Arabs and Israelis duel from Lebanon to the Sinai
Covered by a rug and preceded by three men holding Palestinian flags, the empty coffin was carried slowly along the main street of the village of Beit Likya in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. "In spirit and blood we sacrifice you," murmured one of the 250 onlookers, as others shouted, "Palestine is Arab!" The ceremony was a mock funeral for Jihad Ibrahim Badr, 16, one of the two Palestinians killed during the Easter morning shooting on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. Both Badr and the other victim, Salah Alyamani, had already been buried in a tiny, fenced-off cemetery underneath the eastern wall of the Old City that is devoted to the Muslim victims of the 1936 Arab uprising against the British and of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. But the Palestinians were exploiting the rage over Badr's death to encourage resistance to Israeli rule.
The attack by Allen Goodman, an American-born Israeli soldier, on one of the most sacred sites in Islam, the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, had inflamed Arab passions throughout the Middle East. The incident occurred, moreover, at a time of extreme anxiety in the region. Plagued with doubts about the wisdom of its action, Israel was preparing to withdraw from the final third of the Sinai Peninsula on April 25, while Egypt waited anxiously to see if the Israeli government of Prime Minister Menachem
Begin would keep its word. For weeks, in addition, there had been reports that the Israeli armed forces, spurred on by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, were ready to launch a large-scale strike against Palestine Liberation Organization strongholds in southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat, fully expecting an Israeli assault, was exerting all his influence to prevent some of the more radical Palestinian factions from launching their own attack across the Lebanese-Israeli border. In an effort to head off an Israeli strike and hold the Israelis to their promise of withdrawing from the Sinai by the scheduled date, the U.S. sent its second-ranking diplomat, Deputy Secretary of State Walter Stoessel, to Jerusalem for talks with Prime Minister Begin. Stoessel then continued to Cairo to meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
The region so accustomed to turmoil had seldom been tenser on so many fronts for so many reasons. A general strike of protest against the Jerusalem shooting incident was in effect for a day in much of the Arab world and for the rest of the week in most of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. By the end of the week, at least 70 Palestinians had been wounded by Israeli bullets; four Israeli soldiers and twelve civilians had been injured by Arab stones. In Gaza, a seven-year-old boy died from the effects of an Israeli bullet wound in his stomach. In Jerusalem, a five-year-old Arab girl was recovering from surgery after doctors removed an Israeli bullet from her brain. Elsewhere in Jerusalem, a three-year-old Israeli girl lay gravely injured with a fractured skull and was in danger of losing the sight of one eye. She had been riding in a bus when a rock thrown by an Arab demonstrator smashed through a window and struck her.