Miserable Peace

"If we get arms," said Israel's Premier David Ben-Gurion, "there will be no war. If we don't get them, there will be a war, and we will win after great and needless destruction on both sides."

A determined Jewish island in a sea of hostile Arabs, Israel had suddenly ceased to wring its hands in self-pity over what it considered the perfidy of the West. Its new mood was a combination of realistic apprehension and determined self-reliance.

Along the Arab-Israeli border, gangs of workers went on shoveling ditches for pipes to water new fields in the Negev, while soldiers dug out gun emplacements, trenches and foxholes. Troops joined with raw settlers from Morocco and Kurdistan to turn farm communities into flimsy fortresses. In Tel Aviv thousands of white-collar workers left their desks and went to the borders to help dig defenses. At the annual convention of the powerful Israeli General Federation of Labor (Histadrut), there were no ringing calls to arms in the labor leaders' speeches. "I prefer even this miserable peace to either war or victory," said one delegate. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, himself just back from a day of stringing barbed wire along the Egyptian frontier, told the delegates: "We would rather have less water from the Jordan and an agreement with our neighbors," referring to one of the principal items of Arab-Israeli contention, "than more water and no agreement." He promised that the Arabs had "a little more time" to reach a compromise. But in the end, he said, Israel would go after her water despite Arab threats. If war should result, "we shall cross into Arab territory and not wait to meet the Arabs on our own soil."

As for arms, said Ben-Gurion, if the U.S. failed to provide them, the Israelis might be forced to look elsewhere for them--presumably Russia. Soviet Ambassador Abramov spent part of last week in close conference with Israeli Foreign Minister Sharett. The meeting, said a government spokesman darkly, was "of prime importance."

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