ISRAEL: Massacre at Kibya

The sullen enmity between infant Israel and its Arab neighbors, long acknowledged and long passed over by Western diplomacy, erupted last week with a violence that could no longer be ignored.

At 9:30 one night, most of the people were just going to bed in the Jordanian village of Kibya, 20 miles northwest’ of Jerusalem, and a mile and a half beyond the Israeli frontier. A light still burned in the village coffeehouse, where a few late gossipers were preparing to depart; on this quiet night, as usual, everyone put his trust in the U.N. “truce” and 30 skimpily armed Jordanian national guardsmen. Suddenly, Israeli artillery, previously zeroed onto target, opened up, and a 600-man battalion of uniformed Israeli regulars swept across the border to encircle the village. For the next 2^ hours the town shuddered under shell bursts and small-arms fire; villagers, screaming and milling, rushed out to the surrounding fields and olive groves.

Then the guardsmen’s ammo (25 rounds per man) gave out, and the Israelis moved into Kibya with rifle and Sten guns. They shot every man. woman and child they could find, then turned their fire on the cattle. After that, they dynamited 42 houses, a school and a mosque. The cries of the dying could be heard amid the explosions. The villagers huddled in the grass could see Israeli soldiers slouching in the doorways of.their homes, smoking and joking, their young faces illuminated by the flames. By 3 a.m., the Israelis’ work was done, and they leisurely withdrew.

At dawn, the villagers crept out of the grass and made for the smoldering ruins, looking desperately for a husband, a wife, a child. They crowded around a young girl whose body sprawled grotesquely, forefinger raised to heaven as Moslems do when they say: “There is only one God, and Mohammed is his prophet.” An old man dug furiously in the debris, occasionally looked up, terror in his eyes, then laughed hysterically. Once he shouted to the sky: “Allah! I have no relations now. Why didn’t you leave me one person?” Sixty-six died that night; eleven from one family, ten of another. It was the bloodiest night of border warfare since the 1949 armistice—the armistice that won Dr. Ralph Bunche the Nobel Peace Prize, but brought no peace.

Stern Condemnation. Next morning in London, the news stirred the Big Three foreign ministers. Three identical messages went off to the U.N. requesting an “urgent meeting” of the Security Council, which took up the matter this week, and unanimously invited Denmark’s Major General Vagn Bennike, Chief Truce Supervisor, to New York to report. The U.N.’s Mixed Armistice Commission, chief enforcement agency of the truce, which has only the power to urge and deplore, deplored the Israeli act as “coldblooded murder.” Britain, which stands behind the desert state of Jordan, wired its “distress” and “horror” in an angry message to Israel’s government.

From Washington went the harshest diplomatic protest ever addressed by the U.S. to Israel: “Shocking . . . Those responsible should be brought to account.”

Arab crowds in Amman, Nablus and Old Jerusalem cried for arms to “avenge ourselves.” Jordan begged her fellow Arab League states for troops, planes and tanks. John Bagot Glubb, British commander of Jordan’s crack 15,000-man Arab Legion, the strongest force in the Arab world, announced a shoot-on-sight order directed at any Israeli cau^it in Jordan. But further he would not go, though Jordanian Deputies demanded retaliation. Said Glubb: “The Jews of Israel must be as well aware as anyone else who knows the Arab world that every one of the survivors of such an attack now considers himself in on the blood-feud custom—violence which breeds more violence still.”

“Lost Patience.” The Western protests found Israel defiant and uriapologetic. Extras reporting the Kibya massacre were soon sold out. “When I heard the news, my heart swelled with pride,” said one Israeli. In the Mosaic tradition of an eye for an eye, the Israelis produced statistics to show that since May 1950, 421 Israelis had been killed or wounded by Jordan marauders. Just that week, a cowherd had been murdered, a mother and her children blown to bits. The Israeli U.N. delegation commented that it wished the Big Three “would show the same compunction about Israeli dead.” But no one accused the Arabs of so bloody a massacre as the night at Kibya. The Israeli Foreign Office, contrary to its usual custom, did not attempt to deny the attack; not until four days later did a spokesman claim with straight face that the soldiers involved were not regulars but Allied veterans of World War II, now farming on the frontier, who had “lost patience.” In Jerusalem the government announced that it welcomed U.N. intervention.

But behind its confident tone, the republic was a bit scared; Jerusalem wore a crisis atmosphere. Premier David Ben-Gurion rushed back from vacation to preside over an emergency Cabinet meeting.

Israel was in deep trouble and knew it. The subsidy and sympathy of Western public opinion, which had sustained Israel in its first five years, was ebbing. Besieged from without, overcrowded within, Israel was near bankruptcy. It blamed the Arab economic boycott for depriving Israel of its natural regional markets and $60 million a year in trade. Israel needed water for irrigation, but a sensible water development program required mutual agreements with hostile neighbors. Last week, against the objections of Syria and in open defiance of the U.N., Israel went steadily ahead day & night with a canal project to divert part of the Jordan’s waters for hydroelectric power, whereupon the State Department announced that it would withhold U.S. economic aid ($65 million last year) until the Israelis stop work on the canal.

To survive, Israel needs peace. Last week, in its defiance of the U.N. and in the slaughter of Kibya, Israel made peace harder than ever to attain.