"Innocent Passage"

The one tangible advantage Israel got out of the Sinai invasion was to open up its now bustling southernmost port of Elath to the sea, so that its ships could trade with East Africa and Asia while bypassing Nasser's Suez Canal. Invading Israeli armies, routing the Egyptians from the Sinai peninsula, spiked the Egyptian guns placed to menace any vessel seeking entrance from the Red Sea through the narrow, four-mile-wide Strait of Tiran into the Gulf of Aqaba and thence to Elath. Now the U.N. Emergency Force guards the strait and permits Israel "innocent passage" into the gulf, while Arab nations protest but do not intervene.

Last week at Geneva, the U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea, which had failed to resolve the international squabble about the three-mile limit of territorial waters (TIME, May 5), in its final session adopted, 62 to 1, an article permitting "innocent passage" between straits connecting two parts of the "high seas" as well as those that lead from the high seas into "territorial waters of a foreign state." The Arabs, insisting they are technically at war with Israel and therefore innocent passage does not apply, abstained. The practical situation was not altered, but a step had been taken in the codification of international law that gave Israel's rights the backing of world legal opinion.

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