Back to Gaza

Egypt's young soldier-dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, gave another demonstration last week of the fact that he may be down but he is still kicking. The demonstration did nothing to ease his own problems, or anybody else's, but the technique was certainly adroit. It was also becoming familiar: inciting the mobs and agitating wildly in the newspapers, then helping himself to what is doubtfully his with a careful display of scrupulous legality on his own part.

The Bystander. In accordance with the vague diplomatic "assumptions" by which the U.N. had tried to paper over the Israeli withdrawal from Egypt and Gaza, the U.N. Emergency Force early last week drew up plans to run the Gaza Strip for a long "interim period." But one morning a mob of 300 Palestinian Arabs, shouting "Long Live Nasser" and waving slick-sloganed placards that could hardly have been printed in Gaza, began battering in the doors of the UNEF's police-station headquarters. Hastily mustered Danish and Norwegian members of the UNEF guard drove off the rioters by tossing tear-gas grenades and firing warning shots into the air, but not before a young bystander named Mohammed el Moushref fell beside his bicycle with a fatal ricochet-bullet wound in his chest.

That was the story as the UNEF's commander, Canada's Major General E. L. M. Burns, pieced it together later. But that day the inflammatory Cairo press fanned up its own version. "Troops of the UNEF opened fire on Moushref when he emerged from a seething crowd and tried to put the Egyptian flag in place of the U.N. flag on the UNEF headquarters," said the Cairo newspaper Al Ahram. "He was hit in the back and fell in a pool of blood while still holding the Egyptian flag in his hand." Thereupon, because the forces of the U.N. had fired "at civilian inhabitants," Nasser announced that Egypt would "assume its responsibilities in the strip immediately." He appointed Major

General Mohammed Hassan Abdel Latif as civil governor of Gaza.

Next day, as Nasser's "Voice of the Arabs" broadcast "Arab Victory!" to the refugee camp and cafe radios of the Middle East, his general rattled into Gaza with a task force of 72 (including 50 MPs, ten army officers). Sending a liaison officer round to notify General Burns that he would be wanting the police station for his own headquarters, Latif rushed off to press $288 into the hands of Moushref's refugee father. "You all know where the UNEF is going to be," he told reporters, with a wave of his hand toward the Israeli border.

And so it turned out, though Dag Hammarskjold first called Nasser's move "regrettable," and the Israelis raged. But as with his Suez grab, Nasser had looked to the letter of the law. The fact was that Hammarskjold had always insisted that both sides must comply with the 1949 Egyptian-Israeli armistice agreement, and Nasser had only exercised his right under that agreement to administer Gaza (although he justifies his exclusion of Israeli shipping from the Suez Canal on the grounds that there is in fact no armistice and he is still entitled to exercise a belligerent's rights).

All of this was painful confirmation to those, like Canada's Mike Pearson, who had argued that the U.N. should spell out what it asked of Nasser while there were still levers to use on him, instead of waiting until the U.N. had given him his territory back and cleared his canal. At week's end, going a little further, Cairo announced that Nasser had decided to deny passage to Israeli shipping in the Suez Canal and that his Saudi Arabian allies, who control the Gulf of Aqaba's southeastern shore, were determined to bar any assertion of Israeli shipping rights in such "absolute Arab territory."

Against such sounding threats, Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion called on the U.S. to support the "assumptions" on which Israel withdrew, and sent Foreign Minister Golda Meir back to the U.S. to press the point. The moment had not yet come, said Ben-Gurion, when "other action is appropriate and necessary," but he added: "Should this time come, the government will not give prior notice of its actions."

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