A Nation Under Siege
(See Cover)
"The Jewish people has had to fight unceasingly to keep itself alive," says Israel's Premier Levi Eshkol. "Hopeful ever of redemption, we labored to return to the land of our fathers and to set foundations for the resurgence of an exiled folk. We made our arduous way to the shores of that land. We fought to open its gates to our brethren. We acted from an instinct to save the soul of a people."
Both the land and the soul of Israel are sorely tried. Last week, 19 years after the Diaspora dream of return to Zion became a reality in the first Jewish state in almost 2,000 years, Levi Eshkol and his people found themselves besieged and threatened as few nations have ever been in their history. Tiny, dagger-shaped Israel, whose 2,700,000 people cling to 7,993 sq. mi. on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, faced the implacable hostility and cocked guns of 14 Arab nations and their 110 million people. Its borders were ringed with Arab troops on all sides; its important sea access through the Gulf of Aqaba remained blocked by Egyptian mines and patrol boats.
Israel is not exactly a weakling. The Israeli army, with 71,000 regulars and 230,000 reserves, is by far the most efficient fighting force in the Middle East--as it proved by soundly trouncing the Egyptians in the 1956 Sinai campaign. It could hold its own against almost any array of Arab armies, provided that the Arabs did not unite into a single force. What alarms Israel this time is the way in which the Arabs, though continuing to fight and squabble among themselves, have nonetheless joined firm ranks against Israel. Despite its superior military prowess, Israel might be hard pressed indeed to protect itself against any coordinated and sustained Arab attack.
For this reason, many hawks in Israel would give in to the temptation to strike first and fast at the Arabs, knocking them off balance and freeing the Gulf of Aqaba by marching down the Sinai Peninsula to the sea. It is a natural temptation--but it is a measure of Israel's new maturity that it has so far been resisted. Risking national unpopularity and dissension even within his ruling Mapai party, Premier Eshkol, 71, has withheld Israel's sword, counting on diplomacy and the good will of such friends as the U.S. and Britain to work out the problem.
"It takes courage not to make war immediately on being attacked," Eshkol told his nation last week. "That is not a sign of weakness. It is not difficult for the situation to deteriorate into war, but we have to be strong enough to try all other means. We have to do the utmost to avoid bloodshed on either side of the border." Nonetheless, pressured by politicians and anxious that Israel should be ready if diplomacy fails and open war does come, Eshkol last week relinquished the post of Defense Minister that he had kept for himself and turned it over to General Moshe Dayan, 52, the dashing, one-eyed hero of the Sinai campaign and an ally of ex-Premier David Ben-Gurion, now a chief critic of Eshkol.
Swallowing Pride. Eshkol thus sought to strengthen his own position and to bring to his government some of the unity that seemed to be hogged by the Arabs all week. His move came after a surprising and ominous truce had been reached by Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jordan's King Hussein, who only a few days earlier had seemed dedicated foes. Hussein, whose country has the longest border with Israel (325 miles), flew into Cairo at the controls of his own royal Caravelle jet, spent 21 hours talking with Nasser. They then signed a five-year defense pact that would put an Egyptian general in charge of the Jordanian army if war comes.
In return, Nasser called off his propaganda barrage against the King, sent a special emissary to persuade the revolution-minded regime in Syria that Hussein, for the time being at least, should be upgraded from "Hashemite harlot" to hero. Hussein doubtless felt that he had to take the move to save his throne from being overthrown by Jordan's heavy population of Palestinian exiles, who complain that he has not taken a strong enough stand against Israel. Nonetheless, he had to swallow a lot of pride; he once more welcomed to Jordan's soil, for example, Ahmed Shukairy, head of the fanatic Palestinian Liberation Organization and a constant slanderer of Hussein, whom the King had banned from his kingdom.
There were also indications that a truce was imminent between Nasser and Saudi Arabia's King Feisal, leader of the anti-Nasser bloc of Arab nations by virtue of his opposition to Egyptian designs in Yemen. Though Nasser's bombers last week conducted another gas-bomb attack on Royalist Yemeni towns, Feisal, now ending a month-long visit to Europe, flew off to Cairo to see the Egyptian leader on his way home. (Cairo's semiofficial newspaper, Al Ahram, reported that Nasser has started withdrawing some of his 50,000 troops from Yemen.)
Other Arabs gathered round like Bedouins in the same tent. Kuwait Air ways canceled a dozen flights to airlift a Kuwaiti infantry brigade into Egypt, and Iraqi forces moved into the Sinai Desert to back up Egypt. At desert staging areas in Algeria, troop detachments prepared to depart for the Israeli frontier. From far-off Morocco, where young King Hassan II leans heavily on the support of wealthy Moroccan Jews, came a pledge of troops and a call for an Arab summit meeting. Libya's ancient King Idris emerged from his countinghouse long enough to dispatch soldiers to Egypt. The Sudan's new Prime Minister, Mohammed Mahgoub, ordered full mobilization and an airlift of troops to Sinai. Even Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba, who has been considered a renegade Arab ever since he suggested peace talks with Israel two years ago, reluctantly volunteered a detachment of Tunisian troops.
Um Kalthoum, Egypt's top pop singer, captured the sudden fervor that seemed to seize the usually squabbling Arabs as their armies stared across the borders into Israel and their generals flew out in all directions to confer with each other. Sung in her smoky contralto, the martial song quickly climbed to the top of the Arab hit parade:
We are going back by force of arms.
We are going back like morning after the dark night.
Army of Arabism, may God be with you.
Oh, how great, splendid and brave you are.
The tragedy of Palestine pushes you toward the borders.
All are with you in the flaming battle.
A Boy Named Tiran. To the relief of the world, the flaming battle had not yet come, and diplomats in Europe and the U.S. were trying hard to see to it that it did not (see THE NATION). But the guns had already begun to chatter. For the first time, an unsettling outbreak of incidents took place along the front--any one of which might have touched off wider war if either side had really wanted it. In the first combat deaths of the crisis, two Israeli soldiers and a Syrian guerrilla were killed when an Israeli patrol clashed with a group of infiltrators near the Syrian border at Kfar Hanassi. Earlier, also near the Syrian border, an Israeli armored car ran over an Arab-planted mine and blew up, injuring seven soldiers.
There was scattered gunfire from the Jordan side of Jerusalem, including a barrage aimed at an Israeli helicopter that strayed across the wall of no man's land. Palestinian troops in the Gaza Strip lobbed mortar shells at Israeli positions for 40 minutes without hitting anything, and Egypt charged that the Israelis had fired on Arab farmers near Gaza. Along the straight-edged border that divides the Negev Desert (Israel) from the Sinai Desert (Egypt), the Israelis captured an Egyptian colonel and four of his men who had lost their way and wandered onto the wrong dune.
If the Arabs displayed wild fervor and unusual unity in facing Israel, the Israelis themselves reacted with extraordinary spirit. Lately, many Israelis had begun to fear that the dream that created and fired their state might be beginning to fade. Their country faced severe economic problems. Many who had settled it were now abandoning it. Morale among much of the populace was low. For a 19-year-old, Israel suddenly seemed listless, tired and dispirited. The crisis changed all that: suddenly the dream was very much alive again. The Jewish people once more reacted with vigor to the problem that has always faced it: the struggle for survival.
Half the nation seemed to be in uniform. The winding highway from the rugged wooded hills of Jerusalem to Tel Aviv on the coast was crowded with reservists hitchhiking to join their units. In the cities, girls in khaki miniskirts and pertly cocked overseas caps were on round-the-clock duty at sandbagged gun positions. Middle-aged men volunteered for temporary police duty, and middle-aged housewives enlisted for service as air-raid wardens. Schoolchildren delivered the mail, and university students paid their own way to remote kibbutzim (collective farms) to replace teachers called to arms. In Jerusalem, two wealthy merchant brothers responded to the emergency by paying up five years of back taxes. In Tel Aviv, an army officer and his wife named their newborn son Tiran after the disputed Strait at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, now under Egyptian blockade.
The Promised Land. To the Jews of the world, Israel is both a state and a state of mind. Named for Jacob, whose battle with the Angel of God (Genesis 32:24-28) led him to be called Israel ("He who struggles with God"), it is the fulfillment of a struggle that has pitted the Jew against the world for 2,000 years. It is the Land of Canaan to which Abraham was given a divine deed after he left Ur in the 18th century B.C., the promised land toward which Moses led his people in the 13th century B.C. For seven centuries, it was the Land of Zion, Judea, the homeland of the Jews. And, when its Roman rulers expelled the Jews from Jerusalem in A.D. 135, the latter continued to look upon the land as rightly theirs.
Their claim to title has never, of course, been completely unmuddied. In succeeding centuries, the land that the Romans named Syria Palestina (after the Jews' most hated enemies, the Philistines) was overrun by the Arabs (A.D. 636), Crusaders (1099), Mamelukes (1250) and Turks (1517). A few lonely Jews hung on to decry their fate at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall, but the land was mostly settled by Moslems.
Toward the end of the last century, when the pogroms of Russia and Poland drove the Jews out of their ghettos, some of them headed back to the land of their ancestors. Supported by money from the newly created World Zionist Organization and the French Rothschild family, the first pioneers bought land from the Turks, organized themselves into kibbutzim and began planning the revival of a Jewish state. By 1914, there were some 85,000 Jews in Palestine. Among them were David Ben-Gurion, the tough dreamer who became Israel's first Premier, and Levi Eshkol, a burly Ukrainian youth who left school at the age of 19 to follow the dream.
Arab Vengeance. It was an elusive dream. The British, given a League of Nations mandate over Palestine, could not make up their minds to whom the land belonged. They promised it to the Arabs in 1915, to the Jews in 1917, and finally, after almost 20 years of Arab rioting, to the Arabs again in a White Paper issued on the eve of World War II. But the war swung the balance to the Jews. Horrified by the ovens of Buchenwald, the Western world took up the Jewish cause as its own. It winked when the displaced Jews of Europe began flooding into Palestine in defiance of a British immigration ban. It all but rejoiced when Jewish terrorists made it impossible for the British to continue governing.
In 1947, when the British finally threw up their hands and turned the Palestine problem over to the United Nations, it took the General Assembly only ten weeks to partition the land between the Arabs and the Jews. At four o'clock on the afternoon of May 14, 1948, Ben-Gurion read a 979-word pronouncement declaring Israel an independent Jewish state. Began the declaration: "In the Land of Israel, the Jewish people came into being."
The Arab reaction was immediate and violent. Charging that the Jew had usurped Arab land, the combined armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria marched on Israel the following day and bombers attacked Tel Aviv. The Arabs were roundly drubbed. Outnumbered at first by 20 to 1, Israeli soldiers outfought, outmaneuvered and outgunned the Arabs, who were finally forced to ask for a cease-fire after eight months of fighting. But although they put down their guns, the Arabs still refused to recognize the existence of Israel. Their pride was stung, and they swore vengeance. During the war, moreover, 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled from the land of their own ancestors; they filed sullenly into refugee camps across Israel's borders, where they have stayed for 19 bitter years, waiting to return.
New Image. With the war won, Israel soon became a sort of modern miracle. From the DP camps of Europe, from the remote wastes of Yemen, from the middle-class suburbs of England and America, Jews poured into Israel, were declared citizens, and went to work. The population tripled in 16 years. Supported by massive private donations (more than $2 billion) from world-wide Jewry, by equally massive U.S. aid ($1.6 billion) and by reparations payments from West Germany ($822 million), the nation sprang almost overnight from a picturesque wilderness to an enclave of clanging energy. Deepwater ports were dredged, power and irrigation plants built, modern cities and industries created. The desert bloomed, the orange trees blossomed, and Israel was suddenly the land of milk and honey. For 14 wondrous years, its gross national product soared by at least 10% a year, until by 1964 Israel had achieved a standard of living that rivaled Western Europe's.
Nor was the miracle confined to the tiny Jewish homeland. "Israel," says Ben-Gurion, "has created a new image of the Jew in the world--the image of a working and an intellectual people, of a people that can fight with heroism. The state has straightened the backs of Jews in every country." In place of many of the old stereotypes of the Jew emerged a bronzed and bare-chested figure somewhat larger than life: the sabra (native-born Israeli), who took that name from the fruit of the cactus that thrives in his land, a handsome, romantic idealist who furrowed his fields rather than his brow and was equally adept at digging wells for his country and graves for its enemies.
Polyglot Population. The Israelis achieved social miracles as well--if on a more modest scale. The waves of postwar immigrants threw together Jews of all possible backgrounds and appearances, from the brown-skinned illiterate Yemeni to the bearded Orthodox Jews of East Europe's ghettos to the sport-shirted sophisticates of the West. Gathered from 100 different countries of the Diaspora, they spoke 100 languages and worshiped their God according to the divergent traditions of myriad Jewish sects. Though many modern Jews pay only lip service to their religion, Orthodox Jews dominated Israeli society and lawmaking from the first, are responsible for the many restrictions and proscriptions (no public bus service on the Sabbath, the refusal of restaurants to serve milk and meat at the same meal) that make Israel a sort of secular theocracy.
Somehow, certainly with the help of its common faith, Israel has managed to turn its varied population into a strong nation. There are still ghettos in Jerusalem, and the slums of Tel Aviv are filled with the stucco huts of North Africa. There is discrimination against the dark North African and Yemeni Jews. But government housing projects have been purposely filled with Jews of different nations, with varying success. And compulsory education has forced immigrating Jews to learn to read, write and speak the language of their common heritage: Hebrew.
Israel constantly points to the fact that 261,000 Arabs still live peacefully within its borders. By Israeli lights, they are treated well. Arabic is the nation's second official language, and the government subsidizes 120 mosques and 200 Moslem religious leaders. All Arabs over 18 can vote (Israel was the first state to allow Arab women to vote) and form their own political parties; six Arabs are members of the Knesset (parliament). Nonetheless, Israel's Arabs are unmistakably second-class citizens. They are discriminated against in employment and are segregated into Arab villages and quarters. Until last year, their settlements were under military governments, and Arabs had to obtain special permission to travel. Premier Eshkol has relaxed the rules considerably, but Israeli police still consider the Arabs a potential fifth column, keep a thorough vigil on all Arab communities to prevent their use by terrorist infiltrators.
Full Skid. For 17 years, Israel lived in the heady climate of hopes come true, prophesies fulfilled and glory reconfirmed, despite the vengeful hostility of its Arab neighbors. But the pace could not last forever. In 1965, Israel's economy began to slow down. In part, the deceleration was due to a concerted government effort to stop inflation--which had reached 10% a year. In part, it reflected a decrease in income from abroad: West Germany had finished its reparations payments, U.S. aid had fallen off, and Zionist fund-raising organizations were finding it harder and harder to pry donations out of Jewish communities abroad. But the economic slowdown was also a direct product of something more serious: the immigrants had stopped coming. The number of arriving Jews fell from 239,424 in 1949 to 31,600 in 1965--and dropped again to 12,000 last year.
The economic downturn quickly developed into a full skid. Construction fell 40%. Credit was tightened. The government, which completed two major development projects early last year, refused to begin new ones. Existing industries maintained their production lines, but few new ones were started, and the gross national product, after more than a decade of spectacular gains, rose last year by only 1.6%--not even enough to match the population growth. By the end of the year, in a land where the word unemployment had seldom been heard, 100,000 workers--more than 10% of the labor force--were looking for jobs.
The recession coincided with a national yearning by the Israelis to settle down and enjoy some of the fruits of their labors. They wanted cars, television sets and automatic washers. For several years, they had been moving out of the spartan kibbutzim and into the cities; now, from down on the farms came a collective female chorus demanding that beauty salons, staffed by trained beauticians, become a permanent part of kibbutzim equipment. Some kibbutzim posted signs to advise passing tourists that their restaurants honored Diners' Club credit cards. As was bound to happen, some of the bloom was beginning to fade from the Jewish revolution. The Israelis wanted to live a little.
Terrorist Raids. The combination of fading zeal and falling economy--although neither has yet reached alarming proportions--was bound to produce discontent. It also produced the beginnings of disillusionment. Last year, 11,000 Jews pulled up stakes and moved away from Israel--almost as many as came into the country. Some of them were dispirited by the steadily increasing level of terrorist raids across Israel's borders. A disturbingly high proportion of the departing emigrants was the professional men, managers and technicians who had engineered the Israeli economic miracle. In some cases, they returned to the countries of their birth. In others, they struck out for new lands of opportunity, most notably Canada and the U.S.
By the end of last year, the exodus had become something of a national scandal. Said Premier Eshkol: "We have been able to build and maintain the State of Israel by virtue of the quality of its citizens. But this qualitative superiority is today in danger. The pioneer of our day, the builder of the land, devoted, knowledgeable, diligent--where is he to come from?"
In the 53 years since he climbed off a tramp steamer at Jaffa (wearing his brass-buttoned school uniform and carrying a change of clothes in a sack), Levi Eshkol has been active in almost every part of the development of the Jewish state. He helped found a kibbutz (Degania B) in a malaria swamp on the Sea of Galilee and was a delegate to the founding conference of Histadrut, Israel's powerful labor organization, which now controls some 47% of the economy. A congenial man who speaks six languages (Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Russian, English and French), he was a frequent shaliah (emissary) on fund-raising tours of Europe. When Hitler came to power, he spent three years in Berlin on a double mission: getting Jews out of Germany and smuggling arms to the underground Jewish army back home.
Simply Heimish. After the war, Eshkol rose quickly under the appreciative eye of Premier David Ben-Gurion, whose close colleague he had been for many years. He established himself as a popular labor leader as head of Israel's largest local union. As director-general of the Defense Ministry, he founded the armament industry that now supplies the Israeli army with weapons and armored trucks. As Finance Minister from 1952 to 1963, he was the man most responsible for Israel's economic miracle. He directed the flow of incoming capital into constructive projects, founded the nation's central bank and merchant marine, established its economic-planning authority, and at the same time sold hundreds of millions of dollars of Israeli bonds abroad. In the last years of Ben-Gurion's regime, Eshkol was the undisputed economic czar of Israel, sharing the power of state almost equally with the old man.
Even so, Ben-Gurion intended Eshkol to be a transitional Premier when he turned over the reins to him four years ago and withdrew to a desert retreat. He wanted Eshkol to serve only until his real protege, General Moshe Dayan, was ready to step into the job. Because of the Sinai campaign, Dayan was undeniably the most popular figure in Israeli politics after Ben-Gurion himself. Moreover, the patch he wore over his left eye was a vote-getting image every bit as powerful as B-G's long white mane.
Eshkol lacks the charisma of either Ben-Gurion or Dayan; he simply cannot mesmerize the masses. He delivers his speeches haltingly, woodenly, gurgling instead of rolling the Hebrew r. In a beret and white shirt, he cuts a dumpy, almost grotesque figure when he is called upon to review Israeli troops. Whereas Ben-Gurion had been the all-powerful, all-seeing idol of Israel, Eshkol was simply heimish--Yiddish for plain folks. But he had no intention of being a caretaker Premier. He decided to run the government for his own time, in his own way and according to his own lights, most of which seemed to be amber.
Great Compromiser. Eshkol brought Israel a new kind of leadership. He governed by committee and, as a much better political dealer than B-G, was ever sensitive to the demands of organized labor and to the other political currents within his nation. His stress was on consensus, temperance and quiet restraint; and though these qualities have often made his government seem dull, Eshkol has led Israel with accomplished dedication. He was the first Israeli Premier to be received at the White House (by President Johnson in 1964), negotiated a joint U.S.-Israeli project for nuclear desalinization of sea water. He also threaded his way successfully through the delicate process of establishing diplomatic relations with West Germany. Ignoring Ben-Gurion's final words of advice ("Eshkol, don't always be a compromiser"), he billed himself as the Great Compromiser, the man who would usher in an era of peace and good will. There were even a few optimists who thought that he might succeed where the pugnacious Ben-Gurion had failed--at reducing the tensions with the Arabs.
It was all more than Ben-Gurion could take. "He is a disgrace to the people and the nation," announced the old man. "He does not know how to distinguish between truth and untruth. He should be fired." And, at the age of 80, Ben-Gurion tried to see to it that he was. After being rebuffed in his attempts by the laborite Mapai Party, which he had founded, B-G rallied his old friends around him to form a new political party and set out to defeat Eshkol in the 1965 parliamentary elections. Even with Dayan at his side, he did not come close. Eshkol, with organized labor behind him, swamped Ben-Gurion at the polls, put together a solid government coalition in Parliament that could outvote the combined opposition by nearly 2 to 1.
Despite the proportions of Eshkol's victory, it brought Israel no more than a brief period of political peace. Hard after the elections came the first signs that the economic boom was ending. At first, Eshkol was in full control, correctly arguing that Israel would simply have to learn to live within its means. But then he made the mistake of bowing to labor demands for a general wage increase, which could only contribute to the inflation he professed to oppose. He made other mistakes as well. Driven to distraction by the increase in border terrorism, he lunged out wildly in a massive retaliation raid aimed not at Syria, whose government trains and finances the Arab commando units responsible for the incidents, but at relatively peaceful Jordan, where King Hussein had been doing his best to keep the terrorists out of his kingdom.
In the main, however, Eshkol has been criticized more for lack of action than for taking the wrong action. Once, when he was reminiscing about his childhood in the Ukraine, he recalled that in the pogrom that followed the Russo-Japanese War he and his family had spent weeks barricaded inside their home. "I realized in my own immature way that striking back never entered our heads," said Eshkol. "I wished in a desperate kind of way that when I was older I would know what to do." Last week he--and all of Israel--faced the same dilemma. Barricaded inside their land, the Israelis wanted desperately to know what to do.
Small Sliver. From Arab diplomats in both Cairo and Beirut last week came hints that the crisis might be negotiated. Nasser, who has won a political victory by leading the Arabs to the brink of war, does not want to gamble his winnings by actually leading them to war. He is reportedly ready to bargain with Israel for the lifting of his blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba. His price: "acceptable" Israeli compensation to the 1.3 million Palestine refugees, plus a token "border adjustment" that would return a small sliver of Israeli desert to Arab sovereignty. The border adjustment is a question of repairing Arab honor and is relatively unimportant--though Israel may be reluctant to cede even a splinter of its land. The real key to an eventual political accommodation--after the present tensions abate--lies in finding a solution to the refugee problem.
What the Arabs have repeatedly demanded--and the U.N. General Assembly has repeatedly recommended--is that Israel give all displaced Palestinians the choice of returning to their homes in Israel or accepting indemnity payments instead. Until now, Israel has always refused to consider such a solution. "To return to Israel hundreds of thousands of Arabs conditioned to hate it and incited to engineer its extinction," in the words of an official government document, "could only be an invitation to suicide." But would it? Many responsible Arabs believe that only a relatively few refugees would choose to live under Israeli rule, and that most would be content to receive payments that would enable them to settle permanently in Arab lands.
That view may be somewhat unrealistic, considering the constant pining of the refugees for their homeland. In fact, one trouble is the profoundly emotional and irrational nature of many of the Arab demands and expectations--almost an inability to recognize the hard facts of life. The Arabs have seen Israel prosper on soil from which they barely scratched a living when they had it; Israel's success is not only a blow to their pride but a constant rebuke to the dismal poverty in which most of the Arab world lives.
More than Good Will. Any solution will thus demand much more than ordinary good will. Still, a beginning has to be made, and many feel that the present crisis is the very time to try to start with the hitherto unsolvable plight of the refugees. However the crisis is finally resolved, Israel must somehow make peace with the Arabs if it is to survive as a nation. It cannot prosper indefinitely, or even exist indefinitely, barricaded against its neighbors. If Israel is to continue to thrive, it has to find a way to trade in peace, attract new investment and live within its means; it now spends a third of its national budget on defense.
Isaac and Ishmael never really understood each other, but both were sons of Abraham--and both at least forgot their differences long enough to bury their father. Their descendants in Israel and the Arab world today, even if they never embrace as brothers, need to come to terms with each other not only for the sake of world order but for selfish reasons. The Arabs need the help--and the lessons--that Israel is willing to give. The Israelis need peace. "We must try and try and try again to find a modus vivendi with our neighbors," says Levi Eshkol. "A small state has to work hard for friendship." Israel's hardest task is not just to survive the onslaught of Arab enmity, but to convince the Arabs that the Jewish state, here to stay, is worth having as a neighbor.
* Ishmael is traditionally considered the ancestor of the Arabs, Isaac of the Jews.
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