Mess

U.S. Delegate Warren Austin last week read to the Security Council the long-awaited "clarification of the U.S. position" on Palestine. After 20 minutes of Austin's ponderous prose, a fellow delegate summed up his remarks in this mocking sentence: "We must do nothing--and do it quickly."

Thin Distinction. "The Council's action," said Austin, "[must be] directed to keeping the peace and not to enforcing partition." The thin distinction would be easier to make in the Council chamber than in the embattled Holy Land. The comic effort to make it, however, followed logically from past U.S. efforts to please everyone, which had ended by pleasing no one. Zionists were crying traitor at the U.S. The U.S. position in the strategically important Arab world was hurt in ways that might cost years and possibly blood to repair.

With Austin's speech the damage spread; it undercut the main line of U.S. policy in the U.N. For two years the U.S., faced with the Russian abuse of the Security

Council veto, had been trying to build up U.N.'s effective scope. Specifically, it had tried to increase the authority of the U.N. Assembly. The Assembly, under hysterical U.S. leadership, had made the decision to partition Palestine.

To make partition stick without all-out Arab-Jewish war would require military intervention. Where was it to come from? The U.S. would not send its own troops. It did not want an international force--that would include Russian troops.

So Austin now had to reverse the U.S. line: to whittle down the authority of the U.N. Assembly and to say that the Security Council was not and could not be responsible for enforcing the Assembly's political decisions.

There was as much authority for this position in the U.N. Charter as there was for Russian abuse of the veto. But up to now it had been the Russians who widened the Charter's loopholes.

Vanished Hope. Meanwhile, in Palestine, other tragic effects continued. In the hills overlooking the Garden of Gethsemane, Arabs and Jews bombarded each other with mortar and grenades. In an orange grove near Rehovoth, Jews blew up a British train bringing soldiers back from leave in Cairo. In the twisted steel and splintered wood, 28 were found dead, 47 wounded. The terrorist Stern Gang of extremist Zionists boasted that it had blown up the train.

The Stern Gang and even the "moderate" Jewish Agency blamed the British for the preceding week's horror in Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda Street (see cut), where an explosion had killed 54 Jews. The Arabs took the credit for setting off the blast, but the Jews preferred to believe that it had been the work of British troops. The wrecking of the train (whose soldier passengers could not possibly have had a part in the Ben Yehuda outrage) was a "reprisal."

Its main political effect was another wave of indignation in Britain. Those Americans who had still hoped that the British could be persuaded to police the partition could hope no longer. The British would be out by May 15, and could hardly wait for the day to come. The U.S., judging from Austin's speech, had no idea of what to do next with the bloody mess it had stirred up.

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