Turning Point?

Rambling along the Gaza strip last week on a Moslem holiday tour of army bases and refugee camps, Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser heard a radio bulletin: the U.S. had approved a French shipment to Israel of twelve Mystere jet fighters out of its NATO stocks. Egypt's soldier-strongman blew up: the French jets, added to a dozen Mysteres and 24 Ouragan jets already shipped, would undo much of the advantage Egypt had gained by buying Soviet-bloc arms.*

By midnight Nasser knew by telephone from his Paris embassy that the Mystere report was correct. All next day he thundered in speech after speech to his soldiers about "the West's continuing conspiracy," without attacking the U.S. by name. He announced the formation of a "huge" Palestinian army inside the Egyptian army, recruited among the 220,000 Palestinian refugees in Gaza. Back in Cairo, 38-year-old Premier Nasser cried dramatically: "I have witnessed a turning point in the Middle East."

Next day he fired off a cable to Communist China's Chou Enlai, whose government had just put on a big trade fair in Cairo and was buying $28 million worth of Egypt's surplus cotton. Two days later, in an action likely to be followed by several other Arab-bloc countries, and likely to speed a showdown on Red China's bid for membership in the U.N. Assembly, Nasser's government extended diplomatic recognition to Peking. U.S. Ambassador Henry Byroade first learned what Nasser was up to when Nationalist China's ambassador, the dean of Cairo's diplomatic corps, informed him that he had been handed his walking papers. The same day, Egypt announced that a military mission would leave shortly for Peking. "As though Russia were the only place in the world to obtain arms apart from the Western capitals!" hooted the Cairo newspaper Al Kahira. "What about China, you [Western] idiots, which through your ignorance is not even a member of the U.N.?"

*Cairo newspapers blossomed out last week with identical figures on what Egypt is getting from Communist Czechoslovakia: 200 MIG-15 fighters, 50 IL-28 twin-jet bombers; 200 heavy tanks, six submarines and torpedo boats. Four-fifths of this equipment was said to have been delivered already. Western sources think the figures inflated, particularly the MIG total.

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