Thursday was Thanksgiving Day in the United States, a national holiday. It was also a day in which Islamic operatives struck out in a three-pronged attack against Israeli targets. Two of the targets were in Kenya, a country with which both Israel and the United States have excellent relations: Three suicide bombers attacked an Israeli-owned resort in Mombasa, killing about a dozen people, most of them Kenyan. About 60 others were injured. Almost simultaneously, two shoulder-fired anti-air missiles were fired at an Israeli 757 owned by Arkia Airlines, as it was taking off form Mombasa airport. In a third attack, operatives claiming to belong to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a faction of Fatah, attacked a bus station and Likud Party headquarters in the Israeli town of Beit Shean, killing six. Clearly, the two attacks against Mombasa were coordinated; the issue is who carried them out. A group calling itself the Government of Universal Palestine in Exile, the Army of Palestine, claimed responsibility for the attack via fax to Reuters news service. The group has never been heard of before and simply might be a fiction invented to confuse the situation. It is not clear at all that there was any link between the Mombasa action and that in Beit Shean. Therefore, speculation that the Kenya operation was carried out by al Qaeda would seem valid. Al Qaeda has been active in Kenya before: In 1998, it carried out an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi concurrently with one on the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania. Moreover, there have been persistent reports about al Qaeda activity in East Africa. Part of the responsibility of the recently established task force operating out of Djibouti has been to control al Qaeda in East Africa. Obviously, this is not an easy task, as the region is inherently insecure. The attack against the Arkia airplane was the most striking feature of Thursday's operation. Police in Mombasa say the strike was staged from an all-terrain vehicle about a mile away from the airport. Two missile casings were found near the airport and three or four Arab-looking men were seen in the area. It is not clear at this point what type of missile was used, but there has been some speculation that it was an SA-7, a Russian-manufactured weapon that had been seen in recently released al Qaeda training films. It is unlikely that any Palestinian group carried out this attack. The Palestinians have concentrated their operations in their own region. Kenya is al Qaeda's theater of operations. Moreover, al Qaeda is a loosely knit organization, capable of working with any number of organizations with similar interests. Therefore, the possibility that some Palestinian elements now are coordinating operationally with al Qaeda core operatives is not absurd. Nevertheless, in Kenya, it is al Qaeda that will be doing the heavy lifting. An attack against Israeli targets in Kenya but claimed (with al Qaeda's blessing) by a new or fictitious Palestinian organization fits in neatly with al Qaeda's operational principles. Al Qaeda appears to be doing three things: 1. As the United States tries to build a firewall between its policies and Israel, al Qaeda wants to rip that wall down, driving Washington and Israel closer in order to discredit the United States. Thursday's events force U.S. and Israeli officials to cooperate more closely and perhaps publicly. 2. Al Qaeda wants to be seen not only as anti-American but also as anti-Israeli. Its anti-Israeli credentials in the Islamic world need some shoring up; this operation does that. 3. Al Qaeda continues to intensify its operations on the periphery of U.S. interests — not striking at the United States or its facilities, but widening the areas of operation on the periphery, trying to draw U.S. forces in multiple directions. Intensifying operations outside core areas of U.S. interest will dilute Washington's efforts, or so al Qaeda hopes. The attack in Beit Shean might have occurred regardless of the Kenya operation. Attacking Likud Party headquarters in a small town on primary day is a logical operation. There is no reason to assume the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade knew anything about the Kenya operation; they probably didn't. It was probably coincidence. Nevertheless, many more coincidences like this will raise the interesting possibility of coordination. In Iraq, the weapons inspectors visited a vaccine factory, obviously looking for biowarfare facilities. They also asked for debugging equipment to be sent to them. This would seem to indicate that they are concerned about being bugged. Since, apart from those of the Iraqis, we can count more than a dozen intelligence services that might want to know what the inspectors are finding and planning to do, debugging equipment would seem to be a good idea. We are sure that all of the intelligence services are falling all over each other with offers of their own debugging equipment, freely donated. Meanwhile, the Jordanian government has short-listed three companies to build a 470-mile pipeline to pump oil from Iraq, Jordanian Energy Minister Mohammad Ali al-Batyayneh announced. The firms were not named, but he said they were British, Russian and Omani. He also said that no U.S. firm had bid on the project. The pipeline will run from al-Haditha in northwestern Iraq to Zarq, north of Amman and the site of Jordan's only refinery. It will cost $350 million, with Jordan paying one-third of the cost and the rest covered by Iraq. The winning bidder will be announced in January, and construction will take 15 months. January seems a good, strategic time for Jordan to be making these decisions.