Trouble Gathers on the Arab-Israeli Border

A British royal commission investigating the struggle between Arab and Israeli 17 years ago arrived at a tragic conclusion. "Fundamentally," said the Peel Report of 1937, "it is a conflict of right with right." Last week--one world war and one local war later--the judgment was still valid. The Jews were right, because 4,000 years ago the narrow strip of Palestine, where 1,670,000 today carve out their earthly Zion, became the cradle of their culture and religion. The Arabs were right, because for more than 1,000 years the land had been theirs.

The Arab-Israeli war, which the Arabs lost but the Jews did not win, ended only on paper. In five years of truce, some 500 Israelis and an uncounted number of Arabs have been killed or wounded in fierce border clashes which the U.N. and its armistice teams are powerless to prevent. Some in recent months have assumed the gory proportion of massacres--Kibya last October, when Jews killed 53 helpless Arabs, Scorpion Pass last March, when Arabs slew eleven helpless Jews. But those are only larger, remembered episodes in a situation that is worsening rapidly. Last week TIME correspondents concluded tours on opposite sides of the border between Israel and Jordan.

From the Israeli side, Contributing Editor Sam Halper cabled:

As night fell on Mishmar Ayalon, a frontier settlement which stretches to the Jordan wire, 20 miles northwest of Jerusalem, a tired, unshaven man, coated with the dirt of the field, picked up his Sten gun and climbed to the roof of his house. The village generator, silent all day to save fuel, started to put-put, and 73 floodlights splashed light across the rocky fields. So began another night in the siege without respite that has been going on for five years.

The man on the roof peered towards the rude enclosure where the village's sheep were penned. He was the shepherd of Mishmar Ayalon, and the Sten gun his crook. Since 1951, six of Mishmar Ayalon's men had been killed by bullets out of the night. The villagers took to arms and appointed as their captain Shmuel Schiff, a wiry youth with a hussar mustache.

One night I joined Shmuel Schiff as he made his watchman's rounds. We stumbled through the dark across whirls of rusty barbed wire, past shoebox houses pock-marked with bullet holes. He poked his pistol at the heavy-meshed windows, to make sure that they were strong enough to keep out hand grenades. A rifle barked in the distance. We turned about at the end of the village near an abandoned house. A widow had lived there until one morning last June, when three men poked dynamite underneath the floor and blew her to pieces. U.N. officers tracked the killers to the Jordan border.

We moved on to Schiff's house, where he told me his story:

"My father and brother died in Auschwitz. My mother and I survived in Budapest because we forged identity cards that made us into Christians. My wife comes from Rumania. Her six brothers and sisters were also killed. We passed through many hardships, but now we have a cow, 250 chickens, a kerosene stove and seven acres, and two children. We have found our place . . . Nothing can move us from here."

Much of Israel is like Mishmar Ayalon--an armed frontier land where the settlers live in constant dread of a shot, a raid, a sudden grenade. The danger breathes down your neck as you drive to Jerusalem through a road cleft into a gorge, under the eyes and weapons of Jordanians perched on the hills. You feel it on the narrow-gauge railway that winds into the city alongside Jordan territory so close that sunflower seeds spat from the train windows fall onto Arab soil. Where Jordan bulges westward, the Israeli beachhead is barely eight miles wide. It takes less than 20 minutes to drive from Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean to the Jordan border.

This fact dominates Israel. "If we retire ten miles," said one Israeli general, "we're in the sea. If we move back 500 yards in Jerusalem, we give up our Knesset [the Parliament]. We must hold the border, yielding not an inch."

At Kfar Saba, a stone-and-stucco frontier outpost twelve miles from Tel Aviv, the border runs through tangled orange groves. Almost every night Arab infiltrators flit from tree to tree, and so across the border, to steal and destroy. Some of the intruders are harmless: they come to visit Arab relatives left on the Israeli side, or to steal a bag of oranges from groves that were once their own. But in the past month the settlers of Kfar Saba have lost six cows, seven mules, three horses and three donkeys.

The commander of Kfar Saba is a mild-looking young man named David Tryfus, 29, the son of a German physician. He is responsible for the ten-mile strip of border running north and south between the Arab towns of Qalqiliya and Tulkarm. At night he called his patrol to attention, and pointed to a map marked with red lines that showed the infiltrator routes. "We ambush here tonight," he said.

With Tryfus' patrol, I rode off in an armored halftrack, preceded by a jeep. The jeep's probing searchlight scanned the countryside. "Keep your heads down," said Tryfus as we approached a railroad bridge. Twice in the past year it had been mined. We waited for a train to pass, climbed aboard a gasoline-driven "handcar" and rolled down the track to inspect the railroad line. Suddenly, in the darkness, a pink flare leaped. We stopped and found a land mine, planted on the rails after the last train passed just a few minutes before.

The patrol unlimbered its Bren guns and disappeared into the night in the direction of the Jordan border. Soon the men came back with a prisoner. He was an Arab of medium height, and he tried to make himself smaller by pressing his hands against his belly. The Israelis searched him roughly, and one of them thrust the snout of a Tommy gun into his stomach. He made a noise like a wounded animal. Then Tryfus tried to thrust the land mine into the prisoner's hands. The Arab shrank back, and Tryfus laughed grimly. "He knows nothing," mimicked one of the policemen. "They never know anything . . . They steal and kill but when we capture them they are babies born yesterday."

By dawn we were back in Kfar Saba, sipping glasses of tea.

Almost time for the watchman to go to sleep and for the rest of Israel to rise and work. But how long can the Israelis go on this way? In the years since the fighting was officially declared over, they have not dared to fill in their trenches or coil their barbed wire. The direct cost of the peacetime raids has been $4,500,000, the indirect cost incalculable. Instead of bleeding to death in a thousand places, as her enemies hope she will, Israel is growing bellicose. Increasing numbers of Israelis see no chance of a permanent settlement unless their army wins it for them. Says a top Israeli general: "Only by making the Arabs realize that if they press hard they will be met with another Kibya can we deter them . . . We must adopt an aggressive posture."

From the Jordan side, TIME'S Middle East Correspondent Keith Wheeler reported:

The Arabs feel the same way. One windy morning I drove to the Jordan village of Husan, which is less than a mile from the frontier. All of Husan's 1,200 inhabitants were gathered gravely, a little proudly, in the muddy village square. The Jews had attacked Husan the night before I arrived, and Husan's home guard had helped to give them a bloody nose. Now the whole village was assembled, waiting for the U.N. armistice team to piece together the Arab version of the attack.

A young lieutenant in the red and white headgear of Jordan's Arab Legion had charge of the evidence: a scattering of spent .30-caliber cartridges with Israeli markings; a demolition charge, an empty morphine syrette, several deposits of dried blood, and--out in a wheat field on the south side of the village--a crushed-down trail through the wheat where something heavy and inert, like a body, had been dragged away in the direction of the Israeli border. "We got this one with the Bren gun." the lieutenant said proudly. "It was about 10:45 p.m.when they came. My sentries heard them moving about in the rocks, so we opened fire . . .

"They replied with so much fire so fast, and so many grenades, that at first I pulled back my men behind the village walls. Then the Arab Legion got here--they made it in 15 minutes. The Israelis pulled out some 45 minutes later. We heard one of them yell when he got hit . . ."

"Suppose they come back?" I asked the young lieutenant.

"They'll be welcome," he snapped, staring westwards across the demarcation line towards the squat Israeli barracks at Camp Opper, less than a mile away. But the lieutenant's jaunty confidence was tinged with apprehension, for everyone in Husan knows that it takes almost no effort--only the desire--for the Jews to come again any night they choose. Next time Husan might not escape unscathed.

This knowledge, and the brooding conviction that the will to attack is mounting in Israel, has made Jordan's frontier villages especially pleased of late to be host to a small, urbane Englishman who is a man of distinction in this part of the world. He is Major General John Bagot Glubb, 57, the small, grey-haired commander of the Arab Legion, who is known across the desert as Abu Huneik (father of the small jaw) in tribute to the disfigurement he bears as the result of a World War I bullet wound in the face. Glubb Pasha's personal plane Hies daily from Amman (pop. 200,000), the capital of Jordan, to Jerusalem, ostensibly to enable Abu Huneik to visit his aged mother, sick in her Jerusalem home. But Glubb is more often in the field than in Jerusalem. With his distinctive cavalcade (two jeeps and a tan staff car crammed with Arab Legionnaires) he bounces from village to village along the frontier, and everywhere he stops, an impromptu majlis (assembly) forms to discuss the defense of the border.

Abu Huneik knows how to talk to the Arabs. Though he often reads the lesson in the Anglican church at Amman, he still carries in his right hand the prayer beads which Moslems use to calm their nerves and count their petitions to Allah. Outsiders are not welcome at Abu Huneik's talks, but the word leaks out that what he is saying goes like this:

"The Jews mean to attack us. Geography shows that they have got to widen their waist by straightening out the bulge we make into Israel. They have got to shove Jordan back. And one way or another, they mean to do it."

Jordan's only military resource is Glubb's Arab Legion: 20,000 men. But against a growing Israeli army, whose officers hope will one day number 250,000 men, even Glubb admits that "we must have outside help." Where is the help to come from? Glubb seems to imply that the British army, about to evacuate Suez, might be pleased to reinforce Jordan, in return for base facilities. Many Jordanians agree. Seated on a golden throne in his white stone palace at Amman. 20-year-old King Hussein told me recently that military aid from Britain "is now under discussion, and we believe these contacts will produce good results."

The sad fact is that there are people on the Jordan side who still dream about renewing the war. Defeat and injury in 1948-49 left many Arabs with a sick and shamed desperation, and they see no hope of recovery except by force of arms. Both sides have their war parties, and if the border killings continue, the moderate men may break. You have only to watch the daily mounting tension to become gloomily convinced that sooner or later, one incident or another is going to touch off an explosion. No border built so largely on fear and hatred can be counted upon to produce peace.

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