Dialogue of the Deaf

MIDDLE EAST

Permanent peace in the Middle East seems more than ever a mirage in the desert of Arab-Israeli antipathies. Egyptian and Israeli artillery dueled across the Suez Canal last week with unsettling and dangerous regularity. The casualties of an uncertain truce are beginning to rise. Some 100 Egyptians were killed in last week's exchanges, along with half a dozen Israelis. In a growing war of Arab terrorism in Israeli-occupied territory, Israel lost its first lives since the war: a three-year-old child and two policemen.

At the United Nations, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban sternly rejected any multinational effort to mediate a settlement as merely providing the Arabs with a shelter against "the necessity of peace." Then, flying from New York to Strasbourg to address the Council of Europe, Eban turned to a more hopeful future by proposing an economic union of Israel, Lebanon and Jordan--a notion that even he had to admit wryly was "perhaps Utopian." Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riad's reply in the U.N. was an attack on the U.S. for adopting "a position of alignment with Israel and hostility toward the Arab people." Lebanon's Premier Rashid Karame declared: 'The lambskin that Israel has been hiding under is wearing out and showing the wolf underneath."

Rash of Terrorism. Ever since Israel's swift conquests, Premier Levi Eshkol has been under heavy pressure to permit Jews to move into and settle choice farm areas in the occupied Arab territories. He has been asked to allow 150 separate sites to be so settled, and last week he finally gave in--on one. He allowed a dozen paramilitary farm youths to reoccupy Etzion on the West Bank, sacred to Israelis as the site where four kibbutzim were wiped out in 1948 in a gallant stand that helped save Jerusalem from the Arab Legion. Fearing that the move might be a test for further permanent Israeli settlements in conquered territory, the U.S. State Department asked Israel to clarify its intentions. Jerusalem replied that the settlement was meant to be a military garrison, and that no other settlements were planned that would prejudice peace talks.

Eshkol's government is both angry and concerned over a new rash of Arab terrorism. It began with random minings of roads and railroads, but has spread to such targets as the former Fast Hotel in Old Jerusalem, which was dynamited (it was scheduled to be torn down anyway), and a large canning factory at Givat Haim, which was blasted by a tractor toting 25 lbs. of TNT. The professional jobs are thought to be the work of the Syrian-trained terrorists of El Fatah, and Israeli agents fanned out through Arab settlements in the occupied territories picking up Fatah suspects. They arrested some 200, most of them around diehard centers of Arab resistance, such as the town of Nablus on the Jordan's West Bank. In Nablus, Israeli police imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew in retaliation for a strike of shops and bus service.

Inevitably, some escaped the dragnet. Creeping in across the cornfields of the cooperative farm village of Ometz one night last week, Fatah saboteurs placed 15 lbs. of explosives under a cottage, killed three-year-old Yossi Solomon as he slept in his crib. Yossi's death brought Defense Minister Moshe Dayan himself to join the search party. Dayan and his men followed the assassins' tracks to the nearby Arab village of Kaffin (pop. 2,500). Border police ordered all of Kaffin's men into the village square, interrogated them until they admitted that five Fatah men had spent the night in three of Kaffin's houses. The police then escorted the entire village--men, women, children, donkeys, camels and sheep--to a hillside outside town, where they sat wide-eyed as Israeli sappers blew the three offending houses skyhigh. The lesson was harsh but clear, and next day the Israelis caught up with the guilty Fatah agents themselves.

Fear & Desire. Sunk into sullen resentment, Arabs throughout the Middle East are torn between the desire to encourage terrorism and the fear that Israel may take fresh punitive action against it. While Lebanon's daily An-Nahar urged the Palestinians to conduct a guerrilla war against the Israelis, Syria accused Israel of trying to "prepare world public opinion for launching new Israeli aggression." As for Israel, the terrorism only hardens its resolve to hold on to its new territories. The result is that diplomacy in the Middle East continues to be a dialogue of the deaf.

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