Digging In to Stay
On the morning after its swift and stunning victory in the "Six Day War," Israel awoke to vastly wider horizons and vastly expanded responsibilities. Suddenly the writ of Jerusalem had been extended over lands three times Is rael's prewar size, and over hostile Arab populations amounting to 1,330,000 people--nearly half Israel's own. How long would Israel want to hang onto such problems?
Most people assumed that the bulk of the "new territories," as Israelis soon dubbed them, were negotiable in any peace settlement with the Arabs. The new boundaries would be hard to guard, so the argument went, the new lands hard to govern. But the Arabs have yet to show any interest in a settlement, and the Israelis are clearly in no hurry to give up what they have won.
The new territories make "a very nice map to look at," observes Defense Minister Moshe Dayan with a smile--and with good reason. Far from overextending the Israeli army, the conquered lands have, in fact, shortened Israel's land borders and made them much easier to defend. Israel's new frontier with Jordan runs for 60 miles rather than 180 and, equally important, it runs along the Jordan River rather than through a twisting, tortured no man's land of hills and scrub. The old Negev Desert border stretched a porous 160 miles. With the addition of Sinai, Israel's underbelly is now bounded by open water, save for the 107-mile stretch facing the Suez Canal. Israel's classic military victory on the Golan Heights of Syria has driven the Syrians well out of shelling reach of the Galilee villages that suffered random Arab bombardment for 19 years. And with the seizure of Nasser's airbases in the Sinai, the closest Egyptian jet field is now Cairo.
Gawking in Gaza. For Israel's civilian planners, the new territories that so please the army are wildly diverse in prospects and problems. Sinai is a vast empty space, valuable chiefly for the oil wells south of Suez, as a buffer against Egypt and an air route to the 14 tourist hotels at Elath. Syrian land, too, is largely deserted--abandoned by some 80,000 inhabitants who fled the Israeli advance. Gaza, however, constitutes a monumental nightmare, with its 330,000 Palestinian refugees in stucco and mud-hut camps, plus an impoverished civilian population of 100,000. And though the West Bank of the Jordan, now in Israeli hands, was the jewel of the Jordanian economy, its roughly 1,000,000 people scratched out an existence five times more meager than the Israeli standard of living.
For ordinary Israelis, hemmed in by hostile neighbors for 19 years, the new territories are already becoming festive tourist grounds. And Israeli officials make no secret of the fact that they expect the tourist travel to continue indefinitely. Israel's domestic airline, Arkia, runs two full-load sightseeing flights a day from Tel Aviv that swing out over the Sinai for a look at the ruins of Nasser's tank corps, set down at Elath for lunch, then circle back via the Dead Sea and an aerial view of reunited Jerusalem. By the tens of thousands, blue-capped tourists in buses and cars race down the Mediterranean highway to gawk in Gaza and bargain-hunt for pottery, lamps and wicker goods in the bazaars. At first, miniskirted young Israeli sabras so excited Arab men, accustomed to women more thoroughly clothed, that an uncontrollable rash of pinching broke out. Now miniskirts are banned in Gaza.
At Baniyas in Syria, one of the three fresh-water sources of the Jordan River, Syrian officers had a felicitous club in a two-story building set amid troughs of rushing water that cooled its patio. The Israeli army has already decided that the place should be renovated and turned into a tourist restaurant. It will be administered by a kibbutz from a nearby valley that was hit hard by Syrian artillery.
New Math. Not only tourists are scouting the new territories. In the past two weeks technicians from Israel's Ministry of Agriculture made an intensive survey of West Bank crops and recommended that Arab farmers switch some 15,000 acres of land now growing tomatoes, melons and watermelons to more profitable crops of cotton, tobacco, sesame and sorghum. The ministry will distribute free seeds to farmers for the fall plantings. Other experts are studying irrigation schemes for the Jordan valley. The government's Department of Antiquities will soon send teams of archaeologists fanning out through the new territories. On the West Bank, the Israel Parks Authority has taken over three existing archaeological sites, including Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. A group of planners is at work on a model village where 10,000 Arab refugees from Gaza might be resettled in a pilot project.*
In Gaza the refugees in the camps have been granted a privilege denied them all through the two decades they lived under Egyptian rule: the right to leave the camps by day and roam freely among the rest of Gaza's populace. Significantly, Gaza road signs are being lettered in Hebrew as well as the existing Arabic, and all five major Israeli banks have opened branches in the strip. On Sept. 1, some 100,000 Gaza schoolchildren will enroll in schools administered by Israel. Used as Nasserite indoctrination centers in the past, the schools will be supplied with some of the 300,000 Arab-language textbooks newly printed by the Israelis at a cost of $1,600,000. Missing from them will be such arithmetic problems as the one in the former Egyptian text that read: "If nine Israelis are killed and two are taken prisoner, how many enemy soldiers were there in all?"
In the Name of Law. Of all the new territories, it is the Jordanian West Bank that offers Israel the greatest opportunity and the greatest challenge. If a viable West Bank economy can be created with Israeli know-how and the cooperation of the conquered Arabs, the region could well develop into a solution to the refugee problem, a defused buffer between Israel and the Arab world, a showcase proving that Jew and Arab can work and live together.
To aid the West Bank's economy, some 25 Israeli bank branches have opened in the area, and last week the Israeli pound was made legal tender along with the Jordanian dinar. The Jeru salem government has virtually adopted the former Jordanian budget for the West Bank, including development plans for road building and other public works totaling $5,600,000 this year. All former local officials, including all the West Bank mayors and most city employees, have stayed on their jobs under Israeli rule. Wherever possible, Israel is keeping Jordanian law and custom intact. Thus schoolchildren will get their books free, though in Israel their parents must pay for them. Jordanian courts are back in business, with the amendment that prisoners are now sentenced not "in the name of King Hussein" but "in the name of law and justice." Israel has no capital punishment, but Jordan does; so a West Bank murderer may still face execution.
Arabic Television. Throughout the new territories, Israel has begun a multi-pronged program of education in coexistence. The lessons are all oral or visual, since the Israelis have found that the written word is not effective among the Arabs. One method involves meetings over coffee between Arab notables and local Israeli officials; another calls for loading Arab leaders aboard buses for tours through Israel to see rural and urban development. A typical stop is the 36-story Shalom Tower skyscraper, where the Arabs can see unmistakable refutation of Cairo Radio's claim that Tel Aviv lies in ruins. Visits to a supermarket draw a standard query: "How do you prevent stealing?"
Arabs now hear the Israelis' side of the war 14 hours a day on Arabic broadcasts over Radio Kol Israel. On shows such as The Truth and the Lie, old tapes of Nasser, Syria's Attassi and other Arab leaders are juxtaposed with recent statements. And now Israel, which has been slow to supply tele vision entertainment for its own citizens, has started a crash program to get an Arabic TV station in service. For the Arabs have long been avid TV fans; many more sets can be found in the conquered territories than in Israel.
Precisely because the spoken word is so important to the Arabs, government censors at first felt compelled to red-pencil portions of the regular Friday sermon from the silver-domed El Aksa mosque. In protest, most of the mosque's weekly crowd of 15,000 worshipers stayed away, and 24 leading professional, political and religious Arabs of Jerusalem called for a cam paign of noncooperation with Israel. Alarmed, the Israelis canceled censorship of the sermons--and transferred responsibility for dealing with the Moslem religious community from the Israeli Ministry of Religion to Dayan's Defense Ministry, which, not surprisingly, is vastly respected by the Arabs.
A Few Triangles. In almost every test the Israelis have penetrated quickly to the core of Arab resistance. In the fiercely independent town of Nablus in the hills of Samaria, extremists passed the word to Arab shopkeepers not to open up on Saturday, the day-most Israeli tourists visited the town. Rumors spread that the Israelis would soon be gone; those who cooperated with them would be punished when an Arab government returned. As shopkeepers stood uncertainly by their shuttered stores, not sure what to do, the Israelis started a rumor of their own: shops that refused to open might never open again. Then military patrols began to paint triangular symbols on closed shop fronts. They painted only a few before the Arabs saw the writing on the wall. Shutters flew up all over town--and have stayed up. No longer does anyone doubt that the Israelis are there to stay.
* To provide immediate assistance to new Arab refugees in the wake of the war, a private committee for Near East Emergency Donations (NEED) was formed last week under the honorary chairmanship of former President Dwight Eisenhower. NEED Chairman James A. Linen, President of Time Inc., said that all donations to NEED will be turned over to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.