News Across the Border

If hell ever freezes over, an inquiring reporter will probably be the first to go out to see if the ice is thick enough to walk on. Last week a young Cairo journalist, the first Egyptian lawfully to penetrate what has long been the world's hottest border, was back home safe and telling his story.

Ibrahim Izzat, a 29-year-old magazine writer, was arguing about Israel at a London party last April when an Israeli diplomat walked up and asked: "What do you know about it? You've never been there."

"True," answered Izzat, "but I wish I could." Less than a week later, Izzat climbed tensely down from an airliner at Lydda airport for a ten-day tour of Israel. Just in case things got too hot for Izzat, the Israelis gave him an armed guard and a false name. As George Ibrahim Habib, a "South American journalist," he saw lots of communal settlements, some Arab villages, no military installations. Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett chitted with him in Arabic, and David Ben-Gurion's secretary handed him a message for Egypt's Nasser that Israel's Premier was ready to meet him and talk peace any time, anywhere. By the time he left, Izzat was wearing the floppy khaki hat that is the badge of Israel's desert colonists, and saying he hoped he could come back again.

Back in Cairo, Izzat wrote his impressions ("Israel lives on one single hope--peace with the Arabs, above all Egypt"). Though most of what he reported was widely known in the rest of the world, the significant point was that the Egyptian government allowed it to be published in Cairo. In his first article, Izzat exploded one basic Arab belief: that the Arab boycott is strangling Israel's economy.

The sales of Izzat's magazine, Rose el Youssef, doubled; readers sent him 80 congratulatory wires. Some doffed their tarbooshes to Izzat as a sort of journalistic guerrilla who had sneaked into the land of the "enemy" and returned safely.

Israelis we're too pleased that the world had seen them peacefully welcoming an Egyptian to care about the criticisms he made, e.g., of Arab poverty amidst Jewish productivity. In Washington John Foster Dulles announced that the whole episode made the U.S. Government "very happy," and London diplomats called it a hopeful augury for relaxing tension in the Middle East. The U.N. Palestine truce chief, Canada's Major General Eedson L. M. Burns, announced that the two countries had finally accepted the U.N. plan to set up a dozen observation posts to strengthen the Israeli-Egyptian border ceasefire.

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