The Listener

"We are builders, growers and healers," said Dag Hammarskjold, chief of the U.N.'s staff of international men in white, touring tense Middle East capitals last week. It was a U.N. healer, Ralph Bunche, who last won peace in Palestine seven years ago, and many highly placed observers think that just such a skilled and universally trusted international hand is needed there now. Climbing first out of his white U.N. plane at Cairo, Hammarskjold sewed up Egyptian consent to his plan for healing Egypt's worst Israeli border sore spot, the demilitarized desert crossroads at El Auja, where blood flowed freely last November. Each side agreed to pull back its forces and let the U.N. go ahead and fix the demarcation lines. As

Hammarskjold's C-47 took off from Cairo's International Airport, a sleek new fighter plane flashed aloft from Almaza military airfield just four miles away The plane: one of the first of Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser's new Russian MIG jets to be seen over Egypt.

In Israel, the U.N.'s soft-spoken Secre-tary-General ran into a brief flurry of newspaper criticism when he declined to attend a reception given by Israel's Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, because it. was to be held in the Israeli-held part of Jerusalem, which Jews now make their capital in defiance of a 1947 U.N. resolution recommending that Jerusalem be internationalized.

But Premier David Ben-Gurion sized him up as a valuable person to be traveling about the Middle East, buttonholed him at once to press his pet plan for Palestine peace-bilateral negotiations with Egypt's Nasser under U.N. chairmanship. Ben-Gurion is pushing this idea to avert mediation by Western powers, and particularly to keep out the British, whom the Israelis regard as pro-Arab. As in Cairo, Hammarskjold listened sympathetically, and would only say that he had now "got a fairly complete map" of the problems.

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