ISRAEL: Provocation in the Desert

In Palestine last week, an earnest gesture of peace became a clever pretext for war. Last September, U.N.’s Count Bernadotte made a ruling on the hotly contested supply routes in the northern tip of the Negeb desert. The Egyptian army, he said, could use the roads for six hours each afternoon to supply their forces in the interior across an east-west road running under Jewish guns. The Jews, in turn, would have six hours each morning to supply their settlements in the Negeb across a north-south road blocked by Arab troops. When the Egyptians rejected the ruling, it became a dead letter. Since then, the Jews have supplied their settlements by night airlifts to secret landing strips in the desert.

This worked all right through the summer, but now the rainy season is approaching; floods from the hills of Hebron will soon make the airlift impossible. Ben-Gurion met last week with his chiefs and decided to act. Having ordered picked Israeli troops to the Negeb front, the government (as required by the Bernadotte ruling) informed U.N. truce officials that they would move a convoy over the disputed highway between the stipulated hours. When the convoy moved down the highway, the Egyptians (as the Israelis had foreseen) opened fire. The second U.N. truce came to a blazing end.

The fighting that followed was in deadly earnest. The same evening, as prearranged, Israeli bombers took off on what the government called an “action to open and keep open the convoy routes to and in the Negeb.” Some of the heaviest bomb-loads yet dropped in the Holy

Land fell on Gaza (seat of the Mufti’s new Arab government in Palestine). Arab forces opened up on Jewish settlements in the Negeb with 100-pound guns. Both sides rejected a U.N. cease fire order.

At week’s end Ben-Gurion was beaming. For the first time since May, Israel had a wide, firm land corridor to her settlements in the Negeb. Israeli forces were also hammering closer & closer to Gaza, chief Arab supply base on the coast. Politician Ben-Gurion also hoped that U.N. delegates in Paris, now discussing Palestine, would agree with Israel that the best solution was an old formula: possession is nine points of the law.