February 16, 1982

Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger spent most of last week touring the Middle East trying to strengthen American military ties with the Arab nations and talking about redirecting policy away from Israel. Other Administration officials, led by Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. and including some Pentagon officials, are insisting that there is no change in Middle East policy, and especially no redirection away from Israel. Does this Administration have a policy toward the Middle East? And does it favor one side over the other? Decisions on Ad Hoc Basis The answer to the first question appears to be no. By all accounts, President Reagan has yet to hammer out the differences between his two Secretaries and formulate a policy. Decisions are made on an ad hoc basis from week to week.

Four months after the slayings of a Brink's guard and two policemen in an armored-car robbery in Rockland County, a complex story has begun to emerge of a subterranean culture sustained by a small network of people who view themselves as warriors in a global revolution. It is a group of single-minded people leading double lives, often under multiple aliases, of former Black Panthers and Weather Underground leaders, now in their middle 30's, who returned suddenly and dramatically to public attention after a decade in which their names had been largely forgotten. Within an hour of the shootings on Oct. 20, three of them were arrested when their speeding car containing bulletproof vests, ski masks and canvas bank moneybags smashed to a halt against a concrete retaining wall in Nyack, N.Y. Those arrests, and others that followed, revived an atmosphere of radical leftism surviving from the years of antiwar protest and civil-rights activity. Why these men and women were in Rockland County, as at least some of them were, is only now coming out in interviews with lawenforcement authorities, defense attorneys, friends of the accused and some of the defendants themselves.

Inflation in the seven largest non-Communist industrial nations has dropped sharply in the last year as a result of slow economic growth, reduced wage demands and falling commodity prices. Economists expect the downward trend to continue. By the end of 1981, inflation in those countries had declined to a rate of about 8 percent, compared with 12.2 percent in 1980. In recent months, various private and government economists have been growing more optimistic about the outlook.

Car sales for the nation's Big Three auto companies fell 4.8 percent in the first 10 days of February, the smallest decline this year. The General Motors Corporation, the Ford Motor Company and the Chrysler Corporation sold 15,370 cars daily in the nine selling days of the period this year, compared with 16,151 in the 10 selling days of the same 1981 period. The seasonally adjusted annual rate for the period was 6.3 million, up from the late January rate of 5.5 million. G.M. reported the smallest sales decline of the domestic industry, selling 9,792 cars daily, down four-tenths of 1 percent from the 1981 period when 9,834 cars were sold daily. G.M.'s sales totaled 88,131, for a 62 percent share of the market, up from the 57.8 percent share held in the comparable 1981 period.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin, backed by all of Israel's major political parties, appealed publicly to President Reagan today to reject Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger's proposal to sell advanced weapons to Jordan. Speaking in Parliament, Mr. Begin presented an array of statistics on what he called ''the mighty, almost unimaginable flow of sophisticated weaponry reaching the Arab states from both the East and the West.'' This arms buildup, he contended, jeopardizes Israel's qualitative military edge over the Arabs, which President Reagan has pledged to maintain. Parliament then approved, by a vote of 88 to 3, with 6 abstentions, a resolution expressing ''deep concern'' over Mr. Weinberger's proposal, which, it said, ''poses a serious danger to Israel's security.'' The only opponents were members of the Communist Party.