Israel Critical of U.S. Reaction to Attack on Bus

JERUSALEM —  Israel’s foreign minister complained Sunday to the U.S. ambassador about Washington’s evident unwillingness to use the word terrorism to describe last week’s attack on a bus that left 14 Israelis dead.

Israel’s government as a whole expressed concern that its allies in the United States as well as friendly governments in Europe displayed a lack of “sensitivity” toward the incident, which has left intense bitterness in Israel.

Foreign Minister Moshe Arens told U.S. Ambassador William Brown that the bus crash, which was caused by a Palestinian who seized the steering wheel and plunged the vehicle off a busy highway, was reason enough for Washington to end its seven-month-old dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“The foreign minister summoned the ambassador of the United States and told him Israel is unable to understand how the State Department could evade defining the murder of 14 civilians on the bus to Jerusalem as an act of terror,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

“The minister drew the ambassador’s attention to the fact that the PLO has long violated the conditions set by the United States government when starting the dialogue.”

Arens told Brown that the PLO tacitly approved of the bus assault because its leaders said that they could “understand” how someone might be provoked to take such a step by the ongoing violence between Israel and Palestinians.

Ambassador Brown last week described the bus incident as “loathsome.” Neither Britain nor France commented directly. By way of contrast, the Soviet Union described the assault as “terrorism” on a Hebrew-language broadcast of Radio Moscow, Israeli Foreign Ministry officials said.

The Reagan Administration began talks with the PLO last December after its chairman, Yasser Arafat, professed to abandon terrorism. The Bush Administration has deepened the contacts as it has sought a formula to end the Israeli-Arab conflict.

U.S. Embassy officials declined to comment on Arens’ meeting with Brown.

Relations between the two countries have been strained in recent months. The Bush Administration has pressed Israel to come up with ways to talk peace with Palestinians in revolt against Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Over the weekend, Secretary of State James A. Baker III was reported to be growing impatient with the unsteady outline of Israel’s plan to allow elections in the West Bank and Gaza.

Washington’s continued conversations with the PLO irritate Israel. Israeli officials contend that the talks undermine its own efforts to find local Palestinians willing to accept Israeli conditions for limited self-rule in the territories.

Israel defines almost any attack on its citizens and soldiers as terrorism, a usage that has lost favor abroad during the past 19 months of the Arab uprising. More than 500 Palestinians have been killed during the unrest, mostly at the hands of Israeli troops. At least 35 Israelis have been victims of the unrest, including the 14 bus passengers last Thursday.

Since the bus crash, a volatile mood of despair and anger has overtaken Israel. On Sunday, government leaders urged an end to mob attacks on Arabs that have taken place during the past three days.

The Cabinet issued a statement that expressed empathy with the emotions raised by the crash and the deaths but called for vigilante violence to stop. “The government deplores irresponsible acts by Jews out of bitterness. Such things must not occur. They are harmful, not beneficial,” the statement said.

“The people in Israel have been exposed to provocations and challenges for a long time, and this exposure is leaving its mark. The leaders and the people must maintain their composure and judgment in order to overcome our troubles,” the message concluded.

Police Minister Chaim Bar-Lev described Israeli assailants as “inciters, many of whom are primitive.”

One Arab has been killed during three days of attacks by Israelis on Arab neighborhoods and automobiles. The attacks began after news of the bus crash spread throughout the country. Besides the 14 dead, 27 passengers were injured in the single worst assault by an Arab on Israeli civilians in more than a decade.

The site of the crash along the busy Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway has become a way-stop for curiosity seekers and sympathizers who pull their cars over to stare, lay wreaths or pray.

In Jerusalem, nationalist demonstrators took to the streets Sunday, chanted “Death to the Arabs!” and threw stones at cars bearing blue license plates that indicate Arab ownership. Police broke up the protest and arrested 12 people. Some of the protests have been spearheaded by the anti-Arab Kach movement headed by American-born Rabbi Meir Kahane.

For the second day in a row, a government representative at a funeral of one of the victims was shouted down by mourners. This one, Ehud Olmert, is a member of the rightist Likud Party headed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Olmert was greeted with the heated question, “For an Arab, is it allowed to kill Jews?”

The municipal council of Shaarei Tikva, an Israeli settlement on the West Bank, imposed a ban on Arabs entering the enclave. One of the 14 dead on the bus had lived there. “We took this step . . . to express our protest against the number of incidents in the recent past, . . . to prevent an outburst of accumulated anger of residents against Arabs and . . . to reconsider our security setup,” a settlement spokesman told Israel government radio.

Arab Unrest Hits Home

For the first time, the tension of the Arab uprising has deeply shaken the detached life of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities that considered themselves remote from Arab-Israeli violence. Said a visitor to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv: “Suddenly, we are waking out of a dream. We too live this problem. The bus disaster made us realize that.”

The one-man assault on the bus occurred on one of the most popular routes in Israel and on its most crowded highway. The assailant, identified as Abdel Hadi Suleiman Ghanem, 25, had no previous police record, thus defying identification by security agents at the border crossing from the Gaza Strip where he lives and where Palestinians must show new identification cards.

On Sunday, soldiers demolished Ghanem’s house in the Nusseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.

Investigators told Israeli newspapers that the primary motive for the attack on the bus appeared to be vengeance for the beating of a brother of Ghanem’s by soldiers.

The political repercussions of the bus crash are still being played out. At Sunday’s Cabinet meeting, Avner Shaki of the National Religious Party called for imposition of the death penalty, but no decision was taken.

Members of the Labor Party are scheduled to meet today to reconsider their participation in the coalition government with Likud. Labor has taken a dovish stand on the issue of peace talks and was shaken by Likud’s recent decision to tighten conditions for holding elections in the West Bank and Gaza.

However, political observers said that the deaths of Israelis last week may inhibit Labor from pulling out of the ruling partnership. “They do not want to appear to be soft on Arabs at this particular time,” said one analyst.