No Mood for Accommodation

MIDDLE EAST

For all their frenetic traveling and talking, Arab leaders have not yet found a common policy for coming to grips with the realities of defeat. They have not even been able to agree on how to use their most powerful economic weapon: oil. Should they boycott the pro-Israel West or go back to business as before the Six-Day War? After five days of futile bickering in Baghdad, the oil experts tossed the problem back to their foreign ministers, who in turn plan to buck the whole list of Arab differences straight to the top at the Arab summit meeting scheduled in Khartoum this week.

With the Arabs at odds with each other, it was no surprise that they still could not see eye to eye with the Israelis--even on such a humanitarian issue as the return of their refugees. In its second week, the homeward flow across the Jordan River failed to rise above 2,000 persons a day. And at that rate, fewer than 30,000 of the 170,000 Palestinians who have asked to return seemed likely to make it by Israel's Aug. 31 deadline. The Jordanians complained that the Israelis were giving them barely 24 hours to round up each day's quota of returnees from widely scattered tent cities. The Israelis responded that the Jordanians were operating with such calculated inefficiency that what they were really trying to do was make Israel look bad.

"I Accept." While their leaders wrangled, Arabs and Jews demonstrated that they can cooperate on some levels. In white tents erected to shade them from the unmerciful sun, Jordanians and Arab-speaking Israelis worked side by side to process the returnees. Israeli soldiers and Jordanian policemen joked with each other as they helped old men, women and children across temporary wooden planking on the Allenby and Um al Shurat bridges. "As far as I'm concerned, you can have Jericho back right now," said an Israeli trooper. "Fine," replied his Arab companion, "I accept on behalf of His Majesty King Hussein."

Except for Hardship. On their side of the river, Israelis provide food, medical care, transportation and, when necessary, temporary shelters. They would like to see the returnees integrated into their old communities as soon as possible, and they have been careful to screen out Palestine refugees from the 1948 War of Liberation. Most of the Arabs now coming home are shopkeepers, small farmers, teachers, mechanics. They have a stake in the West Bank, and Israeli authorities figure they will put a minimum of strain on the area's growing relief rolls.

As an added incentive to encourage refugees to return to what is now Israel, Jordan has pledged to let them receive as much as $216 a month from relatives working in Arab states. In a complex arrangement to avoid direct dealing with Israel, the money will be transferred through Swiss banks.

Despite pleas from the U.S., U.N. Secretary-General U Thant and the World Council of Churches, Premier Levi Eshkol's government says that except for hardship cases it does not plan to extend the returning deadline. The Israelis are in no mood for any further accommodation through third parties. Their message to the Jordanians, and to all Arabs, is something they have been saying for years: only by dealing directly with each other can the two camps settle their problems.

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