The Jitters

All one night last week, tanks, guns and truckloads of troops rumbled out of the Cairo area toward Sinai. An Indian diplomat, hurrying to catch a ship at Port Said, was halted by a roadblock, had to make a frantic appeal to the Foreign Office before he could proceed. The entire army was alerted, transportation requisitioned, hospitals commandeered.

Excitable Middle East newspapers talked of war and secret ultimatums, and one wild Beirut headline screamed: SIXTH

FLEET STEAMS TOWARD MIDDLE EAST.

A few days earlier the U.N.'s Dag Hammarskjold had abruptly issued a warning that the Middle East situation was again "deteriorating." The origins of the flare-up date from Israel's claustrophobic feeling of isolation in the Arab Middle East, and its conviction that the indifferent rest of the world has reneged on its promise to keep the Suez Canal open to Israeli shipping. Seizing upon a small incident on the Syrian border last month, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion launched Israel's first reprisal raid since the 1956 Sinai invasion, blasting and leveling a Syrian village in a demilitarized zone. The U.N. Mixed Armistice Commission called it a "flagrant violation" of the armistice, "contrary to elementary humanitarian principles." President Nasser evidently thought it was more than that--the kind of muscle-flexing that preceded the Sinai invasion.

All last week, on a visit to his northern province of Syria, Nasser tossed off incendiary speeches, pledging never to let Israeli ships or goods through the Suez Canal, damning the 1950 U.S.-British-French guarantee of Middle East borders as "dead and buried," summoning all Arabs to follow him in a "sacred march" to "liberate Palestine."

In a jittery Cairo, the rumor spread that the Israelis were mobilizing secretly to attack while Nasser was in Damascus.

Nasser moved 2 1/2 to three divisions back to the Sinai frontier, where 5,300 U.N. Emergency Force troops have kept the peace for three years. British and U.S. diplomats questioned the reality of the Arab fears, and Ben-Gurion himself announced that he would shortly leave for a trip to the U.S., as if to show there was no reason for war scares. In the U.S., BenGurion will also seek assurance of American sympathy prior to the summit meeting, when he fears that the U.S. and Russia might compromise Israel in an effort to arrange a Middle East settlement.

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