The Battle of El Auja

The sound of clash and the rumor of war rumbled through the Middle East. Would the Israelis--1,500,000 people ringed around by 40 million Arab enemies --attack before the Egyptians could use the shiploads of arms the Communists had sold them? Last week the Israelis struck the bloodiest blow since the 1949 armistice. But what at first looked like the beginning of the worst turned out at week's end to be not a preventive war but one quick, calculated ounce of prevention.

For weeks guns have been going off around El Auja, the sun-blasted crossroads on the rocky southern route which may have been Joseph, Mary and the Christ child's on their flight into Egypt. Since 1949 the 100-sq.-mi. demilitarized zone created under the U.N. armistice has bulged like a blister into Israel's Negev desert holdings. In recent weeks Canadian Major General Edson L.M. Burns, the U.N. truce supervisor., has repeatedly warned the Egyptians to stop putting up "check points" inside the zone. The Israelis chose this area to attack.

Under Cover of Oratory. From the top down, the Israelis took special trouble to achieve maximum surprise. That morning David Ben-Gurion, the aging (68) lion of Judah who led the nation to victory in the 1948 war, went before the Knesset in Jerusalem as Israel's Premier-designate. Returning to office with a makeshift majority including both left-wing freethinkers and hardshell Sabbatarians, Ben-Gurion looked rumpled and tired. He made his speech sitting down, paused frequently, and once asked the indulgence of the house while he rested. "I am prepared," he said, "to meet with the Prime Minister of Egypt and with every other Arab ruler as soon as possible in order to achieve a mutual settlement without any prior conditions."

Just twelve hours later some 1,000 Israeli troops, their faces blackened against the bright moonlight, bounced south by truck past the El Auja crossroads. Their target was an Egyptian outpost that was set on the lower slopes of an Egyptian hill but inside the demilitarized Israeli territory. A network of trenches, gun emplacements and barbed-wire barricades linked the forward post with stronger Egyptian positions around the hilltop.

A jackal howled as the Israeli troops fanned out to feint at the Egyptian flanks. As a flare burst over the 1,400-ft. hilltop, the Jewish infantry crawled past boulders to the attack. It was a hand-to-hand bayonet fight. The Egyptians resisted fiercely, and the hilltop did not fall until past midnight. By that time an Egyptian battalion spearheaded by eight tanks rolled up from the rear to counterattack. The Israelis said they knocked out two tanks before withdrawing downhill and into their own territory. They listed five dead, 18 wounded. They claimed 50 Egyptians killed, 49 taken prisoner.

Double Victory. The Egyptian army's story was altogether different. It claimed a big Egyptian victory. Radio Cairo broadcast that counterattacking Egyptian forces "stormed the Israeli El Sabha position and marched on till both tanks and infantry occupied the position. Our air force had complete command over the battlefield." They claimed to have killed 200 Israelis in a fierce fight that lasted 17 hours. When U.S. correspondents visited the scene next day, they saw ample evidence of hard and sanguinary fighting, but were told that the beaten Israelis had managed to drag off all their dead. Jewish soldiers have special hooks on their belts for just this purpose, one Egyptian officer explained. Correspondents were not convinced. By the end of the fighting, however, it seemed clear that the Egyptians had regained their hilltop and the Israelis had dislodged the Egyptians from the demilitarized zone a mile away.

In Cairo, Nasser denounced as "hypocrisy" Ben-Gurion's prebattle proposal for peace talks. Two other Arab powers, Syria and Iraq, announced that they would come to Egypt's aid in event of aggression.

Israeli government spokesmen made no bones about having struck far inside Egypt to drive the Egyptians from their territory. Up and down the republic, people talked war. In Beersheba, where Abraham marked the ancient Jewish-Arab estrangement 5,000 years ago by turning his handmaiden's son Ishmael out of his tents, the whole town cheered when the raiding battalion returned. Individual small gifts for a government arms-buying fund topped $1,000,000. A Jerusalem pediatrician said: "I know how parents with children feel about war, but for the sake of these children I do not feel we can go on living as we are living now--in perpetual uncertainty. If we don't fight now, we may perish." When white-maned old Ben-Gurion rose--and this time he did rise--to wind up the two-day debate on his new government, his voice rasped with his old confident harshness as he said: "If the storm should break, we will stand as a nation united despite our differences."

Double Condemnation. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State George Allen called in both the Israeli and Egyptian ambassadors and handed them identical notes accusing both sides of violating their armistice agreements. Last week, with the help of General Burns, U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold worked out a plan for marking the Israeli-Egypt border as soon as possible. The Israelis quickly agreed, but the Egyptians held out unless all sides of the El Auja zone should be so marked and unless Israeli police as well as soldiers were barred henceforth from the zone. So far, leaders of both nations were privately assuring everyone that they wanted peace, and Truce Supervisor Burns thought there was a "fair chance" of stopping the fighting. But so long as both parties thought they could safely indulge in controlled retaliations, there was always the possibility that the situation itself would spin out of control.

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