Five Eyes for an Eye

The Jordanian army knew it was coming. Twice in ten days Israeli troops had smashed across the border in reprisal raids for scattered Jordan border incursions. Then, on a Sunday afternoon, a Jordanian machine gun had opened fire on a party of Israeli archaeologists near the border, killing four and wounding 17. The Israeli government had stiffly rejected the official Jordan explanation that a soldier had gone suddenly berserk and fired, and that afternoon the Israeli radio had announced an emergency meeting between Army Chief Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

From high in the Judean hills that evening, Jordanians counted 76 vehicles moving with lights undimmed toward the border south of Jerusalem. The Israelis snaked forward through wadies and past white boulders that gleamed like bones in the moonlight. "Can you see them?" a Jordan colonel asked. "Yes," answered an officer in a forward post. "I estimate a regiment." Moments later the Israelis struck in three forces, swarming over two village National Guard outposts and bayoneting the defenders, advancing with halftracks against their main objective, the Husan police fortress commanding the Jerusalem-Bethlehem road. After a bitter fight, they dynamited the fort with a roar heard in Jerusalem 20 miles away.

By 3:40 a.m. the last Israeli soldier crossed back into Israel. Triumphant, they rolled through the first village singing mambo tunes. "A piece of cake," crowed one. With them the soldiers brought booty --captured guns, jeeps, armored cars. The casualties: eight Israeli soldiers killed;

39 Jordanian soldiers and policemen, and a twelve-year-old girl killed.

The attack on Husan was less a guerrilla raid than a full-scale military operation. Though carried out while Nasser was preoccupied with Suez, and their own government overwhelmingly preponderant on its borders, the Husan affair made many Israelis fearful of the consequences. Said a Jerusalem butcher: "Eight Jewish and

40 Arab mothers are weeping this morning--but such tears bring no ease to bitter hearts." Instead of compelling the Jordan government to impose its authority to restrain the border troublemakers, com plained the independent newspaper Haaretz, Israel's policy of five eyes for an eye will undoubtedly weaken the Jordan government and consequently lessen the chances of border quiet. In Manhattan the U.N.'s Dag Hammarskjold warned that unless both Israel and Jordan establish "a discipline sufficiently firm to forestall" such outbreaks, the cease-fire that he negotiated last April will become a "dead letter."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.