THE MIDDLE EAST: The Trojan Horse

In the port of Alexandria last week, at piers sealed off from prying eyes, Egyptian longshoremen carefully uncrated a Trojan horse. It came from Czechoslovakia, but bore Moscow’s greeting card.

The Trojan horse was not immediately recognizable as such. It took the shape of four shiploads of Soviet-bloc arms, but the speed of its arrival bespoke a long preparation by the Russians; about 15 Communist technicians were said to be already on hand, and more were on the way. Alexandria’s airport was closed to civil traffic, reportedly because some 50 MIG-15 jet fighters were being uncrated there. There was talk of six Soviet-made submarines for Egypt, plus plenty of Czech-made tanks and small arms, all at bargain prices.

Mission to Paris. The Communist arms deal with Egypt was a large and astute coup for the Russians, in effect enabling them to leapfrog the northern-tier defense (Turkey, Iraq, Iran) just set up by the West. It promised to be an embarrassment to the West, but to neighboring Israel it threatened to be a disaster. Israel’s Pre mier Moshe Sharett rushed to Paris and then to Geneva to try to get help from the Western foreign ministers. He told them that his people were so wrought up over the Egyptian deal that they were seriously thinking of launching a preventive war (“I hope to God that Israel will not be driven to this”) before the Egyptians could turn their superior new weapons on them. He pleaded with the Western ministers to i) guarantee his country’s borders, and 2) sell it arms at least equal to those its enemies were unpacking.

He got a sympathetic ear but not full satisfaction. U.S. Secretary Dulles said flatly that the West could never join in a Middle East arms race, and he warned Sharett that in such a competition, Israel, with its 1.7 million would reach its “absorption point” quicker than the Arabs, with their 50 million. In such a competition the Arabs might well find the cohesion they now lack, and might become increasingly dependent on the Russians. In this view the Big Three foreign ministers were unanimous. Successively they reaffirmed to Sharett the 1950 guarantee by which the U.S., Britain and France promise to use force if necessary to thwart all-out hostility by either Israel or the Arabs against one another.

Blood on the Borders. Back of this declaration was the U.S. belief that Egypt’s Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser himself fears the deep involvement with the Russians, and a pious hope that Nasser will stand by his promise to U.S. Ambassador Henry Byroade not to use his new arms to attack Israel. Nasser himself, however, was still flexing his muscles. Last week he added a military defense alliance with Saudi Arabia to a similar pact just signed with Syria. Three days after Israelis raided a border post held by his Syrian allies (killing three). Nasser’s troops attacked an Israeli southern border “checkpoint.” killing one. Next night 300 Israeli soldiers struck back at an Egyptian camel-corps post at Kuntila. killed five Egyptians, took 20 prisoners and fired 17 trucks.

As details filtered back to Cairo, Nasser held a four-hour strategy conference with his army commander. Along the shallow ditch that marks the Gaza Strip frontier, Egyptian artillery opened fire, and shells rained on an Israeli desert settlement. Said an Egyptian army spokesman: “We are ready for any eventuality.” Said Sharett: “It is not a case of a preventive war—it’s a case of meeting aggression.”

The feeling of most informed onlookers, including Canadian Major General Edson

L. M. Burns, the U.N. mediator in Palestine, was that there would not be war. They counted on ultimate sanity on each side. Whether sanity would continue to prevail was a moot point, when there is such passionate enmity, and both sides have guns.