Sound & Fury

The Middle East has undergone so many Arab-Israeli alarums since Israel became a state 19 years ago that even the antagonists often find it difficult to take one another seriously. They huff and they puff, they bluster and threaten, they move troops around like toy soldiers, but--with the single tragic exception of the war over Suez in 1956 --their bravado has rarely amounted to more than local skirmishes. Last week the area once more seemed on the brink of disaster--and this time the huffing and puffing was more serious. In the closest that Israel and the Arab countries have come to all-out war since Suez, armies everywhere were moving across the sere, seared sands of the Middle East.

Syria's radical Baathist regime sent its tanks southward to back up troops already massed along the Israeli border, mobilized its untrained "People's Army" to back up the tanks and ordered students to form 150-man "battalions" to back up the army. The armed forces of Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and tiny Kuwait were placed on combat alert. Egypt called up its 100,000-man reserves, drafted half a million students into a civil defense corps and warned all doctors, hospitals and pharmacies to be ready for emergency duties. Israeli cities were strangely empty, just as they had been on the eve of the Suez campaign: most able-bodied men had been called to their reserve units and were manning guns and tanks on the country's borders.

The most ominous move of all came along the 117-mile Sinai desert frontier between Israel and Egypt. Ever since Suez, the frontier has been guarded by a 3,400-man United Nations peace-keeping force whose only assignment has been to keep the two hostile nations from each other's throats. Last week Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered the U.N. troops to withdraw--"for their own protection"--not only from the border but from Egyptian soil entirely. Into their positions moved an Egyptian force estimated at 60,000 men, including one armored and four infantry divisions. It was the first time in ten years that Egyptian and Israeli troops had been in each other's gun sights, and it came at a time when the Arab-Israeli conflict, charged on both sides with the emotions of a holy war, had reached the flash point of hysteria. To U.N. Secretary General U Thant, the situation was "more menacing than at any time since the fall of 1956." At week's end he planned to fly to Cairo to try and ease the tensions.

Bad Pupils. Both sides are responsible for the present crisis. Israel has never seriously tried to make peace with the Arabs, from whose land it was carved. The Arabs have never admitted Israel's right to exist. Instead, both sides have engaged in border terrorism that has only served to deepen the hatred between them. Last November, in reprisal for guerrilla raids, Israeli tanks whipped into Jordan--one of its least aggressive neighbors--and shot up a town. Only a month ago, the Israeli air force flew into Syria--which trains and finances most Arab "commando" units --and shot down six enemy MIG-21s.

Both raids were extremely embarrassing to Nasser in his self-appointed role as protector of the Arab world. But they failed to stop Arab terrorist operations, which by last month had risen to an average of four incidents a day. "The Syrians are not good pupils," said Israel's army chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin. "They do not learn from their mistakes." Unless the terrorism stopped immediately, warned Premier Levi Eshkol at the beginning of last week, "we may have to adopt measures no less drastic than those of April."

Telegraphed Punch. To the Damascus regime, Eshkol's meaning was all too clear. Syria declared a state of emergency, instructed its ambassador to the U.N., George Tomeh, to announce that "Syria expects an attack from Israel" --and demanded that Nasser come to its rescue. Nasser has no desire to take on the powerful Israeli army, which he knows is more than a match for all the Arab forces combined. His military interests, furthermore, lie not in Israel but in Yemen and in the South Arabian Federation, which is due to receive its independence from Britain next year. Despite his reluctance, however, Nasser had no choice but to respond to the Syrian S O S--or lose what little prestige he still has as the leader of the Arab left.

For all the sound and fury, there was little chance of a calculated explosion in the Middle East. If Israel planned a strike against Syria, it had lost its chance by telegraphing its punch. Both sides, in fact, were making it plain that they would move only if the enemy moved first. It was nevertheless a dangerous situation. All along the Israeli frontier, any trigger-happy soldier on either side could start a major conflagration. In the Gaza Strip, Ahmed Shukairy, the fire-eating boss of the Palestine Liberation Organization--which has nothing to lose and everything to gain from a war with Israel--announced that commando raids on Israel would continue unabated. In the air, with the fighter pilots of Israel, Egypt and Syria on constant patrol, the dangers were perhaps even greater. The Israeli air force last week even fired warning shots at the white U.N. command plane of Major General Indar Jit Rikhye as it made a short hop within the Gaza Strip, claiming that it had violated Israeli air space.

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