Divided Partners

In other times, the incident at Gaza might have seemed routine. But last week the foreboding eye of the West was fixed on the bristling cockpit of war that is the Middle East. Egyptian mortars opened fire on Israelis patrolling along the Gaza border, as they had on many another routine patrol before. But this time the patrol, pinned down in a gully, lost three men before Israeli artillery counterfire released them, and the bitter reflex of reprisals began. The Israelis shelled an Egyptian village, the Egyptians replied with mortars on four Israeli frontier settlements, the Israelis retaliated by a heavy shelling of the crowded Egyptian city of Gaza. Before the U.N. Commission could get a ceasefire, 55 civilians in Gaza had died under Israeli shells. Israeli losses: four soldiers killed, four civilians wounded.

The news of the Gaza shelling broke just as U.N. Secretary Dag Hammarskjold prepared to take off on a mission to the Middle East. In sponsoring the U.N. resolution which dispatched him, the U.S. had hoped his presence could quiet the borders and add authority to the U.N. Truce Commission. Hammarskjold himself described his trip as at best "just an episode on the long road" toward Palestine settlement. At this moment, peace in the Middle East is only a relative condition, and settlement a dreamer's word. But is open war, then, a likely possibility?

Bitter Divergence. On this basic question, the U.S. and Britain broke into open divergence last week. U.S. strategists think that neither Egypt nor Israel wants war now. Discussing the possibility of the President's ordering U.S. troops into action in a Middle Eastern emergency, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said: "We do not know of any such emergency."

Britain disagreed, and with some bitterness. "It is painfully clear to everybody, except Mr. Dulles, not only that the Middle East might blow up at any moment, but also that American dilatoriness and reluctance to look at the Middle East as it is impose the severest possible strain on Western unity," snapped Britain's weekly Spectator.

In the space of two months, the British attitude has perceptibly hardened. Government spokesmen talk gravely of how essential Middle East oil is to Britain's very existence. Crisis phrases--such as "No appeasement"--leap from leader writers' typewriters. Though Sir Anthony Eden says nothing publicly, the government's tough line on Cyprus--the airborne dispatch of two battalions of paratroopers, the defiance of world opinion in exiling Archbishop Makarios--looks beyond Cyprus itself. Britain wants to be ready to act swiftly in the Middle East. It fears a new anti-British outbreak in Jordan, and is ready to fly in paratroopers to help young King Hussein put it down. For if Britain loses its hold in Jordan, it has jeopardized its control of the vital Iraq oilfields next door.

Britain has at long last chosen sides in the Middle East, while the U.S. continues to favor an impartial stand, however precarious. The side Britain has chosen is not pro-Israel, but anti-Nasser. Egypt's 38-year-old military ruler, once hopefully regarded by the British--even though he drove them from the Suez--is now in British eyes the Middle East's Villain No. 1.

Deadly Trinity. Six months ago the British were assiduously wooing Nasser, hoping he would join the anti-Communist Baghdad Pact, bring stability to the Middle East, make peace with Israel (Eden even hinted last fall of British backing for a settlement based on Israel's giving up to Egypt a slice of the Negev desert).

Now the British see him as the reckless head of a deadly trinity: Communist arms, Saudi-Arabian oil royalties, Egyptian intrigue. Last week Nasser candidly told New York Timesman Osgood Caruthers that his chief ambition is "to spoil the British plans in the Middle East." The threat of Communism, he said, is not nearly so great as the efforts of "imperialists and colonialists" to regain the area as their exclusive sphere of influence.

That was plain enough for the British. When Dulles next day described Nasser as "actuated primarily by a desire to maintain the genuine independence of that area," the British press reacted with such angry cartoons as Cummings' in Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express (see cut). Another cartoonist showed a patient Eden being kicked by a childlike Nasser, while Dulles, dressed as a nursemaid, says: "Don't take on so, Master Anthony, the little lad appears to be actuated by a desire to maintain genuine independence." The Tory Daily Mail snapped: "In sermons against colonialism [the Americans] have helped preach faithful allies out of invaluable bases. But they have not preached themselves out of Okinawa, Formosa, or Puerto Rico."

Faced with Nasser's explicit threats, the British are now thinking of supplying arms to Israel (despite the Foreign Office's classic bias against Israel). And they are eager to shore up Nasser's principal Arab rival, the pro-British regime of Iraq's Premier Nuri es-Said.

The British, however loud their public outcries against the U.S., are pressing urgently through diplomatic channels for U.S. support in their policies. EDEN TO EISENHOWER--STATE YOUR MIDDLE EAST POLICY NOW, headlined the Daily Express. The British would like the U.S. to help the Baghdad Pact (and especially Iraq) with economic aid, to provide a demonstration to the Arab nations that it pays to be friends of the West. They are annoyed that the U.S. has refused to join the Northern Tier pact that John Foster Dulles himself suggested. They are even more irritated by the U.S. argument that if the U.S. supplies arms to Israel it would set off an arms race, but if the British supply the arms, it would only be a routine act of a "traditional supplier."

Last week, at British urging, the U.S. made a calculated gesture of support for the Baghdad Pact. The State Department announced that it was sending Deputy Under Secretary of State Loy Henderson, an old and good friend of the Arabs, to the pact's meeting next week. But simultaneously, State reiterated that the U.S. would not adhere to the pact "at this time."

New Doubts. The U.S., too, is having second thoughts about Egypt's ambitious dictator, but it is not yet prepared to write him off. It still regards him as an able, honest and dedicated leader of Egypt. It disapproves of Radio Cairo's vicious propaganda campaigns, preaching hatred and revolt to other Arab nations (TIME, March 26), but also hesitates to make common cause with discredited colonial positions, and to assume the ancient burden of hostility (the U.S. has earned enough Arab hostility on its own by its sponsorship of Israel).

The U.S. is painfully aware that Nasser is opportunistically playing off East against West, but believes that to cut him off from Western friendship would only throw him completely into the arms of the Communists--where Nasser himself, in the last analysis, does not want to be. These new doubts about Nasser, and his own attempt to improve the bargain, have held back the final signing of an agreement with him (by the U.S., Britain and the World Bank) to build the $1.3 billion Aswan Dam on the Nile--a project bigger than the Pyramids and infinitely more useful. Nasser last week casually let drop to the New York Times's Caruthers: "We have not yet rejected the Soviet offer--I do not mention [this] as a threat or as bluff."

All these complicated crosscurrents lay behind Britain's decision to take sides, behind Dulles' determination "to continue to take a position of neutrality," and behind the angry rift between the two partners.

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