Israeli Jets Attack Palestinian Bases : PLO Apparently Escalating Its Terrorism Role

The Palestine Liberation Organization’s claim of responsibility for a grenade attack in Jerusalem indicates that the mainstream guerrilla group has returned to a policy of sanctioning large-scale terrorist attacks after several years of relative quiet, Western diplomats and Arab analysts said Thursday.

The PLO statement, issued in Cairo, said the attack Wednesday night in Jerusalem follows a decision by the PLO leadership “to escalate the armed struggle in order to confront this Zionist cancer throughout our Palestinian land.”

Analysts said the attack reflects the PLO’s growing isolation and frustration after the breakdown of peace talks with Jordan’s King Hussein last February.

Grenades Thrown Into Crowd

In the Jerusalem attack, Soviet-made fragmentation grenades were hurled into a crowd near the Western Wall, Judaism’s most sacred place. It is in the Old City of Jerusalem, which has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War.

One person was killed and 70 others were wounded in the attack. The target was an elite Israeli army infantry unit gathered near the Western Wall after a swearing-in ceremony.

A PLO spokesman in Baghdad, Azzam Ahmed, affirmed that the raid was ordered by the PLO. He said that “the near future will see more operations inside the occupied territories.”

Responsibility for the Jerusalem attack was also claimed by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-oriented faction based in Damascus, and a previously unheard of group calling itself the Islamic Jihad Brigades.

Western diplomats who monitor the activities of the various Palestinian factions said the PLO claim seemed the most credible, since it was issued only hours after the attack and was couched in the formal language of a PLO communique.

All the PLO statements about the attack have referred without explanation to a recent decision adopted by the PLO to step up attacks in the territories under Israeli occupation.

No details were given, but news agency reports from Baghdad said the executive committee of the PLO had met in the Iraqi capital earlier this week.

Threat by Arafat

PLO leader Yasser Arafat was quoted in the Kuwaiti press last week as threatening an escalation of the “armed struggle” against Israel. “Whoever abandons the military choice will consequently lose the political choice,” he was quoted as saying. “It is the military choice which has enabled us to become a figure on the political map and later on the geographical map.”

The PLO has drawn a distinction in recent years between terrorist attacks outside Israel, which it disavows, and those within the “occupied territories,” asserting that the raids in Israel have never stopped.

Most guerrilla activity has been relatively minor, such as isolated stabbings and shootings. The last PLO action in Jerusalem, for example, was in 1983, when six people were killed in the bombing of a bus.

Recent attacks attributed to the PLO, such as the murder of three Israelis in Larnaca, Cyprus, in September, 1985, were never officially announced by the PLO as having been approved by the group’s leadership.

Group in Disarray

PLO guerrilla activity slackened off in part because the organization was in disarray after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which drove the PLO from Beirut in 1982, and partly because of peace initiatives undertaken with Jordan’s King Hussein in February, 1985.

Since the collapse of those efforts, in February of this year, the PLO has suffered its worst isolation since it was formed in 1964. Jordan closed 25 offices belonging to Arafat’s Fatah wing in July and expelled Khalil Wazir, the PLO’s deputy military commander whose presence in Amman had been a guarantee against PLO guerrilla activity inside Israel.

Earlier this month, Arafat disclosed that the military leadership of the PLO had left Tunis, where it set up after being driven out of Beirut in 1982, and would now be based in Baghdad and Yemen, far from Israel.

“The PLO now has no channel through which it can work on a diplomatic or political front,” a Western diplomat said. “Inevitably such frustration will lead to other, similar operations.”

Transition Time in Israel

According to the diplomats and Arab analysts, Wednesday’s attack was, from the PLO perspective, ideal because the target was military in nature and happened in what the Palestinians call “occupied Jerusalem” at a time when a hard-line Israeli government is about to take power.

Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, leader of the right-wing Likud Bloc, is scheduled to take over as prime minister next week, replacing the Labor Bloc’s Shimon Peres.

Diplomats also believe that the mainstream PLO felt vulnerable to charges made by groups based in Damascus that it had abandoned the armed struggle in favor of peace talks that were leading nowhere.

The Jerusalem raid can be used by the PLO as evidence that it has not abandoned the struggle.