The Road Back

As it prepared to clear the Suez Canal (if not its clouded title), the U.N.'s next and much tougher task is to establish its Emergency Force along the Egyptian-Israeli 1949 armistice line, some 120 miles to the east. To judge by the beginnings, this may take a long time. In Jerusalem Premier David Ben-Gurion announced that "under no circumstances" would Israel agree to return the captured Gaza Strip of Palestine territory to Egypt. And in the Sinai desert, advancing Yugoslav elements of the UNEF found that the retreating Israelis had skillfully scorched the earth.

As the Israelis pulled slowly back along their three invasion roads, they tore up or blew up the shoreline railway tracks, chopped down telegraph poles, and dynamited even railworkers' huts. The most awesome destruction they wrought on the roads themselves. At a point ten miles east of the canal, the blacktop central road abruptly changed into a jumble of shredded rock. Giant-pronged Israeli machines similar to the "rooters" with which retreating Germans and Italians wrecked roads and railroads in World War II had ripped the pavement to a depth of 12 to 18 in. Last week gangs of Egyptian workmen moving up behind the Yugoslavs had put some 40 miles of railway back in service--but only one mile of highway.

Across desert marked by the charred and twisted remains of Nasser's routed armor, the Yugoslavs churned slowly forward in their shiny, U.S.-built trucks. Because the Israelis had sown the roadside with mines (and neglected to provide any maps), the patrols seldom made better than two or three miles a day. One burly lot of Yugoslav Communists pitched their U.S. Army pup tents beside the road over which Joseph and Mary once fled with the Christ child into Egypt, and played volleyball in the freezing gale. Beside their tents they laid white-pebble signs in the sand: "Zivio Drug Tito. Zivio OUN" (Long Live Comrade Tito. Long Live the U.N.).

At his canalside headquarters UNEF Commander General Eedson L.M. Burns noted that the Israelis had agreed to withdraw 35 miles from the canal by mid-December, and to pull back 15 miles a week from then on. At that rate, which Burns called "not conformable with the U.N. resolution," Gaza was five weeks away. "There's nothing to prevent their going right back to the line immediately," he added tartly.

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