The Week When Talk Broke Out

MIDDLE EAST

In Cairo, Nasser's own two sons volunteered for military service, inspired not only by their father's swollen rhetoric but by the martial music that suddenly took the place of whiny Arab folk songs on Radio Cairo. The absentee-prone Lebanese parliament, perhaps the world's most unmartial body, became so incensed that it took the warlike step of ending its emergency session with a wildly off-key singing of the national anthem. National Guardsmen in Da mascus had a fine time stopping all traffic on the city's wide boulevards and ordering everyone to take shelter--even though nothing more ominous appeared in the sky than a few vultures. In Israel, though it was the Sabbath, on which traveling is a profanation to the Orthodox, students from Talmudic academies jumped into trucks bound for the frontiers with the solemn exhortation of noted Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook ringing in their ears: "Go! This is a matter of saving life, for which the Sabbath may lawfully be desecrated."

There was certainly an unreal, surrealistic quality about the Arab-Israeli crisis in the Middle East last week--as if none of the parties quite knew how or why it had got just where it was. Yet the threat to world peace was real enough. Egypt, having already moved some 80,000 troops into the Gaza Strip and all along its 117-mile border with Israel, announced that it would not permit Israeli ships or vessels bearing strategic materials to Israel to enter the Gulf of Aqaba, at the head of which sits the important Israeli port of Elath.

To back up its threat, it set up guns on the heights of Sham el Sheikh and trained them on the narrow Tiran Strait that controls the gulf's entrance, planted mines in parts of the passage, and sent torpedo boats and jets to patrol the waters. Israel announced that it would consider a blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba "an act of war." The U.S., joined by Britain and France, made it clear that it considered the gulf to be international waters and would oppose any Arab attempt to close it off indefinitely.

Prepared to Die. While Egypt's troops and 5,000 men of the Palestinian Liberation Army faced Israel on the West, 40,000 Syrians to the north squinted into Israel, as Major General Hafez Assad put it, "with their fingers tight on their triggers." Jordan's 40,000-man Arab Legion moved into position in the west, and Iraq sent 5,000 troops to help out in Syria. Algeria promised an airlift of troops, and Saudi Arabia's King Feisal, ordering 20,000 of his men into Jordan, proclaimed that "any Arab who falters in this battle is not worthy of the name Arab." Arab preachers in countless mosques throughout the Middle East reminded Friday worshipers that anyone killed in a jihad (holy war) goes immediately to heaven to Allah's side.

Yet, in the best Arab manner, shouting won out over shooting--at least for the time being; in fact, hardly a shot was fired in anger all week along the tense borders. Damascus radio called on all Arabs "to undertake the liberation battle that will tear the hearts from the bodies of the hateful Jews and trample them in the dust." Said Radio Cairo:

"O Arabs, prepare to die as martyrs so that we may be assured of victory. Martyrdom is the hope of every fighter." At week's end Nasser once more went on the radio to say that any war with Israel "will be total, and the objective will be to destroy Israel. We feel confident that we can win a war with Israel, with God's help." It was, in short, the week in which the Arab countries declared talk on Israel.

A Calm View. While the Arabs shouted, Israel's Premier Levi Eshkol took a surprisingly calm view of the situation. In decidedly conciliatory tones, he said in a speech to the Knesset: "I would like to say to the Arab countries, particularly to Egypt and Syria, that we harbor no aggressive designs, we have no possible interest in violating either their security, their territory or their legitimate rights. We on our part expect the same principles to be applied to us." One reason for Eshkol's restraint, of course, was the knowledge that a good part of the Western world, particularly the U.S. and Great Britain, was working hard behind the scenes to try to avoid hostilities. "Everybody has been talking to everybody," said Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gro-myko--and for once he was right.

President Lyndon Johnson went to Canada to talk over the situation with Prime Minister Lester Pearson, after appearing on nationwide TV to warn that the situation was potentially disastrous. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson postponed a visit to Washington because of the crisis, but Foreign Minister George Brown flew off to Moscow to talk it over with the Russians ("What could he possibly do?" sarcastically asked London's Labor-leaning Daily Mirror). The French Cabinet, after an all-day session with Charles de Gaulle, decided that it might be a good idea if all four major powers pitched in together to head off disaster--but stopped short of actually recommending such a move. Moscow, although concerned by the crisis, declined to align itself with the West and suggested disingenuously that the real answer would be for the U.S. and Britain to restrain Israel, which it called the aggressor.

Perhaps the most ingenuous attempt to find a solution was made by United Nations Secretary General U Thant, who flew off to Cairo on short notice to chat with Nasser. After running the gauntlet of workers chanting "God is great, long live Nasser, Egypt will win!" and being forced to cool his heels for 24 hours at Cairo's Nile Hilton, Thant finally got to see Nasser at a four-hour "working dinner," at which he mostly listened. He accomplished little, and returned a day earlier than planned to the U.N., where he handed the Security Council an unremarkable six-page report suggesting that the only way out of the crisis might be "a breathing spell which will allow tension to subside." In his absence, the Security Council had met and, after a procedural wrangle, decided to do nothing.

Double Play. Meanwhile, though the Arabs continued to talk tough, they were busy looking for exits through which they could escape with honor. The plain fact was that, as Arab and Jew squared off for battle in the hazy heat of a khamsin desert wind, no one wanted the battle to start. From the beginning, the crisis had been the product of massive miscalculations. Nasser, who has repeatedly and publicly warned that the Arabs are not yet strong enough to take on Israel, made the first mistake by signing a mutual defense pact with his fellow leftists in Syria. His intention was to brake the schemes of the Damascus regime to precipitate war with Israel at any cost, but the Baathists proved impossible to restrain; they kept up irksome terrorist attacks over the Israeli border. Stung by these attacks, Premier Eshkol made the second error by threatening war against Syria to stop them. Charging that an Israeli invasion was on the way, Syria thereupon mobilized its troops and called on Egypt to mobilize also under the mutual de fense treaty. If he hoped to retain any glimmering of his declining prestige in the Arab world, Nasser had no choice but to do so.

But Nasser still had one out: the presence on his border with Israel of a small United Nations peace-keeping force--which he had often in the past used as an excuse for not acting. With Israel threatening to invade Syria, he could hardly use that excuse again, so he made what could have been a good double play. To display his courage to his Arab brethren, he went through the motion of requesting the U.N. force to withdraw, expecting to meet considerable opposition.

Secretary General U Thant somehow missed the cue. He could have won time and allowed tempers to cool by stalling on the removal or referring the Egyptian request to the Security Council. Instead, to almost everyone's astonishment, he used narrowly legal reasoning to order the U.N. troops pulled out --without even consulting the Security Council or the seven nations that contribute to the peace-keeping force. With that action, which was met with incredulity and dismay in Western capitals, Thant and the U.N. just about forfeited any effective peace-keeping role. Nasser himself may have been surprised, but Thant's move left him no choice; he had to move in or seriously lose face.

Once Egypt's troops were all in place, facing some 30,000 Israeli troops across the border, the Cairo newspaper Al Ahram began the process of face saving short of armed conflict. It announced that with its buildup Egypt had "reached its objectives" and felt "compelled at this stage to stop at what it has accomplished so far, even if this means that we wait to receive a blow from Israel."

Then, after a week of abuse against the Western nations as "imperialist masters" of Israel--and particularly against the U.S., which Nasser called "the main enemy" for its support of Israel--it called once more on the U.S. and Brit ain to "use their influence on Israel to make it stop its provocations."

Nightly Diatribes. In the eleven years since the Suez crisis, the Arabs have increased the power of their armies mightily. Egypt alone has received $1 billion in military hardware--tanks, planes and rockets--from Russia, and both Moscow and Peking have helped arm the Syrians. Jordan and Saudi Arabia have been able to beg and buy their share of power from the West, and Iraq has been getting guns from both sides. Yet Israel has been keeping pace with the Arabs in expanding its armed might, still believes that its army of 300,000 regulars and reservists can stand off all Arab forces combined. A main Arab weakness is the lack of well-trained officers, whom the Israelis have in abundance. The Israelis consider seven Arab soldiers to one of theirs to be just about even odds.

Most Arab leaders know that the only way that they can hope to beat Israel in any military action is to combine and coordinate their forces. But the Arab world is so divided and its hatreds so deep that not even the threat of immediate war with Israel can bring it back together. Last week government-controlled radio stations in Cairo and Damascus never once let up on their nightly diatribes against such moderate Arab leaders as Jordan's King Hussein ("the Hashemite harlot") and Saudi Arabia's King Feisal ("the bearded bigot"). In a speech to his men on the Sinai front, Nasser himself spent as much time raging against the two Kings ("traitors who plot against us in the name of our religion") as he did condemning Israel.

Throughout the crisis, in fact, the only actual casualties so far have been caused by fighting between the Arab states themselves. Sixteen people were killed when a booby-trapped Syrian car exploded at the Jordanian customs post of Ramtha. Jordan accused the Baathist regime of "premeditated sabotage," ordered Syria to close down its embassy in Amman and recalled its own diplomats from Damascus. In Yemen, Egyptian troops launched a new campaign aimed at driving Yemeni royalists from a stronghold in the northern mountains; in raids during the previous week, Egyptian planes had bombed two Saudi Arabian towns. Forgotten entirely last week was unified Arab military command, established three years ago to oversee any joint effort against Israel. Both Egypt and Syria refused under any circumstances to coordinate their military plans with their brother Arabs of the non-leftist nations. Jordan's Army

Chief of Staff General Amer Khammash became so discouraged after a useless visit to Cairo that he cried:

"How can we confront Israel together if we won't trust each other?"

Ambiguous Announcement. Though the crisis had so far stopped short of actual fighting, the cities of both sides were still on what amounted to a war footing. Cairo's streets were clogged with military convoys heading eastward. Airraid drills blacked out Cairo, Alexandria and the Jordanian section of Jerusalem. In Israel, schoolchildren were put to work sandbagging their schools, and car owners were drafted for emergency duty hauling food supplies to supermarkets mobbed by panic buyers. Tourists, warned by their governments to get out of the Middle East, scuffled with one another for seats on outgoing flights, and airlines rushed in extra planes to try to handle the overload. In Cairo, U.S. Ambassador Richard Nolte ordered the "temporary departure" of 400 embassy wives and children.

But the world's eyes centered on the Gulf of Aqaba, where the danger of an episode that could cause open warfare was greatest. Ever since Nasser closed the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping in 1956, the port of Elath has been Israel's main outlet for its growing export trade with Asia and East Africa. More important, it has become the port of entry for nearly 90% of the country's oil supplies. The Strait of Tiran, where coral reefs and the hulk of an ancient sunken ship make passage difficult under the best conditions, is easy for the Egyptians to control. Their announcement that they would turn back only ships bearing "strategic" goods to Israel was ambiguous enough to keep everybody guessing. At least three ships headed for the Jordanian port of Aqaba were boarded but allowed to pass through the blockade without incident.

The U.S. counseled the Israelis not to test the blockade, and Israel decided for the time being to keep its ships out of the Gulf of Aqaba. It could still import oil from Western Europe and the U.S. through its major Mediterranean port of Haifa, which also happens to be the center of its oil refining industry. Israel thus can live for a while with the blockade--but only for a while. Some ships bearing goods to Israel have already sailed for Elath. If Nasser is adamant about turning back Israeli ships, the U.S. and Britain (both of which had naval task forces cruising in the Middle East last week) may have to decide whether to escort the ships and risk a major confrontation with Nasser in defense of the 1958 accord that declared the gulf to be international water; Russia also signed the accord.

The longer the blockade lasts, the more restless and apprehensive the Israelis are bound to become. They never forget that in 1956 it took Israeli troops only five days to reach Sharm el Sheikh and silence the guns that had closed the Gulf of Aqaba to their ships.

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