ISRAEL: The Ashes of Victory

On a steep sand dune seven miles east of the Suez Canal, sun-blackened members of D Company, 52nd Israeli Armored Battalion squatted under a tank’s camouflage netting listening to a radio. “Well, it’s all over,” said one at Tel Aviv’s report of a cease-fire halting their Sinai blitz. “We should have finished Nasser off,” said a second. “He’s finished already,” said a third tankist. “At last we’ve won a real victory and now we’ll get a real peace.”

And so Israelis felt last week—for exactly two days. Old (70) Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, abed with a virus infection and 102° temperature the day his troops struck into the Sinai peninsula, was a deeply happy man, hailed by his people. Though pale and sweat-beaded with fever, he appeared in the jammed, jubilant Knesset, and with rapt crowds listening at loudspeakers all over Jerusalem, triumphantly reviewed “the glorious military operation that lasted seven days.”

Historic Claims. “And the words of Isaiah the Prophet were fulfilled,” he began. “In that day shall the Egyptians be like unto women, and they shall tremble with fear because of the shaking of the hand of the Lord of Hosts, which He shaketh over them.” Practically laying claim to the whole Sinai peninsula (he had not invaded “Egypt proper”), Ben-Gurion pronounced the 1949 armistice lines with Egypt “dead,” and called upon that government to discuss peace “under conditions of direct negotiations.” No force, “whatever it is called,” was going to make Israel evacuate Sinai.

The Prime Minister even proclaimed that Tiran, the ancient Yotvat, a small island in the Gulf of Aqaba dominating passage from the Red Sea to Israel’s new port of Elath, belonged to its captors. To prove Israel’s historic claims, Ben-Gurion paused in his rolling Hebrew periods and read out in the original Greek the historian Procopius’ 6th century description of the island: “There the Hebrews have lived since ancient times and govern themselves.

But even as he spoke, stronger forces were gathering to strip the old lawgiver of his victory. Of Egypt’s three invaders, only Ben-Gurion refused to pull his forces out of Egypt after receiving Bulganin’s get-out-of-Egypt-or-else message. Now, hours after his speech, Israeli intelligence brought report of 40 Soviet-manned MIGs arriving in Syria. Though Russia might explain that its deal with Syria was strictly commercial, like the sale of arms to Egypt, Bulganin’s threat—to Israel and to peace in general—was very real.

From the British and French ambassadors in Jerusalem came word that the U.S. had informed their countries that it “would not feel compelled to take action” in case of a Soviet attack on their Suez and Cyprus forces. Accordingly, they told Ben-Gurion they could promise him no support if he insisted on holding Sinai. From Washington Ambassador Abba Eban telephoned urging moderation and reporting that President Eisenhower was sending a personal message asking the Prime Minister to back down so as to give the Russians no pretext for intervention.

Bitter Choice. Ben-Gurion was a bitter, frustrated man. He stayed up far into the night, brooding, reading his Bible. Actually, he had no choice at all.

Next morning, surprisingly brisk and bright-eyed, he turned up at his office for the first time in a fortnight. Ben-Gurion drafted replies to Eisenhower and Bulganin. Asked how he felt, he grunted: “I have no time to feel ill.” He called in leaders of all political parties except the Communists to tell them that the U.N. and the great powers were “not content with a mere cease-fire.”

Then he sat down to write a speech taking back all his victorious vaunts of two nights before. At 12:30 a.m., delayed until his reply to Eisenhower was in Washington and thus free to be broadcast, Ben-Gurion’s speech of abnegation went on the air. Hoarse and halting, the patriarch spoke his surrender: “The government is prepared to withdraw its forces from the territory of Egypt immediately after the entry of the international emergency force into the canal zone.”

Again the Guerrillas. At this stunning reversal, requiring surrender of conquests almost three times the country’s size, the flush of victory vanished from Israel. “It took us only one week to conquer the Sinai desert,” said a Jerusalem schoolteacher, “and only one day to lose it.” Perhaps Ben-Gurion never intended to keep Sinai (“We want no more desert”), but he had obviously hoped to bargain with it for his minimum demands: 1) peace on the border; 2) possession of the Gaza Strip and of islands in the Gulf of Aqaba; 3) the right to move Israeli cargoes through the Suez Canal.

All celebrations ended abruptly in Israel, and released reservists were called back. Army units worked full speed to get battle-worn tanks, guns and other equipment back into shape. At week’s end Foreign Minister Golda Meir told a party meeting that the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian-held corner of the old Palestine mandate overrun in the Sinai blitz, “is an integral part of Israel.”

On the very night that the tough old leader made his submission, Israeli newspapers carried reports that fedayeen guerrillas had struck across the border in a half-dozen raids from Jordan. Whatever the Israelis had won by their preventive war, they did not appear to have won a peace. “Go-it-alone” Israel, in its fear of the Soviet Union, turned once again toward cooperation with the U.N., and above all toward the U.S.