Efficient Conquerors

While the Arabs tried to talk their way out of military disaster, the Israelis faced up to problems that mounted in the wake of their swiftest military triumph since Joshua brought down the walls of Jericho. Theirs was the pride of triumph, but theirs, too, were the enormous obligations involved in any conquest of people and property.

Property was the least of the problems. Indeed, sooner or later, Israel's newly bloated borders may undergo drastic shrinkage by negotiation. There is no great urge, for example, to stay in the empty wastes of the Sinai Desert. And rather than maintain a garrison at Sharm el Sheikh, Israel would prefer to see that distant outpost demilitarized and put under international control.

Jerusalem, though, is another matter. No U.N. resolution or Arab bluster is likely to shake Israeli determination to stay in the Old City. Some religious leaders have already begun to lobby for the erection of a Third Temple (see RELIGION), although the Israelis have also offered to permit a commission of Moslems and Christians to administer the holy places of each religion. They have promised freedom of access to all shrines in a Jerusalem entirely under Israeli control.

Policing the Vanquished. Such arrangements may be hard to put into practice. Still, it is people, not real estate, who are causing the most difficulty. From the stifling Sinai to the banks of the Jordan River and the Golan Heights of Syria, Israel is now responsible for the welfare of 1,330,000 hostile Arabs, more than a million of whom are impoverished refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. Not only must those Arabs be fed and housed, Israel's small army must somehow police them and weed out saboteurs--a task immensely complicated by the fact that perhaps one-third of Egypt's estimated 150,000-man army in the Sinai seems to have melted away into the Arab communities of the peninsula. There are also the restive Gaza refugees, who emerged as a commando army during the fighting and afterward slipped quietly back into their Casbah-like warrens of tinroofed shacks. To maintain order, Israel has had to keep about 80% of its 230,000 army reservists in uniform.

Despite such difficulties, the Israelis have succeeded in restoring normality to an astonishing degree. They have patterned their occupational activities on U.S. methods in Japan, and they have handed back authority to the mayors and the city councils of the Arab towns. Arab officials have been encouraged to restore water service, electricity and garbage collection to their communities. New currency systems have been devised, and shops have been reopened.

In Gaza City, when the municipal council convened for the first time since the shooting started, everyone was embarrassed when the mayor read aloud the minutes of the last meeting, at which an outlay of 5,000 Egyptian pounds had been approved for Ahmed Shukairy's Palestinian Liberation Army. The appropriation was quickly canceled.

When the situation has called for toughness, the Israelis have supplied it in good measure. They blew up huts where arms caches were found; Arab commandos picked out of a crowd by hooded informers were summarily shipped off to P.O.W. camps. In Jerusalem, soldiers evicted Arabs from what was once the Jewish quarter of the Old City, and Israeli Intelligence units made good use of captured Jordanian documents that listed agents of Shukairy's army. The agents were seized and forced to cross the river into Jordan. In occupied Syria, where snipers once terrorized Israeli border kibbutzim, the army tightly guarded captured towns even though most of the Syrians had died.

Rotting Enemy. Besides the burden of the Arab refugees, the cost of war was counted in endless other tasks involving men, materiel and money. Not only did the Israelis have 679 of their own dead to mourn, but they had to bury the last of the enemy rotting in the desert. In the Sinai, they also faced a massive engineering job, clearing away the accumulation of Egyptian armor--Arab tanks and trucks piled on top of one another in their desperate flight through the Mitla Pass. All reparable vehicles were loaded on trailers and trucked back to Israel.

As for money, the reckoning of the cost of the war was already rising into hundreds of millions of dollars. Mobilization of the reserves alone cost more than $100 million. During the fighting, the country lost about $35 million in industrial output and another $10 million in export trade. Last week the government moved to avert an economic crisis by pushing through an emergency budget of $117 million that called for a special defense tax on income, property and gasoline. About $150 million is expected to flow into Israel from collections made by the United Jewish Appeal in the U.S. Even though the government had simply printed money to pay for the war, there were few signs of inflation. So far, prices have been remarkably stable. And to assure their supply of foreign exchange, Israelis have started an energetic bid for tourist dollars. Already, in Bethlehem, which was taken over from Jordan, souvenir vendors are stocking Stars of David alongside their rosaries and crosses.

"Outstretched Hand." In politics, the Israelis have displayed the same single-minded efficiency as on the battlefield. The Israeli Cabinet worked overtime all last week putting together a platform for negotiations. Foreign Minister Abba Eban denied that he is at odds with Defense Minister Moshe Dayan over how much territory Israel is willing to yield. Only the Communists in the Knesset raised a momentary fuss when they charged Israeli troops with looting and acts of atrocity. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan dismissed the charge out of hand. "An army of regulars and reservists of various ages and psychological drives cannot be perfect," he said. "I assume the Israeli army is not as bad as other armies." Later, even the Communists went along with a motion to bar for the time being any further debate that might embarrass the government.

Such solidarity is not surprising in a nation long inured to the threat of extinction. It also reflects an impatience to get on with the job of peacemaking. Premier Eshkol visited the Sharm el Sheikh garrison, reminded its men that there, on the Strait of Tiran, Nasser's blockade began the trouble. And there he announced that he was ready to talk peace with any Arab leader who would listen. "I hope that my outstretched hand will not be spurned by those who have the power to accept it," he said. Then he vowed that if rebuffed, "Israel is capable of taking care of itself." On that, there is no argument.

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