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By August 1967, El Fatah was ready to try to launch an underground revolt among the Arabs on the now occupied West Bank. Hundreds of guerrillas trekked across the Jordan River, only to be rounded up by Israeli forces. To head off any future attempts, the Israelis blew up the homes of any Palestinians who cooperated with Arafat's men. El Fatah's next phase was a campaign that sent smaller groups to hide in caves or live with sympathetic Arabs, and venture out at night to set mines or time bombs. Israel hit back at their riverside guerrilla camps, forcing El Fatah to move its bases farther in land. Despite these setbacks, the fedayeen have been able to step up their operations to as many as two dozen a day. Though El Fatah hotly rejects being called terroristic, it has also turned increasingly to attacking Israel's civilian population. The methods are brutal and indiscriminate, random terrorism for terrorism's sake without any military value —a bomb in a crowded cinema, a grenade thrown in a schoolyard, a mine planted for anyone who comes along. Last week a 17-year-old Los Angeles girl, Sari Roberta, who had gone to Israel to serve as a volunteer worker, lost her right leg when she stepped on a mine.
By laying down a strict policy of staying out of Arab politics on the ground that, as Arafat says, "one enemy at a time is enough," El Fatah has so far been able to operate independently in the host Arab countries—chiefly Jordan. Disputes with rival fedayeen organizations are another matter, and on one occasion two groups of raiders almost shot it out, each thinking the other was Israeli. Last month, the fedayeen set up a council to coordinate raids between El Fatah and its two chief rivals, the Palestine Liberation Force and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or P.F.L.P. (inevitably pronounced "flop" by Westerners on the scene), a militantly leftist merger of several splinter organizations on the scene.
* The name is an acronym derived from the Arabic words Harakat al Tahrir al-Falastin, or Movement for the Liberation of Palestine. Its initials, H.T.F., form the Arabic word for death. They are ingeniously reversible to F.T.H., pronounced "faht," meaning conquest —hence El Fatah or, as it is less commonly spelled, El Fateh.