In the Chair

Every fall, as delegates to the 82-nation U.N. General Assembly troop into the glass palace on Manhattan's East River, the world undergoes its equivalent of the annual visit to the dentist. Last week, as the Assembly's 14th session got into full swing, the patient's mouth was wide open and, amid plenty of hollering and yelping, virtually all of mankind's political cavities, abscesses and fillings were mercilessly probed.

The first muted outcries came when the Assembly jabbed perfunctorily at the tender old question of Red China's admission to the U.N. But this year India's V. K. Krishna Menon, whose government is unhappy about Red China's aggressive moves along India's northern frontier, put up only a pro forma fight for Peking. With a sigh of relief, the Assembly quickly adopted a U.S. resolution barring Communist Chinese membership by practically the same vote as last year, 44 to 29.

More painful was the Arab-Israeli infection, which flared up anew as Israel's Foreign Minister Golda Meir rose to demand "collective moral pressure" by the U.N. to enforce its 1951 decision condemning Egypt's refusal to let ships carrying Israeli goods pass through the Suez Canal. Indignantly, Golda Meir reported that the Danish freighter Inge Toft, which was stopped by the Egyptians last May with a cargo originating in Israel, "is being held to this day at Port Said." The United Arab Republic's Farid Zeineddine promptly asked for the floor and, hardily ignoring the U.N. ruling and the verdict of two Arab-Israeli wars, shouted: "The question of free passage through the Suez Canal is an aspect of the Palestine question"--i.e., the continued existence of Israel.

On the Nerve. From then on, the twinges came hard and fast. Neutral Ireland, to the dismay of neutral India, sought support for an Assembly resolution branding Red China a violator of human rights by its repression in Tibet. Ghana's Ako-Adjei charged that Nyasaland is "a police state under British rule." Belgium's Pierre Wigny announced that his country is "now organizing political democracy" in the riot-swept Congo, and Austria's Dr. Bruno Kreisky warned that if Italy does not grant autonomy to the German-speaking people of the South Tyrol--an area that Italy acquired as World War I spoils--he would demand U.N. intervention.

Predictably, it was an Arab who exposed the rawest nerve of all. Without waiting for the Algerian rebels themselves to reply to De Gaulle's new peace plan (see below), Saudi Arabia's Ahmad Shukairy denounced France, De Gaulle, the new peace plan, and the French military in Algeria, whom he labeled torturers "with a thirst for blood." At this, the entire French delegation walked out.

Three Times a Day. At week's end the Assembly was busy probing the threat of nuclear war. Politely but firmly, the U.N. orators made clear that they were not interested in the kind of general disarmament proposed by Nikita Khrushchev fortnight ago (TIME, Sept. 28), unless it was accompanied by controls. "The hard fact," said Norway's Halvard Lange, "seems to be that no government feels it can take the responsibility for starting on the road to disarmament unless it can feel assured, on the basis of an effective control system, that the security of its country is not being jeopardized." Hopefully, Ireland's Foreign Minister Frank Aiken revived the idea of a U.N. standing army in a world of general disarmament. This won him dutiful applause, but as a practical proposition, it had roughly the value of the perennial resolution, on leaving the dentist's chair, to brush one's teeth three times a day for ever after.

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