Mideast: Unstable As Water

IN the wake of last week's events in the Sudan, an Amsterdam cartoonist summed up the situation in the turbulent Arab world with a ring of rulers, each bent on doing in the next man. Reacting to the same event, a Beirut newspaper carried a cartoon showing a baffled Leonid Brezhnev trying vainly to fit the word "Arabs" into a crossword puzzle. The Soviet Communist Party leader has a good deal of company in his perplexity, particularly after the last few weeks. In addition to the coup and countercoup in Khartoum, there have been these astonishing spectacles lately:

> Palestinian guerrillas fleeing to Israel to escape King Hussein's marauding soldiers.

> Reports of an unsuccessful coup attempt in Iraq, with 45 army officers arrested.

>An attempted coup at the summer palace of Morocco's King Hassan II, carried out by cadets who thought they were rescuing their monarch.

> An attempt by some of Egypt's foremost figures to overthrow President Anwar Sadat.

> The intemperate antics of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (see box, following page).

With such goings on, it was small wonder that the demonstrators who poured into Beirut's streets to applaud General Jaafar Numeiry's return to power in the Sudan were so befuddled that they chanted slogans condemning a bizarre assortment of bedfellows: Israel, Jordan's Hussein, the U.S. and the Communists. "In the face of Israel we are all Arabs," Sadat told a meeting of Egypt's Arab Socialist Union last week, but he added: "Unfortunately, disunity still prevails amongst us."

Word and Revelation. To be sure, despite all the coup attempts, the status quo has hardly changed throughout the area. Still, a familiar sense of roiling unease pervades the Arab world. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a sad and disillusioned T.E. Lawrence accused the Arabs of being "as unstable as water," incapable of ever pulling together to create a great state. More recently another British writer, James Morris, mused in the quarterly Horizon: "It may be that the Arabs will never constitute a single nation--that their true strength will remain metaphysical, spiritual, the Word and the Revelation. Or it may be that they have leapfrogged, so to speak, a historical stage and are ahead of the world in their fragmentation." With all "their ambiguities, paradoxes and evasions, their uncertain identity, their jumbled patriotism," added Morris, "they look readier than most people for the 21st century."

But the 20th is still onstage, and the Arabs seem most unready to cope with its final three decades. In the past that unreadiness has been spectacularly exposed in their disastrous confrontations with the Israelis. Next week marks a full year since U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers arranged a cease-fire between Israel and Egypt. There has been no resumption of the bloody war of attrition between the two sides, but neither has there been any appreciable progress toward a genuine peace. Israeli hesitancy--and outright intransigence--are at least partly to blame, but so is Arab unreliability. After recent events, it is difficult to quarrel with the Israeli Foreign Ministry official who said last week: "Considering the transitory nature of Arab governments these days, Israel must be extremely careful what kind of deals it makes, and with whom."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.