Anger in the Council

Adlai Stevenson had not been so angry in the U.N. since last year's Cuban crisis. "This reprehensible act of murder," he said before the Security Council, "deserves the strongest condemnation. Outrages of this kind cannot pass without the stern disapproval of the international community."

Stevenson was referring to a bloody flare-up on the Israeli-Syrian frontier touched off, Israel charged, when ten Syrian soldiers sneaked across the Jordan River and the demilitarized zone and machine-gunned two 19-year-old farmers irrigating a kibbutz field north of the Sea of Galilee. The Syrians denied the killings, accused Israel of sending 15 armored cars charging across the border.

Last week, with both countries having brought complaints to an emergency session of the Security Council (its 202nd session on a Palestine-related issue), the U.N.'s truce chief on the scene, Norwegian Lieut. General Odd Bull, left little doubt that Syria had been the aggressor. Backed up by photographs, spent bullets and diagrams, Bull's report told of finding "two dead bodies riddled with holes; a tractor with numerous bullet holes; a magazine from an automatic weapon; a lever handle from a grenade; ... a pool of blood where one man allegedly had been shot, leaving part of his brain; tracks leading from the direction of the Jordan River to the ambush position and the tracks returning in the direction of the Jordan River."

In the past, Israel has usually made routine complaints to the U.N. when there were truce breaches on the bristling border, then staged heavily retaliatory raids of its own. When such incidents came before the Security Council, the U.S. usually stayed neutral. This time Israel had followed U.S. advice and appealed for Security Council action--hence the U.S. policy switch to support Israel. At week's end the U.S. and Great Britain introduced a joint resolution that condemned "the wanton murder" and called "the attention of the Syrian Arab Republic" to the assembled evidence.

The Russians, who in the past have usually threatened to use their veto in support of the Arabs, backed Moroccan amendments watering down the U.S.British resolution; the Moroccan version avoided condemnation of Syria and merely registered "regrets for the death of two persons."

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