Cleopatra's Needle

In its patient diplomatic efforts to keep lids on a dozen potential volcanoes in the Arab world, the U.S. has to walk with care along the mountainous hatreds between the Arab nations and Israel. If U.S. diplomacy is offended in principle by the fact that Egypt's Dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser bars the Suez Canal to all Israeli shipping and blacklists all ships that traffic in Israeli ports, in private it thinks first about all those Arab volcanoes spouting at the same time. Last week the State Department found the whole delicately balanced U.S. position in the Middle East jeopardized by two self-appointed groups of mountain movers:

P: For 24 days the Egyptian passenger-freighter Cleopatra has been dockbound in Manhattan, immobilized and unloaded because of a picket line thrown up by the Seafarers International Union (TIME, May 9). The union complained that Nasser's discrimination against ships touching at Israeli ports was, in effect, unfair to U.S. labor. No one questioned the legitimacy of the seamen's grievances, but Nasser angrily retaliated by declaring a counter-boycott of all U.S. shipping. The trouble spread quickly to other Moslem nations, including such carefully cultivated friends of the U.S. as Tunisia and Libya. The enraged Arab nations cut off radio communication with American ships, threatened to extend their boycotts to commercial air traffic.

P: In the Senate, an anti-Arab amendment to the $4,175,000,000 foreign aid bill--already passed by the House--made diplomats shudder. Written by Illinois' liberal, pro-Israel Democrat Paul Douglas and endorsed by a gaggle of well-meaning Eastern Senators, the amendment would give President Eisenhower the power, but not the obligation, to withhold all mutual security funds from the United Arab Republic until the Suez Canal would again be open to Israeli shipping. The amendment posed no real threat to mutual security funds or to peace in the Middle East, but it was a sharp needle in the side of Arab nationalism and pride.

In the double crisis, the State Department moved rapidly. Acting Secretary Douglas Dillon wrote a letter to the Senate, pointing out the amendment's "harmful repercussions on U.S. interests in a wide area of the Middle East" and urging the Senate to scuttle it. Arkansas' J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, damned the amendment as nothing more than a Zionist pressure group's meddling in U.S. foreign policy--a charge that was indignantly denied by New York's Kenneth Keating, a sponsor of the amendment, who protested that "our motives are pure." The Senate refused to drop the amendment, passed it, along with the entire foreign aid authorization bill, 60 to 25.

Having lost one battle, the Administration won the second. Labor Secretary James Mitchell lunched with the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s President George Meany and failed to convince him that the U.S. foreign policy was more important than the grievances of his seafarers. But after Meany's able legal counsel, Arthur Goldberg, discussed the situation for two days with Dillon and Mitchell, Meany was persuaded to relent. The State Department agreed to investigate the complaints of the Seafarers Union and to "do what it can" to end the anti-Israel blockade. Picketing of the Cleopatra ended and the Arab counter-boycott was called off. Truce, if not outright peace, returned to the troubled waterfronts of the world.

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