Skirmishes & Minisummits

Everywhere I arrived, I found men expecting me to supply them with the means to start the war all over again as soon as possible. Everywhere I left, I left men whom I had quieted down. And everywhere we will keep our hands on the key to the arms that we are giving them.

Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny confided this assessment of his recent mission to the Arab countries to a visiting French diplomat in Moscow. Despite the Russian hand on the key, there were daily skirmishes last week between Egyptian and Israeli forces stationed along the Suez Canal. Egyptian artillery shelled Israeli positions on the east bank. The Israelis replied with withering rocket and cannon fire, finally sent in jets to strafe Egyptian artillery positions. They also sank two Soviet-made torpedo boats off the Gaza coast. As the week ended, the two sides were lobbing shells and bombs at each other across the canal in the heaviest battle since the U.N. imposed a cease-fire on June 10. In the air over Suez, the Israelis downed seven Egyptian planes, conceded one loss themselves. On the ground, scores of Israeli and Egyptian soldiers were killed or wounded in the artillery barrages. And, for the first time since the ceasefire, scattered shooting broke out across the Israeli-Jordanian line.

The U.N., which won approval from both Egypt and Israel to station truce observers along the canal, hopes that the situation will cool off at Suez when the observers take up their posts this week, though the Israelis believe that the observers are likely to be ineffectual. The truce teams, which will be composed mainly of Finnish and Swedish officers, will eventually number about 30 men to cover the 107-mile front at Suez. U.N. truce observers have been patrolling the cease-fire line in the Golan Heights 40 miles south of Damascus for the past six weeks.

Horrifying Thing. For the first time since the war began, a sizable number of Arab leaders met last week in a series of whirling minisummits to discuss "nullifying the effects of Zionist aggression." First, Algerian President Houari Boumediene flew into Cairo and excited Cairo crowds with a shrill cry for an immediate resumption of the war with Israel. He was shortly joined in Cairo by Jordan's King Hussein, who privately pleaded for some sort of accommodation with Israel--but got nowhere with his fellow Arabs. After he flew home to Amman, the leaders of the Arab left all converged on Cairo; Syria's Noureddin Attassi, Iraqi Strongman Abdel Aref and Sudanese President Ismail el Azhari joined Nasser and Boumediene for two days of nonstop talks in ornate Kubbeh Palace.

Among such irrational hawks as Aref and Boumediene, Nasser sounded almost like a dove. He counseled against a renewal of fighting with Israel, the skirmishing at Suez notwithstanding, until the Arabs were rearmed and united--a condition that is not imminent. Nasser realizes, however, that he cannot coo too loudly without running the danger of being brushed aside as leader of the Arab left by someone like Boumediene. Even the most hawkish leader at the Cairo conference must have known deep down a horrifying thing: that if full-scale fighting broke out again, the Israeli army could undoubtedly occupy Cairo, Amman and Damascus within 48 hours. There would be practically nothing the weakened Arabs could do about it.

Shrewd Move. Nor did there seem to be much that the Arabs or their friends in the U.N. could do for now about Israel's territorial gains, even though Israel may eventually have to give most of them up. The General Assembly at week's end voted another demand that Israel revoke its annexation of Jerusalem's Old City, but the Israelis seemed unmoved. They shrewdly tried to take the edge off the issue by seeking Vatican approval for an Israeli plan to place the Christian holy places in the Old City under independent religious control, perhaps by some nonpolitical body such as the Knights of Malta, which was founded shortly before the First Crusade to free Jerusalem from the Moslems. The Israelis also intend to offer extraterritorial rights to the Moslem shrines in Jerusalem, though at this stage the Arabs are unwilling even to contemplate such a solution. If Israel insists on keeping Old Jerusalem, they claim, the Arab war against Israel will become a holy war of all Islam and its 465 million people.

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