Between Damascus and Jerusalem

...Consequently, Egypt, Syria and Jordan sharply restricted such activities from their territory...

...Israel had repeatedly made clear, both publicly and through diplomatic channels, that it would not permit this...

...Damascus and Moscow had an urgent interest in torpedoing Haig's mission by demonstrating Syria's "veto power" and compelling Saudi Arabia to openly declare the priority of its anti-Israeli hostility over anti-Soviet concerns...

...Partly because of plain inefficiency and partly because of pro-PLO sympathies among some participating countries, however, the terrorists were permitted to establish bases in UN zones and infiltrate from there into Haddad-land and northern Israel...

...The view here is that Damascus is unlikely to have embarked on its major adventure in Lebanon without the Kremlin's approval, and that this may now be the beginning of a test of the Reagan Administration, similar to those given every new White House occupant since the Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting in Vienna...

...Eliahu Salpeter, a regularNL contributor, is a correspondent for Ha'aretz...

...As they await the final outcome of the missile crisis, Israelis are understandably uneasy about having had the neutral mediator's role conferred upon a country that still denies Israel's right to exist...

...Significantly, too, Syria's offensive coincided with Secretary of State Alexander Haig Jr.'s first visit to the Middle East, designed to line up Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia in an anti-Soviet" defensive consensus...

...and they began to employ air power to subdue the Christians...

...The most important test of all in the present crisis, though, involves U.S.-Israeli relations in the light of Washington's growing reliance in the Gulf area on Saudi Arabia...

...Several factors may account for the exact timing of the attack...

...Thus, when theSyriansescalated their campaign by introducing helicopter strikes to neutralize the topographical advantage, Israel felt it had to respond...

...By the time Habib had arrived in Bei-raut on May 7 to start his shuttle effort, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi M. Korniyenko was in Damascus conferring with Assad...

...An inter-Arab peacekeeping force ("Force of Dissuasion") was established to end the civil war, but it soon became nothing more than a 30,000-strong Syrian army of occupation...

...But the missile crisis quickly took on much wider dimensions...

...The first phase of the Habib mission enabled Syria to bolster its defense, and ended with the Reagan Administration looking to Riyadh to provide a solution...

...At stake was the trust the Christians had placed in Israeli promises of protection, and Jerusalem's own credibility vis-a-vis the Syrians (and other hostile Arabs...

...Nevertheless, nobody outside the Presidential Palace in Damascus can say for sure what prompted President Hafez-al-Assad to embark early in April on a determined effort to subjugate, if not eliminate altogether, Lebanon's large Christian minority...

...The Soviet missiles are a danger to Israeli planes controlling the PLO terrorist bases in Lebanon...

...The most Westernized Arab country, Lebanon emerged from the status of a French mandate in 1945 with a Constitution that assumed rough parity between Moslems and Christians...

...During three weeks of this pounding, Israel kept reminding Damascus that it would not tolerate the destruction of the town's Christian minority...

...Subsequently, Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev again insisted that peace could best be assured by convening a Geneva mideast conference...

...At the crucial moment when Begin had to decide whether or not to act, moreover, the Syrians crossed two of the several "red lines" firmly established in the 1977 agreement: They began moving troops into the southern areas, toward Israel's border...

...Yet faced with the alternative of a bloody Christian defeat, it felt the pleas from Zahle for intervention could not be ignored...

...The present crisis, therefore, has its roots in both the civil war and in the Israeli clean-up operation...

...And no one having any familiarity with the Jewish State could doubt that Prime Minister Menachem Began and most Israelis feel strongly on a purely emotional level about preventing a massacre of innocent civilians just north of their doorstep...

...Israel was not unaware of the possible Syrian calculations...

...Knowing Israel would not allow the destruction of the Lebanese Christians, Assad could expect the conflict with Jerusalem to give him some badly needed popularity at home and some support from the Arab nations...

...In addition, developments across its northern border have always been of concern to Israel for reasons of obvious self-interest...

...Last April 2, the Syrians launched a murderous offensive against Lebanese civilians in the town of Zahle and the militias defending them...

...While they wait, they wonder not only whether the Syrian missilecrisis will end with a whimper, a bang or a gradual return to the status quo ante, but how the confrontation reached its present stage...

...These, after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon, came under the control of the Christian militias of Major Sa' ad Haddad...

...When bad weather prevented the Israeli Air Force from knocking out the Syrian missiles the day after they were brought into Lebanon, Jerusalem agreed to Haig's request for time to try diplomacy...

...Simultaneously, the Syrian "Force of Dissuas-sion" started devoting itself increasingly to the final subjugation of the Christian minority...

...Publicly, the Syrians say it was triggered by their fear that a road was being built to link Zahle with the Christian forces in the south...

...By closing this gap, Damascus was in effect creating for itself the option of a surprise attack...

...Jerusalem lost no time in making it clear that it considered the new situation intolerable...

...What is more serious, the fact that Israeli planes could retaliate against Syria via relatively unprotected Lebanese air space had served as a kind of unwritten guarantee against a surprise attack on Israeli cities...

...The inaccessibility of some of the mountain posts around Zahle was crucial for the Lebanese defenses...

...In 1977, Israel was compelled to march in and clean out the Fatahland...

...Although this partity was slowly threatened by the higher birth rate among Moslems, a higher emigration rate among Christians and the influx of Palestinian refugees after 1948, it kept Lebanon the least violently hostile of the nations surrounding Israel...

...But renewed intense opposition to President Assad inside Syria, and his near-total isolation in the Arab world (because he sided with Iran against Iraq in the Gulf war), also made a "patriotic"di-version highly desirable...

...And by the third week in May Jordan's King Hussein, who favors internationalized peace talks, was in Moscow...

...When the terrorists shifted their bases to Lebanon, it reacted too indecisively and then was too weak to reverse the situation...

...That brought an instant halt to the all-out attacks on Christians...

...Damascus responded with its most flagrant violation of the 1977 agreement, and its most direct challenge to Israel: the movement of sam-6 missiles into Lebanon...

...AUnit-ed Nations peacekeeping force, composed of several thousand soldiers from a score of nations, was interposed between Major Haddad's region and territories to the north to prevent the return of the terrorists...

...Indeed, the assault against Zahle, one of the major Christian strongholds in the east, was part of this process...

...The specific details, of course, are well-known...

...On April 28 its fighter planes downed two of the helicopters...

...But eventually an alliance between Leftists and the PLO, who had taken control of the refugee camps, produced the bloody civil war aimed at making the country a "revolutionary" Moslem Arab state...

...AT THE HEART OF THE CONFLICT Between Damascus and Jerusalem BY ELIAHU SALPETER TelAvtv Like the rest of the world, albeit with more intense personal interest, Israelis are waiting for special United States envoy Philip C. Habib to resume his Middle East shuttle diplomacy as this is being written...

...Having been victims of Hitler's genocide less than a generation ago, the Jews of Israel find it inconceivable that they should stand by passively and watch the slaughter of their neighbors...

...Israel accepted this turn of events under an informal agreement worked out through the United States that obliged Syrians to keep away from areas close to its border...

...Foreign Minister Yitz-chak Shamir declared that Israel would not accept this threat to its security, any more than it would accept the destruction of Lebanon's Christian minority or the complete takeover of that country by the Syrians...

...But the next day Syria moved Soviet sam-6 antiaircraft missiles into the Bekaa Valley and relations with Israel immediately reached the flash-point, threatening a new Middle East war...

...Terrorist ravages by Palestinians across Israel's borders have inevitably led to reprisals against the country protecting and abetting them...

...The PLO took over the regions close to Israel's border inhabited largely by Christians, who opposed the intruder's presence, and the territory became known as "Fatahland" -After Yasir Arafat's Al Fatah, the main component of the PLO...

...At that point Israeli planes downed two Syrian helicopters...