For Peace with Justice

Most U.N. members thought that justice was well served when the invading British and French forces were shooed out of Egypt. The case of the Israelis was less clear. They too had violated the Charter by attacking Egypt, and brought down on their heads the same clear-cut Assembly order to get out. But the Israelis refused to leave the Gaza Strip and the Egyptian gun positions on the Gulf of Aqaba without guarantees that the Egyptians would not again use the bases to raid and blockade them. The U.S. State Department, for one, thought the Israelis had some right on their side.

But in the new 80-nation Assembly, in which 27 Asian-African votes can block any decisive action, justice is a sometime thing. After canvassing lobby opinion in the U.N.'s glass-walled conference building for two days (WEST PLOTTING BEHIND-SCENES CONSPIRACY, headlined Cairo's semiofficial Al Ahram), the U.S.'s Henry Cabot Lodge drafted two compromise resolutions. One repeated for the sixth time the Assembly's demand for Israeli withdrawal. The other called vaguely for "the placing of the UNEF on the Egyptian-Israeli armistice demarcation line."

Back to the Line. Canada's Lester ("Mike") Pearson called this so vague that he refused to co-sponsor it: he wanted to reassure Israel that if it agreed to the first resolution, it would be protected by the second. But Cabot Lodge was after a resolution that would satisfy enough Afro-Asians, and teamed up with India's Krishna Menon to achieve it. Once the Israelis withdrew, said Lodge, the U.N. troops would be "deployed on both sides of the armistice line, particularly in the sensitive Gaza and El Auja sectors" and "at the Strait of Tiran." Their mission. he said, would be "to restrain any attempt to exercise belligerent rights" contrary to the 1949 armistice agreement: in short, it was warlike of Israel to invade Egypt, but it was also warlike of Egypt to blockade the Gulf of Aqaba.

With India and five other nations as cosponsors, Lodge's resolutions passed. The first carried 74 to 2, with only France siding with Israel. The second was then adopted, 56 to 0, the Arab and Soviet blocs abstaining. But before passage, Egypt's Foreign Minister Mahmoud Fawzi, seconded by Menon, rose to dispute Lodge's interpretation of the loosely phrased second resolution. The UNEF, he said, was not in Egypt "to resolve any question or to settle any problem" but to "secure the withdrawal" of the Israeli invaders. After such withdrawal, he said, the UNEF must "take positions exclusively on both sides of the armistice demarcation line," and Egypt's consent would be "an indispensable prerequisite".

On to Tiran. U.S. delegates, however, were not completely discouraged. In a sense, the fact that the Israelis are still at Gaza and the Tiran Straits would further U.S. purposes. For Nasser, it is an absolute political necessity to get the Israelis out of his country--and there is no present prospect that the U.S. would support economic sanctions in the U.N. to get them out.

U.N. pressure was on Israel to withdraw, but also on Egypt to negotiate. Should the Egyptians refuse to accept a UNEF garrison on the shores of the Tiran Straits, the UNEF might well wind up adding a navy--a destroyer patrolling the narrows to insure for Israeli ships what Hammarskjold has affirmed as the "right of innocent passage."

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