Tougher Terms for Peace

At the end of the June war, Israel would have been willing to give back most of the land its army had conquered in exchange for one simple document: a meaningful peace treaty with the Arabs. But the Arabs would not deal on Israel's terms, which included face-to-face negotiations--and the terms have since been getting steadily tougher. Just how tough they have become was spelled out last week by Israeli Premier Levi Eshkol. In a major policy speech before the opening session of the Knesset (parliament), Eshkol made it plain, in case anyone has recently had any doubts, that his government has decided to hold on to most of the land it won.

Israel, he said, no longer recognizes Egyptian claims to the Gaza Strip or Jordan's claims to Arab Palestine, since both areas had been taken by the Arabs in 1949 "as the result of military aggression and occupation." Nor will the Golan Heights overlooking Upper Galilee be returned to Syria, whose guns had threatened "havoc and destruction for our villages in the valley." To ensure passage of Israeli shipping through the Strait of Tiran and the Suez Ca al, Israel also intends to maintain some sort of control over the Sinai Peninsu la--which, Eshkol suggested, might be turned into a huge demilitarized zone partly policed by Israeli troops. The city of Jerusalem would remain Israeli at all costs, he said. As a divided city, it was "a security danger and an economic absurdity."

Half-Measures. Such terms, hardly calculated to bring the Arabs rushing to the conference table, came just when both Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jordan's King Hussein were trying to work out a formula for negotiations through a U.N. mediator. Both rulers had made known their willingness, if not to sign a formal peace treaty, at least to end their 20-year "state of hostilities" with Israel. But the Israelis are in no mood to accept such half-measures. They are now convinced that it is much wiser to hold on to what they have than acquiesce in what Eshkol refers to as "obscure and meaningless formulas like declarations of the cessation of belligerency without a real peace settlement."

Instead, Israel has continued to "consolidate its position"--as Eshkol put it --in the occupied lands. On the Mediterranean coast near El Arish--once the headquarters of Egyptian military forces in the Sinai--scores of bronzed and bearded young Israeli soldiers have staked out a fishing kibbutz that is the first Jewish settlement in the peninsula since Moses led his people out of Egypt. Another colony of Jews has moved into Etzion, in the Hebron hills of Arab Palestine, and a third has begun farming land at Baniyas, below the Golan Heights. In Jerusalem, rabbinical students have set up housekeeping in three abandoned yeshivot (theological seminaries) within the walls of the Old City, and the government plans an extensive resettlement of Jews throughout the Arab half of the city. Eshkol last week announced that the entire Jewish quarter of the Old City will be rehabilitated at a cost of several million dollars.

Jerusalem has already undergone a radical transformation. All city services --including water, electricity, police, and bus lines--are now integrated to serve both Arab and Jew, and many city departments have been transferred to headquarters on the Arab side of town. With the frontier dissolved and all barriers destroyed, thousands of Arabs have found jobs with Israeli employers. Three new public high schools --part of a $34 million program to expand education, housing and industry --have been opened for Arab students. And, under Eshkol's personal supervision, the government is planning to move ministries now located in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which the Israelis have always considered their real capital. At Jordan's former airport in East Jerusalem last week, the first international flight arrived since the Israelis captured the city. Aboard the chartered DC-4--the airport is too small to handle big jets--was a group of Italian pilgrims to the Holy Land, taking advantage of what the Israelis hope will become a regular service.

Without Gas. While the Israelis consolidated, the Arabs vacillated. King Hussein, on his way to the U.S. to appeal for military aid to rebuild his vanquished army, responded to an offer by Eshkol to begin peace talks either in Amman or Jerusalem with an ambiguous statement that peace in the Middle East is "a problem of the world." In Egypt, Nasser had his own problems. After two meetings with Robert B. Anderson, a longtime friend of President Johnson, the Egyptian leader--through his favorite mouthpiece, the newspaper Al Ahram--accused the U.S. of deliberately blocking a peace with Israel. Without bothering to explain the charge, the paper also attacked the U.S. for two recent moves: the State Department's agreement to resume shipments of military hardware to Israel (but not to Jordan) and the House of Representatives' vote to ban imports of Egyptian cotton.

Nasser himself was occupied with a more pressing matter: diverting attention from the disaster of his latest exchange with Israel, in which his navy sank the Israeli destroyer Elath but his economy was nearly destroyed by the retaliatory shelling of his two major oil refineries at Port Suez. With Egyptians facing the probability of a winter without heat in their houses or gas in their stoves, Nasser needed all the whipping boys he could find. He found one last week in Air Force Commander Mad-kour Abu Al-Izz, whom he fired for unaccountably failing to send up Egyptian jets to knock out Israeli guns during the bombardment of Suez.

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