Wide, Deep & Exclusive

A statue of Pharaoh Sesostris III will soon stand at the Mediterranean entrance to the Suez Canal replacing the giant bronze figure of famed French Canal Builder Ferdinand de Lesseps. Then the Egyptianizing of the canal will be complete. Already, under the new Egyptian management, the Suez Canal handled a record volume of traffic in 1959 without incident. The canal has become the United Arab Republic's most profitable operation, earning more than $100 million last year. Last week, obviously impressed by President Nasser's plans for increasing the international usefulness of the great waterway, the World Bank lent $56.5 million (at 6% interest) to his Suez Canal Authority for widening and deepening the canal to permit passage of 46,000-ton supertankers.

In making the loan, the bank ignored the objection of the Israeli government that Cairo does not allow its ships to pass freely through the canal.* For a time after the Suez invasion, the Egyptians allowed Israeli cargoes to go through in ships flying the flags of other nations. Then one day last May, Cairo stopped the Danish freighter Inge Toft on her maiden voyage to seize an Israeli cargo; Inge Toft and her crew have sat in Port Said ever since.

U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold thereupon flew out to see Nasser, reported back to the Israelis that Cairo would have no objections to letting cargoes pass in future if title to Israeli exports had already passed to foreign purchasers, and if imports were not yet technically Israeli-owned. Israel disliked this compromise, but observed it. Last week a Greek freighter fulfilling Hammarskjold's conditions--Israeli cement purchased f.o.b. Haifa by an Eritrean importer--was stopped in Port Said. Hammarskjold's own prestige and assurances were thus at stake. As Hammarskjold set off on a tour of Africa, he scheduled a new stop at Cairo and another session with that fellow Nasser.

* Egypt's grounds: that only an armistice, not a treaty, ended the Israeli-Arab fighting, and that a state of war still exists. This theory of a continuing war was also used by Israel when it invaded the Sinai Peninsula in 1956.

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