Eyes on Elath

Just one shooting scrape--in which the Egyptians claimed four Israelis killed, the Israelis acknowledged no casualties at all--broke the edgy calm along the Middle East's tensest frontier last week. Yet this skirmish disturbed many Isaelis more than the bloody battles at Gaza and El Auja. What mattered most to them was the site of battle: Elath, a new town which Premier David Ben-Gurion likes to call Israel's own "up-and-coming Los Angeles."

When Israeli troops drove south across the Negev Desert seven years ago to seize an elevenmile coastline at the head of the Red Sea's Gulf of Aqaba, Elath was just a name on the edge of the barren red cliffs. Today Elath is a port settlement of 500, with a jetty, barracks, airfield, a prefab town hall, a power plant, botanical garden and stadium. By next year Elath is to house the first of up to 12,000 Israelis, who will smelt and ship 7000 tons of copper a year from the newly reopened King Solomon's mines, high in the flinty heart of the Negev.

"Once the Negev is developed and a railway built to Elath," said the Egyptian newspaper A Sareeh, "Israel will be able enormously to expand her trade with the Far East, and our boycott will become nothing but ink on paper." The hope of restoring Egypt's land link with Jordan and the Moslem East will vanish.

Cocking a belligerent eye at the coastal guns which Egyptians have already installed on islands commanding the narrow waters that lead to Elath, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion warned: "We will assure freedom of passage to the Indian Ocean if necessary with the help of Israel's navy, air force and army." Last week the Israeli government hotly rejected Sir Anthony Eden's proposals to work out a "compromise" peace by border adjustments. Reason: such compromise, the Israelis fear, might cost them the fast rising southern port that has become the dearest prize and symbol of 1955 Zionism.

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