Tragedy of Errors

As Operation Stone of Wisdom progressed, more details emerged about the Palestinian terrorist raid that triggered the Israeli drive into Lebanon. Interrogating the two captured guerrillas of the 13-member terrorist squad, Israeli intelligence agents learned that the Palestinian attack had not gone at all as planned. The original landing zone, daringly enough, was supposed to be the beach at Tel Aviv itself. The raiders--part of an elite, college-level group trained relentlessly in terrorist doctrine and tactics--had planned nothing less than the takeover of a large Tel Aviv hotel and the holding of its occupants as hostages, much as terrorists had taken over Tel Aviv's Savoy Hotel in 1975, killing eight hostages.

Instead, apparently due to a major navigational error, the outboard-powered rubber assault boats deposited the raiders on a remote beach near a kibbutz 40 miles north of Tel Aviv. The bewildered commandos, with no big hotel in sight, sat down and picnicked on the beach before deciding on an alternative plan. If not by boat, they would get to Tel Aviv by bus.

The bloody massacre that ensued, unfortunately, may have been as much the result of Israeli incompetence as Palestinian menace. Every one of Israel's surveillance and emergency reaction systems failed during the landing and deadly ride of the terrorist raiding party from Kibbutz Ma'agan Mikha'el to the Tel Aviv Country Club, where the bus and its passengers were halted in a storm of gunfire and flame.

The attackers' boats, camouflaged in black and gray, were not easy to spot. But Israeli naval and air patrols of the long shoreline failed miserably, perhaps in part because of a heavy sea that fouled radar reception. Even so, the terrorists lunched on the beach at high noon and rested for an hour before beginning their bloody hitchhike to Tel Aviv. No one disturbed them. They encountered a woman, Gail Rubin, taking pictures on the beach. After learning from her where they were, they killed her.

Once the ride of terror began, moreover, the usual Israeli talent for inventive tactics seemed somehow to collapse. There were no smokescreens laid across the highway, and only one feeble attempt was made to force the hijacked bus to stop. Not until the captured bus hit a stretch of highway seeded with nails outside Tel Aviv were the terrorists and their hostages stopped by a blockade hastily erected by police who had been alerted to the hijacking.

There was not time enough to order up special Israeli antiterrorist squads to arrive on the scene before that fatal confrontation--perhaps the most tragic failure of all. The police commander at the roadblock gave a blanket open-fire order to terrified traffic cops, and their wild fusillade when the bus was finally halted probably killed more hostages than did the terrorists. Worse, it may have driven some of the terrorists to commit suicide--and to take as many passengers as possible with them. According to an intelligence report, each Palestinian commando wore an explosive belt, and he was expected to blow himself apart if capture seemed to be imminent.

What had thus begun as a major error for the terrorists ended--in the macabre mathematics of a suicide mission--as a death-dealing success. What is more, a P.L.O. leader claimed in Lebanon last week, the raid might even turn into a major economic blow against Israel as well. The attack, said an Al-Fatah commander who had helped to plan it, was designed not only to derail the Cairo-Jerusalem peace talks but also to raise havoc with the tourist trade in Israel during the Christian Holy Week and over Easter. Last week, indeed, the P.L.O. issued a warning through its official news agency, WAFA, that Christian pilgrims should stay away from Jerusalem's traditional holy places during the Easter religious rites because "several operations are planned for that time and it is not our intent to harm foreigners."

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