The Watchman of Zion
Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
--Psalms 121:4
On the wall of his unpretentious office in infant Israel's ancient capital of Jerusalem, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion keeps a huge map. It is a map of the Moslem world; and in the midst of it the New Jersey-sized state of Israel, heavily outlined in black, looks like a jagged, tiny black arrowhead. "This is to remind me always," he says, "how small we are."
In the nine years since David Ben-Gurion founded the New Jerusalem by the force of a fanatical vision and the shrewdness of a gun-toting prophet, there have been times when much of the world has wondered just how big the tiny republic thinks it is. For one peaceful spell, Israel's unsleeping sentinel retired, full of years and honors, to Sde Boker, a pioneer desert settlement, to plough fields, search the writings of the philosophers for "universal truth" and ponder the mission of man--and of Israel. Then, white of mane but wearing the familiar khaki battle dress of his wartime leadership, the hard, headlong man of decision came back to power in 1955.
"There is too much chasing after comfort, profits and riches," he thundered in the accents of an Old Testament patriarch. Israel, he proclaimed, was in danger. Israel's youth must gird itself, man new settlements along the threatened border, stand ready to repel the merciless Arab. Last October, at 70, he risked all on a bold and cunning "preventive war" to knock out Nasser's new, Soviet-supplied army.*
"We Never Despaired." From that moment on, Israel and its impassioned lawgiver have defied the whole world. Condemned as an aggressor for the Sinai attack, Israel flouted six successive U.N. Assembly orders to get out of Egypt. Israel defied President Eisenhower's publicly pronounced warnings of "pressure" and the U.N. Assembly's well-publicized moves for "military, economic or financial" sanctions. Israel balked at the U.S. President's insistence that no nation invading another in the face of U.N. disapproval should set conditions for its withdrawal. Unlike its fellow preventive warriors, Britain and France, who completed their unconditional withdrawal within 27 days, Israel held out.
Even in yielding last week, the un-slumbering caretaker of the reconstituted Zion breathed defiance and, with his Old Testament as ever to hand, proclaimed that Israel would fight on more fiercely than before. "I believe in our future," he said in an interview with TIME Correspondent George de Carvalho. "Absolutely. I know we can survive and flourish. We must survive, and we will survive. We have a history of 4,000 years. We were driven out and dispersed about the world for 2,000 years, often hated and persecuted. Our people were tortured and burned at the stake by the thousands. We were expelled from England in the 14th century, we were expelled from Spain in the 15th century, we were expelled from many lands. There were laws against us, pogroms, persecutions of every kind. Hitler exterminated 6,000,000 of us. We never despaired.
"We are a small nation," said Ben-Gurion, his stained, grey suit rumpling on his powerful, squat body, "and ours is a poor country. Everything we tried to do was doubly difficult, but we built it up. We took in more than 1,000,000 immigrants, including 300,000 survivors of Hitler's slaughter and 400,000 refugees from Arab countries. Here in the Middle East we are the only people who still believe in the same faith and talk the same language that we did 3,000 years ago. Hebrew was a dead language, but now it is the language of our people again. Nasser cannot even speak a word of Egyptian, the language of the Pharaohs.
"We survived before under worse conditions, and we will survive now. Eight years ago we were invaded by the armies of six Arab nations. We had no organized army and very few arms, but because of the sacrifice of our sons--and of our daughters, too--we defeated them. We won because we were filled with idealism and a great vision of the future. Faith is much more important than arms or riches or numbers. It is our real weapon."
It was not Israel's only weapon. "Once blest is he whose cause is just," goes the old American saying. "Twice blest is he who gets his blows in fust." A civilian army called to its posts almost overnight last autumn, Israel's motorized forces under one-eyed General Moshe Dayan had swept across 120 miles of Sinai desert in four days in an operation that is being studied with admiration by U.S. Army observers. The military skill with which they advanced was matched by the diplomatic skill with which they retreated--and then stopped. Ben-Gurion chose two strong points of resistance, and then began his argument against what the U.N. Assembly had called Israel's single injustice. His points of resistance: Gaza and Aqaba.
The Gaza Strip is the tiny corner of the old British Palestine mandate now crowded with 219,000 Arab refugees from Palestine (practically all of them on relief). In the 1949 armistice, Egypt won the right to administer it as unannexed territory. To the Israelis it was a dangerous center of the over-the-border commando raiding against their desert settlements, raids which Israel under Ben-Gurion avenged with ever-increasing ferocity. The Gulf of Aqaba is the north-reaching arm of the Red Sea whose use was denied to Israeli shipping more than six years ago by Egyptian guns emplaced at Sharm el Sheikh. In violation of the 1949 armistice, the guns commanded the narrow passage into the gulf.
Spelling out his justification for hanging on at Sharm el Sheikh, Ben-Gurion said:
"The straits and the Red Sea are important to us--perhaps more than the Mediterranean. We have closer cultural affinity with the West, but economically we are perhaps closer to the East. To us trade with Asia and Africa is vital. Elath [at the head of the gulf] is our doorway to the East, and nobody has the right to blockade it. We cannot rely on the good will of Nasser--forget Nasser--we cannot rely on the good will of any Egyptian government to keep it open after forcibly blocking it for so many years. Under international law we have the right to use the Suez Canal, but Egypt denied us our rights."
Explosion In Elath. "Israel's ships voyaged through these straits over 3,000 years ago in the days of King Solomon," said Ben-Gurion in a recent speech. Back in 1935, when Ben-Gurion was an executive of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, he prophetically wrote the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis that for the coming state of Israel, "whose mission is to become the Middle East's industrial center . . . Elath will play a greater economic and political role than in Biblical times." Egypt's seven-year blockade forced Ben-Gurion to shelve his projects for the outlet to Israel's other sea. But when his armies took the Egyptian gun positions last November, his plans for Elath exploded into reality.
In three months the sun-baked settlement of mauve, cerise, orange, pink and green houses set on the vast, drab coastal flats has trebled its population, will double again to 4,000 by year's end. Three and four planeloads of newcomers, including refugees from Hungary and Poland, arrive daily. Workers sleep in shifts, some on benches. Some 500 families are waiting to come as soon as housing opens up. The place has only brackish water, no bar, no milk, no private cars, one broken-down bus, one barber, one doctor. But young Elathniks work themselves to exhaustion on new projects, getting rich quick on the fantastic (for Israel) pay of $8 for a six-hour day, plus overtime.
Since the Sinai invasion, ten merchant ships have tied up at Elath's small jetty, and the volume of cargo is expected to jump to 100,000 tons over the next four months. Bright yellow bulldozers are churning up space for a new dock, the first of half a dozen planned under a $12 million, three-year program. Goal: to be able to handle 30 million tons of oil and other cargo a year.
To link Elath up with the rest of Israel, the government is paving a highway, surveying for a railroad, laying an 8-in. pipeline north to Beersheba, and dickering with a French consortium to build a 32-in. pipeline capable of transporting 25 million tons of oil a year across to the Mediterranean and Western European markets. By March, oil should be arriving from Iran, whose government, remembering how Arab countries increased their oil output during the Mossadegh troubles, seems willing to sell oil to Israel when Arab sheiks will not. "With Elath open," exults a top Israeli official, "the major powers would for the first time have a real stake in Israel just as they have a stake in the oil states."
Through Elath, Israel also hopes soon to push its trade east of Suez up to $70 million or $80 million yearly. Through Elath it also hopes to pour out the mineral wealth of the Negev--copper from King Solomon's mines processed at a refinery at Elath, and sulphates and phosphates for the five-year plans of Asia.
A Time for Optimism. Ben-Gurion is less impassioned about Gaza, although he says he would like to use the Gaza Strip to prove that the Israelis can do right by the Arab refugees driven from their homeland (this Israeli explanation rings hollow in Arab ears). Last week he had reduced his Gaza demands to this: "The Egyptians must not return. They must never return. We won't agree unless we are made to--forcibly." He added: "I don't overestimate our strength. I suppose the U.S. or U.N. could send in armies." He stopped and chuckled. Grinning slyly, dimpling his jowls like an old grey cherub, he said: "There is an Israeli story that people used to tell back in the early days when food was short. The optimist was the hungry settler who said: 'We don't have enough food, what we should do is send a few planes to bomb Washington. Then the U.S. would invade and occupy us and everything would be all right because they will have to feed us.' The pessimist was the pioneer who replied: 'Maybe you're right. But the trouble is, we might win.'
"In this situation, I am an optimist."
Unconditional Conditions. With the injection of Gaza and Aqaba into the debate, the optimist began a war of nerves that was to last for six tense and confusing weeks. Nobody mobilized or signed up "volunteers" in embassies around the world, but diplomats frantically shuttled about, going without sleep, drafting and redrafting documents that never reached public print. Chiefs of state engaged in heavy cannonading in a rivalry for favorable world opinion.
The U.S., intent on getting the Israelis out of Egypt and Gaza without losing the good will it has been trying to build up among the Arabs, was bound by its declaration that aggression must not be rewarded. The Israelis, invoking a theory of war older than U.N., insisted that victors earn spoils.
The U.S. kept trying to say to the Israelis that it understood their demand for guarantees in Gaza and Aqaba and in some ways supported them, but--the Israelis must not expect the U.S. to say so too explicitly. So began a semantic battle requiring a conditioned Israel withdrawal involving what could not be described as conditions. The happy substitute that emerged was the word assumptions. On Feb. 11 John Foster Dulles handed Israel's Ambassador Abba Eban an aide-memoire. As soon as Israel pulled out, Dulles said, the U.S. would 1) itself proclaim the right of innocent passage in the Gulf of Aqaba, and 2) support U.N. action to ensure that the Gaza Strip would not again be used as a base for guerrilla raids on Israel. Ben-Gurion's response was so flatly negative that President Eisenhower cut short a Georgia vacation and took to the air to restate the U.S. proposals and warn of "pressure" if Israel should fail to cooperate.
A Knowledge of Fear. Ben-Gurion is a history-minded realist who accepts setbacks rather than permanent defeats. When the greatest powers of East and West alike warned him to pull back his triumphant armies from Sinai last fall, he bowed to necessity and paraphrased to his Parliament Plato's definition of courage as "a special kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared, and not to fear what ought not to be feared." In reply to Eisenhower's broadcast, Ben-Gurion made an impassioned defense of his reasons for standing out against "the elected leader of the American nation . . . one of the most illustrious men of our generation." But he also quietly dropped his demand that Israel administer Gaza: Israel's main concern was that the Egyptians should not be allowed back "directly or indirectly."
With a stern "Be strong, have courage," the Premier sent Ambassador Eban back to Washington with new instructions. Then, pale and drawn from the effects of pneumonia, after a PT-boat ride two months ago in the Aqaba straits, Ben-Gurion went before his Cabinet to ask new flexibility in his terms. Less than a month before, the Knesset had put through a fire-eating resolution committing Israel never to give up either the gulf or Gaza. A Knesset debate had to be postponed one whole day while Ben-Gurion argued with politicians who insisted on all-out defiance. "The devil with this," growled B-G. "The devil with the coalition." He threatened to quit and form a new government. The Knesset debate that night was dogged ("The noose is tightening round our neck." cried one bearded, skull-capped orator), but Ben-Gurion's threat of resignation at last effected a compromise that gave the Prime Minister the leeway he needed.
Enter the French. Arriving in Washington, Eban informed Dulles that Ben-Gurion was now willing, "more or less," to go along with the U.S. proposal for Aqaba, but wanted some such arrangement for Gaza as Canada's Lester Pearson and Britain's Selwyn Lloyd were working on. This would install U.N. troops in Gaza while creating a U.N. administration of the strip from which both Israelis and Egyptians would be excluded. By this time the Arab-bloc nations had introduced a U.N. resolution calling for sanctions against Israel, and the U.S. had prepared a milder one to the same effect. Dulles suggested that the Israelis take their case to U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. Eban failed to make a sale: if Israel expected protection in Aqaba under the 1949 armistice, then the armistice also applied in Gaza, which meant that Egypt had a right to be in Gaza.
At this point, France's Premier Guy Mollet and Foreign Minister Christian Pineau arrived in Washington. Out of its long hostilities against Arab rebels in North Africa, France has become Israel's one staunch supporter in the U.N. Pineau submitted to Dulles a draft resolution whereby 1) Israel would withdraw unconditionally, and 2) Israel's rights would be reserved under the Charter's self-defense clause if Egypt should go back to raids and blockades against her.
"Stay Away from New York." Dulles accepted the French draft as an acceptable alternative to the U.S. resolution, and next day Eban and Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir flew to Washington for emergency consultations with Dulles and Pineau. After a 3-hr.-10-min. conversation with Dulles, Eban informed Ben-Gurion that the U.S. now favored the idea of international administration for Gaza too. Eban turned up at a Washington diplomatic party, was asked why he was in Washington instead of in New York at the U.N. Cracked Eban:"The more you stay away from there, the more you solve problems." Optimism filled the air. Mrs. Meir, the onetime Milwaukee schoolteacher, told a Manhattan "Labor-Israel" dinner: "This is a great evening, and [tomorrow] may be a great day. I wish I could tell you more."
In Jerusalem, on receipt of Eban's report, Ben-Gurion sent out motorcycle cops to catch his ministers on the highways and in their village homes, even had a message flashed on a Jerusalem movie screen to summon one minister. When the Cabinet finally assembled, Ben-Gurion an nounced his decision: to evacuate Gaza. "What guarantees have we got?" cried a minister. "None," replied Ben-Gurion. Then he told of the support developing in Washington and New York for an international regime for Gaza. "They have shown their understanding of our problems," he said. "We must show understanding too." The argument raged till 2 a.m., when B-G forced the decisive vote. It was 11 to 4. Knowing that he faced a government crisis and public outcry. B-G imposed the strictest news blackout on the decision.
Next day, in consultation with the U.S.. Golda Meir drew up the statement she would make to the Assembly, then cabled it to Israel for Cabinet approval. Because of the time differential and deciphering delays, the Israeli Cabinet session did not get under way until Friday at 3 p.m. Ministers argued until after the evening star rose--the first time in Israel's stormy history that a .Cabinet had ever extended its deliberations into the Sabbath. The two Religious Front Ministers were gravely troubled about the Sabbath; four holdout ministers were sullen and bitter about B-G's decision. Just as bitter were Moshe Dayan and his army staff when Ben-Gurion called them into his living room afterwards and informed them.
Too Many Assumptions? In New York Golda Meir went to the Assembly tribune before packed galleries to announce Israel's decision: "Full and prompt withdrawal from the Sharm el Sheikh area and the Gaza Strip, in compliance with the resolution of Feb. 2." Israel's action, she explained in matter-of-fact tones, was based on three "assumptions": 1) that freedom of navigation would prevail in the Gulf of Aqaba; 2) that the Gaza Strip would be administered by the UNEF "until there is a peace settlement ... or definite agreement on the future of the Gaza"; 3) that Israel reserved the right under the Article 51 self-defense guarantee of the U.N. Charter to send its ships through the gulf "by armed force" if there should be interference, and to "defend its rights" in the Gaza Strip if raids should start again.
The U.S.'s Henry Cabot Lodge followed immediately with a general endorsement of Israel's decision. But on the future of the Gaza Strip he limited the U.S. commitment to upholding Hammarskjold's view that it must be worked out "within the framework of the armistice agreement" of 1949. France's Guillaume Georges-Picot, speaking later, explicitly endorsed the Israeli "assumptions" as "legitimate and reasonable."
By Radio & Press. At 8:30 next morning Ben-Gurion snapped on his bedside portable transistor radio and glumly listened to the news of the U.N. session. He was startled by the Lodge declaration: under those terms, the Egyptians could conceivably return to Gaza practically as soon as the Israelis pulled out.
As the word of withdrawal spread through Israel, settlers in the exposed Negev settlements stirred in anger. With Israel's army in Gaza, they had slept easier of late. In Ben-Gurion's old community of Sde Boker wooden watchtowers had been left unmanned, and herders had lost the habit of taking guns when they traipsed out with their flocks. Was this all to be undone?
The right-wing opposition party (Herut) called for nationwide demonstrations in protest against withdrawal, and its leader, Menahem Beigin, asked for immediate elections. Two restive coalition parties threatened open revolt. Ben-Gurion himself, after announcing laconically that the government supported Mrs. Meir's U.N. announcement, ordered Army Chief Dayan to postpone his scheduled conference with UNEF Commander Eedson L. M. Burns, and cabled Washington for "further explanation" of Lodge's U.N. statement.
Next day, as Eban paid a rush call to Dulles' home (and was assured that the U.S. was not proposing to go back to the way things were before November in Gaza), Ben-Gurion read in the newspaper a letter to him from President Eisenhower expressing the President's faith that "Israel will have no cause to regret" its decision to withdraw. On this basis Ben-Gurion was prepared to ask the Knesset for a vote of confidence this week. Said an Israeli: "An unyielding stand means a U.N. crisis. Yielding means a Knesset crisis. For Ben-Gurion it is always crisis."
"Hold Tight." Throughout this whole drama of public proclamations and private exchanges, the official U.S. attitude had been curiously complicated. At times the U.S. had seemed to be reminding Israel with oversolicitous friendliness of the sentiment for sanctions building up in the U.N. Assembly. Yet, when it came right down to it, practically everybody except the Arabs disliked the idea of sanctions, and the feeling began to develop in Israel that perhaps the U.S. Administration felt more strongly about applying "pressure" (its word for sanctions) to its Israeli friends than anybody else. In fact, early in the week Golda Meir had come right out with it: "I don't think there will be any sanctions. I don't think anybody does. Nobody wants them." But the U.S. had a timetable for its new Middle East moves, and there was no getting on to the next phase until the Israelis had been somehow shoehorned out of Arab territory that they had illegally occupied.
Many Americans were inclined to think that the Israelis had put themselves in the wrong by going into Egypt, and ought to get out of there. But in the U.S. as well as elsewhere around the world, sympathy had built up for Ben-Gurion's position. Last week the Israeli government in Jerusalem and its consulates overseas reported receiving thousands of letters of support from places as far apart as Bangkok and Bangor, Me., Stockholm and Santa Ana, Calif. Samples: "Don't surrender to Nasserism"; "Stick to your guns and positions"; "Call Ike's bluff"; "Don't give an inch"; "Stand pat"; "Hold tight."
The Fruits of Victory. If Israelis could accept "assumptions" which were widely approved, instead of gun positions held in defiance of U.N. resolutions, they would not come out of their retreat at all badly.
They have shown that they can lick the strongest of their neighbors. They have shown up the extent of Soviet penetration in the Middle East by capturing huge stockpiles of tanks, guns and motorized equipment. They have shown up the hollowness of Nasser's vaunted four-power pact, signed just before the Sinai invasion, by which Syrian, Saudi and Jordanian troops were supposed to march under Egyptian command. And the first frightened session of desert kings that convened after the Sinai rout in Beirut last November signaled a shift which may well make last week's Cairo session the last get-together of "positive-neutrality" Arabs.
The Fruits of Retreat. Finally, in any assessment of what the Israelis win or lose by giving in, their most significant gain may be the degree to which President Eisenhower has now committed the U.S. in the Middle East. Lacking a steadfast and mature Middle East policy, the U.S. in the past tended to follow the British lead there long after it ceased to in other parts of the world. All that ended in the wreckage of Suez, and the U.S. has moved to fill the Middle East "power deficit" (the State Department avoids the word "vacuum" as offensive to Arab nationalist pride). The new U.S. policy, of which the Eisenhower Doctrine is the core, is by far the most important extension of foreign policy enunciated by the present Administration. In one sense, what Ben-Gurion accepted last week was worth more than what Dulles had suggested back on Feb. 11. What had begun as another several-sided statement by a Secretary of State had been reinforced and made authoritative by the public affirmations of the President of the U.S.
By his Israeli intervention, Ike is more committed than the U.S. perhaps originally intended to a peaceful and prosperous Israel in the Middle East. When the President of the U.S. summons the restive leaders of the Senate to a tough-talking session and then goes on the air to say what the U.S. is prepared to do to see that the Israelis do not have to face the same aggression again from Egypt, this amounts to more than sounding words of sympathy. The personal messages that Ike sent Ben-Gurion mark a further degree of commitment.
All in all, if the Israelis do finally with draw, that will be a victory for the TJ.S. and for the U.N. But the U.S. will also have obtained a concession from the Israelis, which in turn implies an obligation on the part of the U.S. Though the tortuous indirections of the statements and documents made public at the U.N. contain no verbal promises, the understanding is nevertheless as clear as it can be in the circumstances. Israelis will henceforth go down to the sea in ships from Elath as in Solomon's day and sail the Gulf of Aqaba with the right of "free and innocent passage," and the maritime nations of the world, among them the U.S., have freely conceded their right to do so. For David Ben-Gurion, obviously, this is a victory for which even Gaza may be forgone.
*Though only two weeks before he had pro claimed: "We will never start a war. We do not believe that wars provide comprehensive solutions to historic problems."
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