ISRAEL: Back to Reprisals

Lest the world forget a threat to peace that predates Suez—and probably will outlive it—shooting broke out again last week across Israel’s borders. Late one morning Jordan National Guardsmen jumped 30 Israeli troops carrying out a map-reading exercise on the Hebron border and killed six. Next night an Israeli raiding party laid an ambush for probable reinforcements, then blew up a police fort on the Jordan side, killing twelve. Seven more Jordanians died when the Land Rovers in which they were hurrying to the scene drove into the Israeli ambush.

Jordan’s reprisal was to kill three Israeli Druze watchmen at an oil camp in the eastern Negev desert, not far from where Jordanians had ambushed a busload of Israelis last month. Next night a powerful Israeli army force—some 1,000 troops according to Jordan sources—slammed twelve miles across the desert frontier into Jordan and, supported by artillery and bombing planes, wiped out a police post at Gharandal, almost midway between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea. Jordan reported ten police, National Guardsmen and civilians killed, eight wounded.

The return to reprisals grew in part out of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s conviction that the U.N. cannot enforce the cease-fire that U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold negotiated last April. Since that time, 29 Israelis have been killed and 49 wounded in border incidents. Last week’s shootings brought the number of reported Jordanian dead to 31, and 27 Egyptians have also died.

Far from pushing the Israeli-Arab conflict into the background, the Suez crisis, with its temper-shortening tensions and attention-diverting demands, was likely to provoke more probing and more shooting in the days to come.