Crossed Toes

For two days last week the chances for peace in Palestine looked good. The Jews had won their immediate objective--an Egyptian offer to cease fire and talk armistice terms. They quickly accepted. But at week's end the odds in favor of peace were off again.

The Israeli military campaign had been a brilliant, hard-won success, highlighted by a fast three-day invasion of Egypt. Driving down the Egyptian right flank (after a feint at Gaza on the coast), the Israeli forces plunged headlong into Egypt and fought their way to El Arish, over 50 miles behind the frontier.

Everywhere they took the Egyptians by surprise. Cried one captured Egyptian colonel: "But what about our forces at Beersheba?" Israeli officers explained that they had captured Beersheba three months before, during the last Negeb campaign. At El Arish the Israelis severely damaged three enemy airfields and captured several Egyptian Spitfires, along with Egyptian soldiers and ammunition. Said Alouf/- Yigal Yadin (31), chief of military operations: "It was a good opportunity to do as much damage as possible. It is not every day that we are in Egypt. The last time was 3,400 years ago."

Lone Pocket. As the Israelis withdrew into Palestine, the Egyptians threw in the sponge. The two-week campaign, by Israeli claims, had cost the Egyptians 2,500 casualties (including 700 prisoners) and the loss of almost all their remaining toeholds in Palestine. Faluja, the one Egyptian pocket left within Israeli-held territory, had become a joke in Tel Aviv. Cracked cocky Israelis (who were being pressed for higher taxes and war loan contributions) : "We must turn the conduct of the war over to Finance Minister Kaplan--he knows how to empty pockets."

At Lake Success, meanwhile, news of the Palestine cease-fire raised high hopes. Members of the U.N. Committee on Palestine, meeting briefly, agreed that Egyptian and Israeli representatives should meet with U.N. Mediator Ralph Bunche on the Island of Rhodes this week to hammer out the terms of a permanent armistice. With nothing further to do, the committee then adjourned happily into the unseasonal Long Island sunshine.

Five Planes. Their pleasure was shortlived. On the very day the Palestine ceasefire took effect, five British reconnaissance planes were shot down over Egypt by Israeli fighters and ground batteries. The planes, said the British, were operating from British bases in the Suez Canal Zone; they were under orders to keep an eye on the movements of the Israeli army into Egypt.

Forthwith, Britain struck back. It instructed British aircraft to shoot down any Israeli planes encountered over Egyptian territory; it dispatched British reinforcements to Transjordan to protect Aquaba, Transjordan's port on the Red Sea and an important link in British communications to Bagdad.

The Israelis were impressed, but not intimidated. The British, they said, had no business flying reconnaissance over someone else's war. Furthermore, three of the British planes had been shot down over Palestine, and they had the charred wreckage of one to prove it. The British troop landings at Aquaba, cried an official spokesman, "can have no purpose but to threaten Israel's territory in the southern part of the Negeb."

Would the British-Israeli clash disrupt the scheduled peace talk between Egypt and Israel? Mediator Bunche, as usual, was optimistic. So was his chief of staff, Brigadier General William E. Riley. As the two men took off from La Guardia Field this week for Rhodes, they were ready for the best and the worst. The Jews and the Egyptians, Bunche declared, would "have a hell of a time getting off the island" without reaching an agreement. "We have our fingers crossed," he added with a grin, "and we'd have our toes crossed too, if we could."

/-Israeli for full colonel.

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