Now for the Bitter Battles of Peace

Except for scattered skirmishes along the Suez Canal, the guns of war fell silent last week across the Middle East. Almost as abruptly as it had begun, the superpower saber-rattling also came to an end. One week earlier it had threatened to involve the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 18-day war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The U.S. last week ended a worldwide military alert called to forestall apparent Soviet troop moves into Egypt; after briefly chiding the U.S. for giving in to baseless fears, Moscow then let the matter drop.

With all these fronts quiet, diplomats began to take up where the generals had left off. To them was given the job of trying to create a peace settlement that could be as dramatic as the war itself. The short-term problems created by the war and the intensified hatreds built up over 25 years made the task difficult. But there were some opportunities, and along with them there was hope.

Dangerous Notes. One immediate problem was that the latest Middle East war ended on an inconclusive and potentially dangerous note. From a purely military viewpoint, Israel had won, but not in the spectacularly decisive way that its generals had hoped.

Egypt's Third Army of 20,000 men, which had crossed to the east side of the Suez Canal in the first days of battle, was still there. But it was surrounded, trapped and desperately short of food, water and medical supplies. An Israeli task force, crossing the canal in the opposite direction, had surrounded the city of Suez and rolled up the flanks of units protecting the Third Army. As a result of such maneuvers, troops of the United Nations Emergency Force moving into the battlefield area to keep the peace found it hard to find the lines. In some places, the blue-helmeted U.N. troops discovered Egyptians and Israelis a scant 30 yds. away from one another. In other places, the lines were kilometers apart.

Operating with Security Council sanction--and aided in large measure by U.S. pressure on Israel to let the surrounded Arab troops be resupplied--the U.N. Emergency Force began to bring food and water through Israeli lines to the beleaguered Egyptians. Beyond that mercy mission, the role of the peacekeeping force was uncertain. It faced unfortunately some of the same handicaps as did a similar force that attempted to keep the peace in Gaza and Sinai before Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered it out in May 1967, thus paving the way for the Six-Day War.

This time, as then, the Egyptians indicated that they might want a say-so on the disposition of the U.N. force. This time also the Soviet Union was threatening to withhold funds later if it disagrees with the operations of the U.N. troops; the Chinese will ante up nothing at all. And Soviet Ambassador to the U.N. Yakov Malik was continuing to try to bring the emergency force under the control of the Security Council, where Russia has a veto, rather than under Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. The U.S. opposes Malik's demand.

Considering the international character of the negotiations that led to the ceasefire, it was no surprise that the broader diplomatic discussions last week took on a kind of intercontinental jet-set frenzy. Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetzov, for example, hurried to Cairo for an indefinite stay. One reason for his trip, perhaps, was Moscow's desire for firsthand information. Soviet intelligence on the war had been notably less proficient than that of the U.S., which recovered from initial misjudgments about Arab intentions and reported the remainder of the war accurately.

Convinced that the Arabs could and would win, the Soviets did not realize until it was almost too late the size of the Israeli task force moving across the Suez Canal and its significance to Egypt's Third Army. It was the plight of the Third Army that forced the Soviet Union to ask U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to visit Moscow for cease-fire talks. The threatened Soviet troop movements, which led to the American alert, were primarily designed to pressure Washington into forcing the Israelis to stop fighting while the Third Army was still more or less intact. No other incident of the war has so infuriated the Israelis, who consider that the superpowers thereby deprived them of victory.

After his return to Washington, Kissinger rescheduled a postponed trip to Peking for this week. Along the way, he will stop at Rabat, Cairo, Amman and the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh to discuss the Middle East situation with the Arab leaders. (Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Zekarya Ismail last week met Kissinger in Washington, but Iraq steadfastly refused any contact.)

Kissinger will be accompanied by State's top Middle Eastern expert, Assistant Secretary Joseph Sisco, who will make additional visits to Tel Aviv, Beirut and Kuwait. Sisco will also have the unenviable job of trying to explain U.S. Middle East moves to representatives of the NATO nations in Brussels, who were roiled by Washington's unilateral decisions and efforts to resupply Israel from U.S. military stocks in Europe (see story page 64).

Last week also, both the Israelis and the Egyptians invited themselves to Washington for discussions with Kissinger and President Nixon. First to arrive was Egypt's Ismail Fahmy, 51, who had been dispatched by President Anwar Sadat to get a firsthand explanation of Washington's attitudes about the ceasefire. Even while Fahmy was in Washington, word came from Cairo that Sadat had elevated him from acting to permanent Foreign Minister. That was a hopeful sign as far as future peace negotiations are concerned. Fahmy replaced Mohammed Hassan Zayyat, who felt that he could not carry out a new Sadat-ordered policy of rapprochement with Washington.

Extra Kilometers. Meanwhile, Sadat appeared in Cairo in field marshal's uniform to hold a press conference for 350 Egyptian and foreign correspondents gathered to report the war. In a remarkably relaxed and genial mood,* he gave one reason why he accepted the ceasefire: "I would not fight the United States of America. I fought Israel for eleven days. They would have run out of ammunition in two [more] days. I am not ready to fight the U.S." Although he criticized Washington for giving aid to Israel, Sadat praised the U.S. for taking a "constructive position" on peace negotiations. As for the muddled ceasefire lines, Sadat chuckled: "I am willing to give Mrs. Meir an extra ten square kilometers."

Egypt's Fahmy was followed to Washington by Israel's doughty Premier. Looking alarmingly fatigued as she arrived at Dulles Airport aboard an El Al airliner, Golda Meir, 75, remained seated for an airport press conference. Her visit, as it turned out, was somewhat more urgent than Fahmy's. The U.S., after all, is Israel's principal friend and chief armorer. According to reports from Jerusalem, Washington is not only replacing planes and tanks Israel lost in the war but has also provided antitank weapons and new "smart bombs," such as the Walleye and the Rockeye, that the Israelis have never had before. At the same time, however, President Nixon had pressed so vigorously for a cease-fire that his actions rekindled latent Israeli fears of an imposed settlement. Mrs. Meir had come to Washington to find out what the President had in mind.

What Washington wanted, as President Nixon told Mrs. Meir in two days of talks that were officially described as "very constructive," was for Israel to cooperate in setting cease-fire lines and taking pressure off Sadat by feeding his trapped Third Army. The American pressure on Israel was obviously intense. At one point last week. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan told Israel's parliament: "I do not know whether Knesset members are aware that the shells that the Israelis are firing today were not in their possession a week ago. The war cannot be waged without shells, and without shells we shall not be able to release the prisoners. Whoever proposes that we conduct this war split off from the U.S. is suggesting that we will not win this war."

In return for allowing supplies to reach the Third Army, Israel expected a prisoner-of-war exchange that was very slow in getting under way. Israel seeks the return of 440 men listed as missing in action, most of them on the Sinai front. To recover them Israel is willing to send back some 8,000 Arab prisoners, most of them Egyptian--at least 2,500 more than it held after the Six-Day War in 1967.

By week's end, however, the Egyptians had handed over only 85 names of Israeli prisoners to the International Red Cross in Geneva, and the Syrians none at all. There were rumors in Israel that many of the prisoners, especially those held in Syria, had been brutally tortured--which in fact had occurred in 1967. Wives and relatives of the missing men turned out in angry demonstrations before the Knesset building in Jerusalem and the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. They carried signs: WHERE IS MY FATHER? and NIXON, YOU GAVE THE EGYPTIANS A CEASEFIRE. NOW GIVE US BACK OUR SONS.

The demonstrations underscored one more reason for Mrs. Meir's hasty visit to Washington. The war and its uncertain ending have created Israel's most serious domestic political crisis in 25 years. Defense Minister Dayan, the hero of the '67 war, is already being excoriated for not having prepared Israel's forces to rebuff the initial Arab attacks. Mrs. Meir's Labor-dominated coalition government is also under attack, particularly from army officers, who resent that they were not allowed to finish off the Arabs. Some observers of Israeli politics predict a significant shift to the right when national elections, originally scheduled for last week, are held in December after a war-inspired postponement.

"My Children." To some extent, Mrs. Meir's political future rests on how she solves the prisoner issue, which last week threatened to become as important in the Middle East as it had been for the U.S. in Viet Nam. Sadat bluntly warned the Israelis against further attacks on "my children" of the Third Army. He was holding out not merely for a cease-fire and the return of prisoners, but for a withdrawal of Israeli forces to the positions they had held when the cease-fire was ordered on Oct. 22. For the Israelis, the point of that demand was obvious. To get their prisoners back, they would have to withdraw from key positions on the west bank of the canal. Meanwhile, Sadat would be able to maintain his forces on the east bank and claim an Arab victory.

Egypt also had one other card to play. Mrs. Meir protested that Egyptian destroyers were blockading Bab el Mandeb, where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean, thereby preventing tankers from sailing on to Eilat to unload vital oil.

While Washington was working hard to end the diplomatic impasse, the Russians last week were content merely to sit back and observe. Moscow was unquestionably delighted by the disarray in the Atlantic Alliance that had been created by President Nixon's unilateral handling of the Middle East crisis. Though the Western allies insisted publicly that nothing had changed, privately they complained that Washington's actions had made it more difficult for them to negotiate as a united bloc with the Russians.

"Great Martyrs." But if Washington had overreacted in panic to the threat of a confrontation with the U.S.S.R., it had skillfully seized the initiative in serving as the real peacemaker in the Middle East. Even though Egyptian officers at the front were not only meeting with Israeli officers but in some cases carrying on their conversations in Hebrew, Sadat insisted at his press conference that he would never negotiate with Israel face to face. The State Department, however, quietly contended that when the time came Cairo would take part in direct meetings. Meanwhile, Israel was additionally pressured to concede that at an appropriate time it would withdraw from some of the territory it has held since 1967. For Mrs. Meir, who still remembers bitterly that as Foreign Minister in 1957 she had to bow to John Foster Dulles' dictate and hand back the captured Sinai territory to Egypt, there is one large proviso. This time, any such arrangement will have to guarantee Israeli security.

There were other optimistic notes in the course of the week. Certainly the most unexpected was a display of realism on the part of fedayeen leaders. Up to now, the Palestinians have represented perhaps the most insoluble problem of the Middle East cold war. Meeting in Beirut, officials of the multi-group Palestine Liberation Organization hinted that they might be willing to take part in any discussion on peace. Shafiq Hout, the P.L.O.'s head for Lebanon, explained why there was a trend among the fedayeen organizations to move away from long-held demands for the restoration of all of pre-Israel Palestine. "If we say no to peace negotiations," Hout told TIME Correspondent Karsten Prager, "we're finished. We will have turned out to be great martyrs and lousy politicians."

That sense of Realpolitik was the reason why the Palestinians--except for George Habash's militantly Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine--may be willing to settle for a new Palestinian nation, vintage 1973. It would include the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Gaza Strip and the Hemmeh region around Lake Tiberias in the panhandle between Syria, Israel and Jordan.

What about Israel and Palestine coexisting as neighbors? "Why not?" answered Hout. "The situation is no longer what it was before Oct. 6. In negotiation now, we will stand at an equal level. We can threaten to resume war. We can say no--which we could not do when they were still swimming in the Suez Canal. We can keep a settlement of the Palestine question open. Who knows? We might live next to one another, engage in peaceful competition, leave final settlements for another time, perhaps another generation."

Even if the Palestinian proposal becomes policy, major obstacles have to be overcome. One is King Hussein of Jordan. He is willing to give the Palestinians the West Bank and has suggested that Gaza might also be included, but only under a federation subservient to his monarchy in international and financial affairs. Another is Mrs. Meir, who once said that "there was no such thing as Palestinians. They did not exist," and warned that Israel would not allow an independent Palestinian nation on its flanks.

The Beirut declaration, however, was at least a start on the long road to peace. So were Mrs. Meir's discussions in Washington and the Egyptian moves. In the meantime, nagging and possibly dangerous details remain to be settled. For a beginning, the cease-fire lines have to be drawn. A place for long-range negotiations has to be selected, although by last week everybody's choice seemed to be Geneva. The representatives who will sit around the table must be chosen. With memories of the squabbles over the shape of the conference table that preceded the Viet Nam peace negotiations in Paris, U.S. diplomats, at least, could only be horrified at the thought of seating perhaps a dozen delegations instead of only four.

Evaporating Optimism. Before peace can succeed, however, there has to be optimism, and at week's end some of that seemed to be evaporating. President Sadat made a hurried trip to Kuwait in company with Syria's President Hafez Assad and stopped off on his way back to Cairo for discussions in Saudi Arabia. Sadat was angry over the Israelis' continued presence on the west bank of the canal in what he feels is defiance of the original cease-fire provisions. Nighttime blackouts were ordered again in the Egyptian capital. Wrote Editor Mohammed Hassanein Heikal of the influential Cairo newspaper Al Ahram: "I find a return to war more probable than going to a peace conference." The various moves could, of course, simply be posturing on the part of the Arabs. But after the events of the past month in the Middle East, no one could ever be sure of that again.

* In fact he was in mourning for his halfbrother, a MIG fighter-pilot who had been shot down and killed over the Sinai during the fighting.

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