COVER STORIES
Israel is challenged from the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Sinai
On the road between the Sinai and Tel Aviv, an Arab youth leading a donkey raised his fist and shouted: "In fire and blood, we shall free my Palestine." In the town of Yamit, Israeli settlers burned furniture and other belongings in a bonfire and cursed the Israeli government that was forcing them to leave their homes in the Sinai. On the West Bank, shaken by a month of violence, Arab youths continued to stone soldiers in ugly skirmishes protesting the Israeli occupation. On the Golan Heights, there was rifle fire as soldiers wounded four Druze Arabs who were demonstrating against the Israeli annexation of the region in December. In northern Galilee, thousands of Arab residents of Israel marched to commemorate Land Day, an annual protest against the Israeli practice of confiscating Arab property in order to build more Jewish settlements.
As Holy Week began in Jerusalem, Israelis were locked in a series of struggles on a number of fronts. They were striving to maintain a tight hold on the occupied Arab territories and trying to adjust at the same time to the trauma of withdrawing at long last from the Sinai, the great desert barrier that separates them from Egypt.
Prime Minister Menachem Begin appeared to have weathered a parliamentary crisis that had broken out the week before. His Likud coalition, sustained by a mere one-vote majority in the 120-member Knesset, had been whiplashed by the two explosive issues confronting Israel at the moment: the forthcoming withdrawal from the Sinai and the government's repressive treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Two weeks ago, the Begin government barely survived a no-confidence motion that ended in a 58-58 tie vote. But for a budget vote last week, Begin gained the tacit support of an opposition member, Mordechai Ben-Porat of the TELEM party. Then at midweek, the Knesset took a five-week recess for the Passover holiday. The government thus seemed to be secure until the Knesset meets again in early May, and by that time the politically sensitive withdrawal from the Sinai will have been completed.
On the West Bank, fighting flared again. In the village of Ya'bid, near Jenin, a band of Arab youths, armed with knives and homemade firebombs, attacked an Israeli army patrol. The soldiers opened fire, wounding three Arabs. Elsewhere, three soldiers were injured in stoning incidents, and a member of a village council in the Hebron area was wounded slightly when a pipe bomb exploded beneath his car. Overall, however, a measure of normality seemed to be returning to the West Bank. The towns of Ramallah and Nablus remained heavily guarded by Israeli troops, but the strike that had closed down most stores a week earlier was gradually ending.