio reported at midnight Sunday that Peres had accepted Sharon’s retraction.

When the Cabinet convened Sunday morning in the shadow of the Sharon statement, a seething Peres demanded that Sharon either retract his statement or resign. Peres halted the session after only 10 minutes and said he would block further Cabinet meetings until Sharon complied with his ultimatum.

“It’s impossible for a Cabinet member to level such accusations in public and remain in the government,” Peres said in a statement later released by his office.

The situation remained stalemated for much of the day, with Peres enjoying full support from the ministers of his centrist Labor Alignment faction. Sharon’s colleagues from the rightist Likud Bloc, which shares power with Labor in the national unity government, said that while Sharon may have been wrong to make such a statement, Peres was overreacting.

Israel radio, quoting sources close to Sharon, said the trade minister’s retraction, addressed to Peres, said: “There is no connection between government decisions and the incident in Istanbul. Neither is there any connection between our desire for peace and the murder of Jews.”

‘Nazi-Like Murder’

Sharon, a former defense minister and architect of Israel’s war in Lebanon, is an outspoken former army general who has twice previously brought the coalition government to crisis because of clashes with Peres.

In his Saturday statement, Sharon called the Istanbul attack a “Nazi-like murder and a horrific reply by the Palestinians and their allies to the peace overtures and concessions that Israel is making to the PLO, to (Jordan’s King) Hussein, to (Morocco’s) King Hassan and those on Taba. They are seen as Israeli weakness, which only encourages aggression.”

His remark about Hassan referred to Peres’ surprise meeting with the Moroccan monarch in July, and Taba is the name of a disputed sliver of Sinai Peninsula beachfront that has become a litmus test of Egyptian-Israeli relations.

Peres hopes to meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Alexandria later this week, but that meeting depends on completion of an agreement to submit the Taba dispute to binding international arbitration.

According to a Cabinet statement issued after Sunday’s abbreviated meeting, Peres said that Sharon’s remarks were “divisive and accusatory.”

Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who heads the Likud Bloc, called Sharon’s statements “unacceptable, but . . . no reason for a crisis.”

Shamir and Peres are due to exchange jobs next month under a “rotation” provision of their coalition agreement.

Meanwhile, there was growing speculation among Israeli terrorism experts Sunday that the person behind the Istanbul synagogue attack was Sabri Banna, better known as the arch-terrorist Abu Nidal.

Ariel Merari, an expert on terrorism from Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, said the synagogue assault and the attempted hijacking of a Pan American World Airways jetliner in Karachi, Pakistan, on Friday “are characteristic of the Abu Nidal organization--indiscriminate attacks with hand grenades and automatic fire, attacks on synagogues and Jewish targets, and the use of aliases.”

Abu Nidal was blamed by U.S. and Israeli authorities for last December’s nearly simultaneous terrorist attacks on check-in counters of El Al Israel Airlines at the Rome and Vienna airports, which killed 20, including four of the terrorists, and injured 121.

Abu Nidal has been supported at various times by Iraq, Syria and Libya, and was last reported to be in Tripoli, the Libyan capital.