Israel

on the World Today

BECAUSE of the nature of the troubles along the borders between Israel and its neighbors, it is difficult in the current crisis to sift fact from fiction. By the time the reports of a clash go out over the press cables, the details are magnified beyond all proportion. A dispatch on the front page of the New York Times, for instance, told of a major assault on a Jordan village by 100 welltrained attackers. Jordan officials later admitted privately that perhaps 10 amateur raiders had been involved in what was, at most, a haphazard attack.

What is going on is essentially a propaganda war. The battlefields are the newspaper offices of the world. This is perhaps the first war in history in which each side boasts of its own casualty list and disparages that of the enemy. Condemnations by the four UN Mixed Armistice Commissions have little practical effect on the governments involved except in so far as they are lotted up on the scoreboard for the world to see. A thin, scared little Arab girl wounded in the cheek by a stray Israeli bullet; a dozen pedigreed sheep, imported to Israel by air all the way from Australia and then stolen across the Egyptian border the likes of these represent victories for the aggrieved party in the battle of the headlines.

Byroade’s counsel of moderation

In editorials and reports of political speeches in the newspapers of the Middle East on both sides of the border this summer, public enemy number one has appeared to be an American, Henry Byroade, Assistant Secretary of Slate for Near Eastern All-airs. In two speeches which be delivered, one in Dayton before the Council on World Affairs, and one in Philadelphia before the American Council for Judaism, he laid down the outline of a long-range policy for America in the troubled area east of the Mediterranean. In the first place, he said, there is no hope of a quick peace between Jews and Arabs; their ideological positions are too far apart. Peace, however, must be our ultimate object, if only to prevent the entire area, with its people and its oil, from falling prey to Soviet imperialism.

Each side must he encouraged to retreat from its position, Byroade said. The Israeli must cease to look on their country as the eventual Zionist refuge of 12 million Jews. The present borders of Israel obviously ran hold no more than a fifth of that number. The prospect of such a mass immigration is a constant territorial threat to the Arab world. The Arabs, on the other hand, must eventually recognize the existence of* Israel as a fait accompli. Talk of an Arab attack upon Israel “with the purpose of driving her into the sea,” Byroade pointed out, is completely unrealistic.

On both sides of the truce line the reaction to the speeches was immediate and intense. Israeli tub-thumpers proclaimed that their valiant little democracy was being abandoned to its fate by the oil-hungry Republicans. Arab editors assured their readers that their nations would never agree to peace on any terms. A Jordan cabinet., long overdue for a fall, picked the day after Byroade’s second address to resign as “a protest against BrilishAmerican imperialism.”

The burden of the refugees

On the Arab side of the fence the basic difficulty lies in the Palestinian refugees and their state of mind. Nearly a million fugitives from what is now Israel are scattered through the area. Official figures of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) put 465,000 refugees receiving rations in Jordan; 200,000 in the Gaza Strip, the section of Palestine now under Egyptian control; 107,000 in Lebanon; and 80,000 in Svria.

Physically, the refugees have no bed of roses. Their collections of tents and mud lints resemble any of the displaced persons’ camps of the last ten years. But in many cases, miserable as they are, the refugees are better off than the permanent residents of neighboring villages. The concentration camp level of 1.500 calories a flay isn’t far out of line with the normal Middle Eastern diet. The minds of the refugees are more of a problem than their bodies.

All they want is to go home. Over and over again they give the same answer to interviewers. Their thousand-year-old tie with the soil of Palestine is their strongest motivating force. UNRWA projects to give work to refugees have to be presented as temporary, and each refugee must he assured that accepting a job won’t prejudice his right to repatriation, “Settlement schemes” were a failure among the camp dwellers until their official title was changed to “self-supporting schemes.”

In Jordan, where more than half the voters are Palestinians (“Most Jordanians,” the official phrase has it), no politician dares to preach moderation toward Israel. Even though the Jordan government exists only by the grace of a $50 million annual subsidy from Great Britain, every elected official is anti-British and anti-Western, at least for public consumpt ion.

Grist for the Soviet mill

There are a number of theoretical solutions for the refugee problem. The Jordan Valley Authority, financed chiefly by the United States through a UN agency, could irrigate enough new land to resettle perhaps a third of the homeless. Iraq and Syria are underpopulated; they have good land waiting to he settled when it becomes politically expedient for the governments to permit it.

In Israel itself most of the onetime Arab villages have been occupied by Jewish immigrants, in many cases themselves refugees from the Arab countries of North Africa, from Iraq, and from Yemen. But many other villages are on steep, rocky hillsides, surrounded by the tiny terraces which Arab toil developed over the centuries. The Israeli scorn such land. It would be no loss to anyone if the Arab owners were allowed to return to their two-foot-wide wheat fields and to their ancient, gnarled olive trees.

Whatever changes are made in the lives of the refugees will have to be proposed tactfully. Out of pride, the Arab will cut off his nose to spite his face. If he thinks his moving to a fertile farm in the Jordan Valley will help the Israeli, he will insist on remaining in his refugee tent to moan before the world about the rocky halfacre of which he has been unjustly robbed by the Jews.

A solution for the problem of the refugees has seemed more urgent than ever this summer because of the new tack taken by Soviet foreign policy toward the Middle East. Apparently the Kremlin has decided to jettison for good its support of Jewish interests, and to shift to hacking t he Arabs. In the Security Council this spring Vishinsky voted against Israel on every count. This earned him a joyous, if semi-humorous, cable of thanks from the Jordan parliament.

The Jordan legislators are all landowners who would be among the first hanged if the Communists ever got in a position to stage Vishinsky-style purges in the Arab world. If these men begin to think kindly of the Soviet Union, how much more likely are the refugees to listen to the words of agents who whisper through the camps that Red troops will lead them back to their homes.

Financing Isrsel’s imports

The morale of the Israeli is high. Border villagers take for granted that they must guard their lands and their homes from Arab infiltrators. Most Israeli accept the tension along the fromier as a semi-permanent inconvenience, but few show any basic fear of being “pushed into the sea.”In the minds of its citizens Israel is a going proposition.

From the economic viewpoint, however, there is a grave question how the proposition is to keep going. After six years the country is still able to cover only one fifth of its imports with exports. Total value of its products sold abroad last year — about $60 million — barely covered the imports of food alone.

The bulk of the remainder of the country’s foreign exchange budget is made up from three sources: Ended States government aid ($52.5 million for 1053—54), German repartitions ($62 million annually), and gifts and loans from Jewish organizations around the world (about $75 million last year, two thirds of it from the United States).

Point Four aid from the American government is almost certainly going to grow smaller every year, and fade away about 1960. The Uonn government originally agreed to continue for ten years its payments of reparations for losses suffered by the German Jewish community under Hitler. Only the most optimistic Israeli today believe the payments will actually go on that long. That leaves only one solid prop under the ailing economy: the charity of Jews around the world.

It is conceivable that Israel will eventually balance its foreign trade position. If the Arab world adopts a more friendly outlook toward its neighbor, Israel can become a sort of Switzerland of the Middle East. It would be an ideal manufacturing center for the finished goods the underdeveloped area needs so badly, liut for the moment that rosy prospect is nothing but a dream.

Some improvement is in sight. This year’s trade figures should be the best ever. A new sulphuric aeid and fertilizer plant in Haifa, largest unit outside Europe and America, marks a major advance in industrial development. An excellent citrus crop came along at the very lime when the Spanish orchards suffered from winter freezes. And the spring crop of tourists overflowed Israel’s hotels.

But there’s still a lot of gap to be narrowed. Economic planners have come up with no solutions for the high cost of production, caused by the Western standard of living which at least half of all Israeli insist on. Nor have they halted the inflation which has dropped the free exchange value of the Israeli pound in six years from $£.80 to its present low estate, less than 36 cents. Nor can they control the black market, based on gift packages and “scrip dollars” from America. Nor can they persuade foreign investors to sink real money into private industrial development of the socialist-governed country.

The causes of border tension

The only solution seems to be a permanent peace with the Arab world. This leads the discussion back again to t be truce line around Israel, and to the border tension. The troubled areas lie in the bulge in the center of I lie line where the Jordan truce line approaches to within S miles of the sea, and in the Gaza Strip, 50 miles south of Tel Aviv.

Who is the actual aggressor? The official Israel charge, convincingcnough when examined from a vantage point in Tel Aviv, is that the Arabs want war; that Jordan is deliberately inciting infiltrators to terrorize the people of Israel; that Egypt is building up tension along the Gaza Strip to cloak its domestic crises; and that the weak governments of Syria and Lebanon make wild accusations about Israel to distract the attention of their citizens. The Arabs, in return, charge that Israel is looking for a chance to expand; and that any day now the Israeli army may strike for the Jordan River, or even for Cairo and Damascus.

Many neutral observers who have visited both sides of the line end studied the situation from both angles hold a view somewhere in between. They consider that, while Israel wants peace in the long run, for the moment the border tension is all to its advantage. It keeps the disturbance in the Middle East before the eyes of the Eniled Nations and of the Western powers. Someday, Israel hopes, the powers will have to step in and force the Arabs to make a permanent peace, if only to keep the area out of Russia’s itching hands.

The recent difficulties along the Gaza Strip have consisted mostly in shooting affrays between rival patrols across tlie line. With tempers so hot it is impossible on most occasions to say who fired first or which side is putting more pressure to keep the border aflame. Neutral observers in Cairo are convinced, however, that the Egyptian government at this crucial stage in its affairs wants no trouble with Israel.

The Israeli charges against Syria and Lebanon stand up belter. At least once a week the Damascus and Beirut papers scream to the heavens about “concentrations” ot Israeli troops along their borders. No observer on the Israel side has yet caught a glimpse of these alleged battalions and divisions. If they are there, they must be among the best camouflaged troops in history.

There seems to be little actual danger that the border tension will build up to a point where a real war will break out. The Arab states know Israel is stronger than they. Only a minority of the Israeli think their country could get away with a “preventive" war. The genuine menace is, as By made pointed out, that until the constant irritation of frontier incidents is cleared up, and until the fear on both sides of the border dies away, there is little hope of even a start being made toward a stable peace in the Middle East.