Merger by Inches

When U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim set out on his first official visit to the Middle East, he knew full well that the problems of the area were, as he put it, "complex and very difficult." At the very least, though, he thought that he knew the lay of the land and the antagonists' basic positions. No such luck. Halfway through his five-capital tour last week, Waldheim found that the alignments were shifting like desert sands, and that certain features on the map were being altered.

The most notable change involved the first hesitant steps toward the on-again, off-again merger of Egypt and Libya. While Waldheim was in Damas cus, where he got an unexpectedly cordial reception from Syria's government heads, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat was closeted at his country home, 50 miles north of Cairo, with Libya's mercurial strongman, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Sadat had just concluded a jet-propelled, hush-hush tour of his own to two oil-rich neighbors and Syria. With Saudi Arabia's King Feisal and the Emir of Qatar, Sadat had discussed how best to use Arab oil and funds in the fight against Israel, and had wrung promises of lavish support. These commitments strengthened Sadat by leaving him less dependent on money from Libya's bubbling black gold.

The merger plan that Sadat and Gaddafi announced last week fell far short of the Libyan leader's proclaimed goal of immediate union. Instead of a long-promised binational referendum that would declare "merger day," the agreement provided for a series of inching steps, certain to be slow, although no timetable was set. Egypt and Libya were to form a mixed Assembly, with 50 members from each nation, to draft a constitution. They will exchange resident ministers and establish a higher planning council. They will also issue a new currency--the Arab dinar--but only for transactions between their tvo central banks.

The projected merger, along with Sadat's eastern agreements, inevitably diminished any hope that Waldheim might have had for a softening of attitudes in the Middle East. By the time he reached Jerusalem, he found that Israel's position was also hardening. This week Israel's ruling Labor Party is expected to adopt a hawkish program, originated by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, for economic penetration and development of occupied territories on the West Bank of the Jordan and in the Sinai desert--which even some Israelis protest is "creeping annexation."

By two astonishing gaffes in Jerusalem, Waldheim managed to erode a fair amount of the goodwill that his visit was supposed to generate. First, at Yad Vashem, the shrine in memory of the 6,000,000 Jews killed by the Nazis, Waldheim refused to cover his head with a yarmulke. That offended even non-Orthodox Jews. Later at a State dinner, he expressed pleasure at being "here in your capital"--although the U.N., far from recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, has demanded that it be internationalized. That raised the Arabs' hackles. Apologies followed, but neither side was likely to soon forget the slights.

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