Even by Middle Eastern standards, it was a week of abnormal tension and turmoil. The carefully engineered truce imposed on that divided nation by Syria had collapsed . Bitter fighting continued between hard-pressed Christian rightists and forces of the National Movement, an amalgam of Moslem leftists and Palestinians led by a gaunt, shambling politician-mystic, Kamal Jumblatt , who vowed to fight on until Lebanon’s antiquated sectarian political system was reformed. The civil war grew so intense that Syria came as close to threatening intervention as at any time since the crisis began a year ago. Under severe pressure not only from Damascus but from Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Jumblatt agreed to a ten-day ceasefire, which would allow Parliament to elect a new President in place of Suleiman Franjieh, the stubborn Maronite leader who at week’s end was still clinging desperately to office. In Washington, where he conferred with President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Jordan’s King Hussein argued that Syrian military intervention might be the only way to bring peace to Lebanon. Some Western observers were less sanguine. Reason: a direct move by Syria would almost certainly lead to a strong Israeli response—possibly even the occupation of southem Lebanon. Israel, which has faced more than its share of agony, had new worries at home. Following weeks of tension on the West Bank, there was a violent clash between Israeli and Arab inside the Jewish state itself that left six dead and scores wounded. It was the most serious confrontation between Israeli Jews and their Arab fellow citizens in the nation’s history. No one believed that the seemingly endless crisis in Lebanon would trigger another Middle East war that neither side really wants—although that will remain a worrisome accidental possibility. But if war breaks out, Israel will come armed with an awesome military threat: nuclear bombs. In an exclusive report , TIME presents hitherto undisclosed details of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. FREEZE FOR A HOT WAR For months, with few interruptions, Lebanon had known only the politics of death. Now, said Kamal Jumblatt, leader of Lebanon’s leftist National Movement, “the path is open for beginning a political solution.” He spoke as he accepted a cease-fire that ended, at least temporarily, one of the bloodiest passages in the country’s endless civil war. An estimated 1,500 were killed last week, even as negotiations were going on, in fierce fighting between right-wing Christians and the combined forces of Moslems, leftists and fedayeen. That raised the death total since last April to nearly 13,000. Considering the deep-rooted passions, no one in Beirut at week’s end was predicting with much confidence that this latest pause in the struggle would last for long. But many agreed with what was implicit in Jumblatt’s confident assertion: that the Moslems were within sight of their basic goal in the war —overturning the antiquated sectarian system of distributing power that has controlled Lebanon since it gained independence from France in 1946. The world has become inured to the ravages of civil war; the public mind is numbed by both the
