Double Standard in the Mideast
MARSHALL, S. L. A.
THE UN ACTION Double Standard in the Mideast By S. L. A. Marshall THERE IS AT LEAST One good thing to be said about the most recent exchange of heavy blows between Israel and the terrorists who...
...That leaves one wondering, what is the value of an Israeli life as reckoned by those who pronounced judgment: two planes, five, maybe eight...
...The Greeks courts called it murder...
...they cannot make war...
...Most of this distance is along extremely helpful water barriers—the Jordan River and the Suez Canal—beyond which the Arab armies can do little more than sit and glower...
...The only theoretical difference in these two situations is the fiction that a UN-policed truce makes Arab clandestine aggression something other than outright war...
...The Arabs are no more entitled than anyone else to have a thing both ways...
...That is why the December 28 raid went so smoothly...
...But not a shot was fired, and no one was hurt...
...It was a sober and reasoned estimate of the situation...
...Such then is the outline of the "excessive retaliation," and most of the dollar costs will be met by Lloyd's of London...
...War—that is, fully joined battle?is wholly unlikely in the Middle East, though Arab terrorism will certainly spread and grow in strength if men and institutions elsewhere are too timid to denounce it...
...The attackers later said they were under instructions to avoid hurting anyone, yet they jeopardized the lives of 51 persons, killed an Israeli citizen, and wounded a stewardess...
...The United States has lost men and far more planes than were demolished in Lebanon...
...Months ago, the Israelis had learned from agents in Lebanon that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was preparing to sabotage Israel's ocean vessels and aircraft abroad as the opportunity arose...
...If the Israeli commandos had destroyed only two Piper Cubs in Beirut, perhaps the Council would not have met and Rusk would have withheld comment...
...Intervention by the USSR would then be less likely, though the threat will never wholly vanish...
...This is not the case today...
...In failing to censure the Arabs, it implied a, tolerance of the aggression by Moscow's Middle East clients...
...Israel's Army, far stronger in every respect than in June 1967, now has little more than 600 kilometers of hostile border to recon-noiter and defend, compared with more than 900 kilometers before the last war...
...This worldwide campaign of terror was formulated in Cairo last July by a multiorgani-zation Arab guerrilla committee...
...The Syrian Army has never been anything better than a poorly armed mob...
...Because as time goes by fundamentals must prevail, the bellicose rumblings of President Nasser and the shrill cries of defiance from other Arab quarters are as much beside the point as the Soviet rearmament of the UAR or the reappearance of a legion of USSR military trainers along the Nile...
...Being aware that the conspirators were centered in Beirut...
...Jerusalem warned that Arab aviation would pay in kind for this attack on an Israeli plane...
...THE UN ACTION Double Standard in the Mideast By S. L. A. Marshall THERE IS AT LEAST One good thing to be said about the most recent exchange of heavy blows between Israel and the terrorists who are carrying out current Arab policy: The play is right out in the open...
...is author of Sinai Victory and Pork Chop Hill...
...The planners did not even need to know approximately when the next sneak attack on a common carrier would take place to be sure of where and how quickly they would hit back...
...At his last press conference on January 3, Rusk implied that Israel was responsible for the rise of a Middle East danger that might beS. L. A. Marshall, Brigadier General, U.S.A...
...For the U.S...
...We know exactly what happened at the Athens and Beirut airports...
...American policy should be guided more on such hard realities as this, and less on the raw hope of doing or saying what might appease the Arabs and Russians...
...The crime was not sabotage, for the terrorists might have killed everyone aboard...
...MOSHE DAYAN come a "catastrophe...
...Though the Security Council and Rusk seem to be saying that the operation in Beirut was more heinous than the action in Athens, it would be impossible to prove this by either legal or ethical precedent...
...Almost immediately...
...A critic might reply with more logic that the Council itself tends to overreact when judging violence in the Middle East, by using a double standard that can only aggravate existing conditions...
...Judged simply as a military operation, it was an astonishing feat...
...Israel's intelligence agency must have planned and rehearsed its counterblow over many weeks...
...Governments, ruling figures and the terrorists say so...
...Just before departing from the United States in mid-December, General Moshe Dayan said that barring the possibility of Soviet intervention, there would be no general war in the Middle East...
...Rusk simply used it arbitrarily to load his remarks against a single party...
...At the Beirut airport (which is adjacent to the olive field where U.S...
...It may be a silly question, but it is surely no sillier than the reaction prompting it...
...The UN decision on Israel was not only one-sided, but in accord with Soviet desires...
...forces encamped during the Lebanese crisis 10 years ago) 15 Arab commercial airliners were demolished by Israeli commandos...
...If we disagree with what we hear, it is because we believe the men charged with international responsibility have weighed the evidence and drawn a morally faulty conclusion...
...The raiders took undue risks to avoid bloodshed...
...In these respects, the first Middle East crisis of 1969 differs from most others of past years...
...The controlling fact is that the Egyptian Army cannot even put a bridgehead across the Suez Canal with any prospect of holding it, nor can the Jordanian Army cross the Jordan River with any success...
...But when armies have no place to go...
...For almost four years now, Viet-cong and North Vietnamese raiders have been shooting up air fleets at Bien Hoa and other airports serving both civilian and military air traffic...
...The essence of the charge was that, irrespective of provocation, Israel had overreacted...
...Every terrorist activity by Al Fatah and other groups is justified on the ground that war exists...
...As for "excessive retaliation," the term is without meaning in either law or military practice...
...There is no yardstick for measuring such problems...
...By first viewing the situation with alarm and then pointing his finger in only one direction, the Secretary did not help things at all...
...From Washington, we have listened to Secretary of State Dean Rusk and others speaking their pieces...
...It was in truth as flagrant a violation of international law as piracy...
...Nevertheless, there were no anguished cries of protest from anywhere except Israel, and the UN paid no heed at all...
...The wholly dominant position of Israel's Air Force in the Middle East skies has in effect mobilized the Arab conventional field forces just beyond the borders patrolled by Israel's military...
...Israel alone is in a position to know how to counter Arab terrorism, and to determine what degree of reprisal might have a dampering effect...
...From the United Nations, we have heard the Security Council give its judgment...
...ret...
...position helped to build the two incidents into a chimerical Middle East war scare...
...A virtually identical line was taken several days earlier in the Security Council as it voted to censure Israel...
...The threat of a resumption of full-scale fighting between the Israelis and Arabs is altogether hollow...
...and how the score stands...
...but a double standard nevertheless exists with UN approval...
...The subsequent Soviet maneuvers to bring off a four-power intervention in the Middle East?one altogether weighted against Israel—was predictable...
...We know who started things, who followed up...
...He did this by advising Israel to refrain from "excessive retaliation," while praying that Arab terrorists would behave like good little boys...
...At the Athens airport on December 26, an Israeli plane bound for the United States with an international passenger list was machine-gunned and fire-bombed during takeoff by two Arab terrorists...
...Those usually began with hostile clashes along some remote frontier, the facts ever remaining in dispute...
...Yet the UN Security Council has said nothing, and the question of excessive retaliation has never arisen...
...The word for all this is hypocrisy...
...The Arabs themselves declare they are at war, while Israel keeps insisting it does not want war...
...It seems equally likely, however, that such a raid would have had no restraining effect on anyone anywhere...
...They can be best understood and dealt with only by those directly involved...
Vol. 52 • January 1969 • No. 1
