Eruption in the Middle East

...This is the present necessary condition for her national existence, but it is not, to anywhere near the same degree, the necessary condition for the emergent nationalisms in the ex-colonial Afro-Asian world...

...If, for many of us, this information has become fearfully redundant, for others it may have the salutary effect of making it clear that the challenge confronting the human race in our century cannot be resolved by recourse to past modes of political behavior or to a detached faith [The author of this article is an American anthropologist who recently spent time in Israel studying the Kibbutzand an Arab village...

...In defense of Israel it can be said that these, and other, obsolescent attitudes were not invented by her, and in another time and place would have proven viable, even if inappropriate...

...Israel tends to consider itself a beacon of civilization in a benighted area in much the same way that early American settlers viewed the Indians...

...The country is tied to the West economically, culturally, and sentimentally...

...The only condition would be the guarantee that all nations, including Israel, can freely use the Canal...

...Israel had and has the best army in the Near East...

...Nasser is still in power, and seems assured of greater support in Egypt than before the invasion...

...Hence Israel is viewed with suspicion not only by the Arab effendis and demagogues, but by many of the more sober and progressive elements among the Afro-Asians...

...This was certainly one reason why Israel was not invited to the Bandung Conference...

...It is important to note here, although we cannot pursue the matter, that most of these refugees fled Israel because they were caught between two fires...

...This nineteenth century punitive expedition calculated the risk of a third world war, and in the face of that reality, no counter-argument can rise above the level of rationalization...

...The "vacuum" drawing her out is tempting, and the pressure from with in, especially but not exclusively from right-wing, quasi-fascist elements such as the Herut is real enough...

...But what of the more immediate situation...

...Suffice it to say that the Canal is blocked, the essential imperialism of British and French foreign policy stands out, both nations are now more dependent than ever on the United States, the British Commonwealth suffered a near fatal blow, and France has worsened its position vis-a-vis North Africa, if that is still possible...

...Nothing short of, say, Soviet troops manning Soviet machines could possibly have altered the situation...

...Wasn't the Israeli attack provoked...

...Israel's dilemma is that it must behave, not like other nations, but better than other nations have acted in the past, in order to survive...

...Although Nasser is a blustering, para-military dictator, he is not, strictly speaking, a Fascist...

...These, of course, are realistic proposals, whose sound is idealistic only in the context of our customary political behaviour...

...Had Israel acknowledged that the refugee problem was the central problem in its relations with the Arab world, it would have been in a better moral and political position, and might have been able to neutralize the demagogic use to which the Arab leaders put the refugees...

...There is a nuance here which should not be neglected...

...Whatever the motivations of individual nations may have been, the I0 fact is that the war in the Near East was not permitted to spread or continue...

...We should, therefore, condemn the combined attack on Egypt as a special instance of immoral, read impractical, antiquated, and ultimately ineffectual political behavior...

...THE MOTIVES and results of the British and French participation in the expedition are too well known to require extended comment...

...The bluster of the effendis and demagogues to the contrary, none of the Arab nations possessed sufficient organizational or technical know-how, nor sufficient national morale, to launch an attack on Israel with any real hope of success...

...The indicated immediate solutions seem rather obvious...

...It is a homily come home to roost, for good...

...and, as such, politics is dead...

...FIRST—concerning Israel...

...It is only under such favorable conditions that Israel will finally get the chance to reveal whether those Jews who became Zionists have read deeply into the tragic scroll of Jewish history...

...Where Arab fury against Israel is genuine, that is, felt by ordinary Arabs and not simply manufactured by the effendis, it is, in part, ultimately traceable to this Israeli version of the "white man's burden...

...THEIR RESETTLEMENT 1$ a project of major dimensions, requiring extensive international aid...

...In making this point we do not, of course, interpret the crisis in the Middle East, but, first things first, we take a position against this attempt at resolution...

...First, the Arab refugee situations must be quickly ameliorated...

...And I believe the same result would have been achieved had Egypt been the immediate aggressor...

...he is an ultra-nationalist leader thrown up during the first phase in the re structuring of a feudal country...

...Israel's position is tragic...

...The latter has literally to be created via irrigation projects, soil amelioration programs, and so on...

...STANLEY DIAMOND...

...These people are rotting away in an irredentist no-man's land, and most of the border incidents are rooted in their disaffection...

...and the Egyptian adventure has only served to confirm such suspicions...

...Politics, in its most practical and experiential definition, now becomes the art and science of human survival, that is, the practice of pub lic morality...

...PERTINE...

...The crisis itself, now acute, now chronic, cannot be fully explored here, but certain important and usually neglected issues can be raised...

...Egypt's right to nationalize the Canal, which Egypt was operating quite efficiently prior to the attack, will undoubtedly be recognized by most nations, as indeed it should be...

...We should remember that, on the outbreak of hostilities, both Russia and America immediately exerted all possible pressure towards their cessation, along with most of the rest of the world...

...Certainly, border incidents were frequent and bloody...

...Readers are invitedto send in their comments on the topicdiscussed by Mr...

...And there is no evidence that an international Communist plot of this character was being hatched...

...Hindsight may be easy, but as the bearer of Western enlightenment to the heathen, Israel might well have avoided a part of its present dilemma by confronting the refugee question boldly, that is, by insisting relentlessly in the United Nations and other channels, despite rebuffs, that action be taken on the international level, while it continued to absorb the few hardship cases that it could, given its swollen population...

...Politics used to be defined as the science of power, or the art of the possible...

...It is the handwriting on the wall, the damned spot that defies erasure...

...The quickest way to get rid of him, if we do not like his behavior, is to extend large-scale aid to the terribly depressed Egyptian masses...

...Such abstractions convert themselves into weapons for the concrete murder of humanity...

...And if we seem to be asking too much of a sorely tried Israel, it is no less than an aware mankind must ask of itself in these times...

...The second necessary step is the extension of aid, preferably administered through an international agency, to all nations of the Near East who request it...

...Diamond.] in History, blind and deified, like Justice...

...Whether the attack on Egypt provided a convenient cover for brutality in Hungary, or whether the Russians decided it better not to take chances by relaxing further in a fluid situation is hard to say, but it is at least clear that in the eyes of the Afro-Asian world one immorality tended to cancel out the other...

...In so doing, they made Israel a viable political entity, from the Zionist point of view, and whatever the intentions of the Israeli Government may have been prior to their emigration, it quickly took advantage of the situation...

...inspection teams...

...But the dilemma lies precisely in the impossibility of pursuing well worn channels of political behavior under contemporary conditions...

...r here is the "power vacuum" that exists in the Near East...

...Above all, the most reactionary elements in Russia were strengthened with particular reference to the attack on Hungary...

...Given Israel's mobile and efficient army, her technicians, her bustling population, and her quasi-messianic sense of man ifest destiny, she could have multi plied her land area many times over —that is, if this were the 19th century...

...Such aid should be given for specific purposes, but with no political strings or secret clauses attached...

...The combined, and probably premeditated, Anglo-FrenchIsraeli punitive expedition against Egypt has again illuminated the narrow track we walk between survival and extinction...

...We are learning, and it is a bitter lesson, that the people we used to call Utopians because they insisted that the spheres of public and private morality could not be kept apart without finally corrupting both were, if ineffectual in their time, prescient for ours...

...This undercurrent is a fact to be borne in mind, though I would not claim that it is presently at all decisive...

...Actually, the refugees were no more welcome on a permanent basis in Egpyt or Jordan than they would have been in Israel...

...If this seems merely homiletic, it is a measure of the tragedy of our time that it should seem so...

...The degree to which they could be realized depends, in the last analysis, on how willing Russia and the United States are to experiment in reaching an agreement in favor of nobody but the people of the Middle East...

...We refer to the state of Israel, and not to -Zionism, or Jews in general, because these are not synonymous, despite the propaganda to the contrary...

...Furthermore, the thieves fell out when caught in the spotlight of world opinion and gave feeble, conflicting accounts of the origin and course of their movements...

...There is, in short, an undercurrent of ex pansionism in Israel which is part of the very dynamic of state formation...

...The image of Israel held in these quarters is that of an outpost, military, economic, and cultural, of Western colonialism...

...Finally, military aid to all Near Eastern countries should be cut off at once, through international agreement, double-checked by U.N...

...Although most of these incidents were initiated by the Arabs, the probability is that they did not constitute a threat to Israel's immediate survival...

...On the contrary, both the Soviet Union and the United States, for reasons of their own, want and need peace in the Near East desperately, although the formula has not yet been found...

...In a world dangerously split along parallel ethnic, cultural and economic lines, the cultural chauvinism of many Israelis, their lack of insight into or sympathy with Arab culture, generates a type of hostility even more explosive than that arising from other factors...

...For at present there is physical space to accommodate them in the Arab countries, but little economic room...