The Middle East Convulsion-Two Articles No 'Hot Line'
PETERS, S.
No 'Hot Line' By S. Peters Tel Aviv The prevailing view of the latest Middle East crisis among observers here—Israel and foreign —can be summed up in the now often heard comment, "We are back...
...Suddenly the UAR began pouring troops, tanks and airplanes into Sinai...
...No 'Hot Line' By S. Peters Tel Aviv The prevailing view of the latest Middle East crisis among observers here—Israel and foreign —can be summed up in the now often heard comment, "We are back in 1956...
...This strategy was also a Syrian move to gain the upper hand in the competition between the Baath Party and Nasser for the leadership of the "progressive forces" in the Arab world...
...The threat of war today is intensified by the complete vacuum of communications left by unef's withdrawal...
...Clearly, Nasser decided he had to prove to the Arabs that he was no "paper tiger...
...Nasser apparently began to feel his already very shaky prestige could not stand much more abuse...
...Instead of waiting until they are united and strong enough to crush Israel in conventional warfare, Damascus urged, the Arabs should launch immediate guerrilla attacks as the beginning of a "war of liberation...
...The roots of the affair lie in Damascus, where the Syrian regime was taken over last year by Left-wing elements of the Baath Party...
...The Israelis then embar-assed him with their militant Independence Day warnings that continued terrorism would be met with stern retaliatory measures...
...Practicing what they preached, the intelligence sector of the Syrian Army trained, armed and dispatched small groups of saboteurs into Israel to blow up houses and irrigation installations, and to mine military and civilian routes...
...Some of its functions, and particularly its role as a channel between the two hostile countries, were taken over by unef, which had its headquarters in Gaza and also maintained a liaison officer in Israel...
...But more important, the defeat highlighted the fact that the recently concluded Egyptian-Syrian defense pact did not mean Cairo's planes would rush to the aid of Damascus—something that was gleefully noted by Nasser's enemies in the Arab world...
...To S. Peters, a previous contributor, is a free-lance writer currently based in the Middle East...
...Nasser took up the challenge and demanded complete withdrawal from Egyptian territory...
...To Nasser, the unef was a convenient excuse for the fact that Egypt's borders with Israel were the most tranquil of all its frontiers...
...There is no "hot line" between Cairo and Jerusalem now, and a minor incident could easily grow into an unintended full scale blowup...
...This the Israelis tried last April 7 when, after weeks of sporadic terrorist activity, the Syrians began shelling border settlements...
...Moscow has even sent threatening warning notes to Israel and made them public, thus further encouraging the Syrians...
...Though enjoying Moscow's full support—possibly more so than Nasser ever did—the Damascus rulers adopted Peking's hard-line prescription for the "solution of the Palestine problem...
...Strategically, the Syrians have the advantage: The border runs along the...
...Whatever the final outcome of that debate, from the moment U Thant announced he would accept Nasser's demand, he and Nasser and possibly Israel, lost full control of the situation...
...The unef troops, drawn from seven nations, numbered just under 4,000...
...Syrian posts on the hillsides can fire down on Israeli farmers or settlements, yet remain fairly invulnerable to gun or mortar fire...
...Damascus has been trying to prove it is the only one really willing to fight Israel...
...What, then, precipitated the Egyptian demand for the departure of the unef, bringing the possibility of war in the Middle East closer than at any time in the last decade...
...Nevertheless, the whole area is a tinderbox, and the match setting off a conflagration could be struck at any number of places...
...The Israel-Egyptian Armistice Commission ceased to exist in 1956...
...The removal of unef posts along the border, even more than the large Egyptian troop concentration in Sinai, compelled Israel to take appropriate countermeas-ures, including partial mobilization...
...While terrorist raids have caused the most serious tension between Israel and Syria, hostility has also been aggravated by their perennial dispute over the demilitarized zone separating the two countries...
...The only effective way for Israel to silence the Syrian guns is from the air...
...Both Israel and Egypt declared that they would not attack unless attacked...
...It also served to explain his allowing unhindered passage of Israeli ships through the Straits of Tiran—the only exit from the port of Elath...
...Syria, on the other hand, wants to make the area a kind of no man's land from which Israel would gradually be eliminated...
...Presumably as part of the effort to restore his prestige, Nasser demanded that the unef move back from its positions along the border with Israel...
...Armed with light weapons only, they were never intended to serve as a physical deterrent to hostile acts across the border...
...U Thant hastily agreed, setting off a hot subsidiary debate on both the wisdom and correctness of his action...
...base of the Syrian hills, leaving Israeli territory and the demilitarized zone almost entirely in the lowlands to the west...
...The defeat in the air led to intensified terrorist activity on the ground, inside Israel...
...In the ensuing air battle, the Israelis shot down six of the Syrians' Soviet-made migs...
...Israel, they represented the last remnant of a brilliant military victory, much of which had to be relinquished because of the Anglo-French debacle at Suez and Soviet-American pressure...
...The lid removed by U Thant when he agreed to evacuate the United Nations Emergency Forces from the Gaza Strip is proving more difficult to replace than the Secretary General apparently imagined...
...Its presence was a symbol of the "hopes and expectations" attendant on the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territory occupied during the Sinai Campaign...
...Then he could boast that he had restrained Israel and saved Syria—even with the bulk of his army still engaged several hundreds of miles away in Yemen...
...Since March 1957, the United Nations Emergency Force (unef) had been patrolling and manning observation posts in Egypt along the lines separating Israel from the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Straits of Tiran at the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba...
...At this point, Nasser seems to have fallen victim to the panic created in Damascus, believing its unfounded reports that Israel was massing troops in the north for a large attack on Syria...
...To make matters worse, positions vacated by unef along the Gaza Strip were taken over by units of the so-called "Palestinian Army of Liberation," which, though under Egyptian command, have a greater hatred of Israel and are far less disciplined than the regular Egyptian Army units...
...Israel claims full sovereignty over the zone, subject only to restrictions on the introduction of military personnel and armaments...
...On several recent occasions, Egypt has indicated its reluctance to confront Israel while a major part of its Armed Forces were bogged down in the civil war in Yemen...
...Despite the Peking-style tactics, the Kremlin has made no secret of its eagerness to bolster the Syrian regime—the first in any Arab country to have two known Communists as Cabinet members...
...United Nations Secretary General U Thant apparently decided to call what he felt was Nasser's bluff: He told Nasser there was no possibility of partial withdrawal—either unef units stayed where they were or they would have to be evacuated altogether...
...Their presence considerably increases the danger of armed clashes, whether Cairo wants them or not...
...Probably he also hoped his troop build-up—plus international pressure exerted by the major powers, already nervous over the heightened tension—would be sufficient to deter Israeli reprisals against Syria even if terrorist attacks continued unabated...
Vol. 50 • June 1967 • No. 12
