The Washington Post, by Alfred Friendly

JERUSALEM—Diplomatic negotiations are under way among the Western maritime powers, led by the United States, to create an international mechanism to affect the opening of the Aqabe Gulf to free passage, it was learned here today.

Agreement in principle, if it is reached at all, should come in a couple of weeks, it is believed. Creation of the device itself—its nature has not been disclosed—is expected to follow in another week or so. 

It was on the basis of that promise, plus information that conversations on the highest levels are taking place between the United States and the Soviet Union, that resulted in the Israeli government's decision yesterday to suspend any military action to break out of its present stranglehold.

Belated announcements today from West Germany and Japan supporting Israel's right for free passage through the Strait of Tiran may be an indication that top consultations among the maritime powers are beginning to bear fruit.

During the period while this approach is being followed, Israel plans to maintain its present mobilization on all fronts, particularly on the Sinai border with Egypt. The cost to Israel's economy is tremendous, more in terms of productive actibity than in dollars and cents, but is is preferable in this situation to war.

Also, Israel will make no attempt to test the blockade Egypt announced against it. Current news flurries about ships moving through the Strait of Tiran are, accordingly, without significance and, insofar as they refer to Israeli commerce, inaccurate.

Depending on what, if any, international mechanism is devised to bring an end to the blockade, however, Israel may decide on a careful and clearly indicative test run from or to [the] southern port of Eliat.

This temporary period of suspended animation, or animated suspension, in the crisis could end at once if serious border incursions, infiltration or acts of sabotage take place.

Israel sources reported that a minor episode of that sort occurred at noon today near the Gaza border settlement of Nahal Oz. From the Egyptian side, there was fire from automatic rifles and mortars on ten agricultural workers and an Israeli military patrol, they said. One Israeli soldier was wounded, and the conflagration kindled in the fields took half an hour to extinguish About 500 acres of wheat were burned, the sources reported.

Further raids of that type would probably put pressure on the government of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol of Israel, already being severely attacked for what has often appeared to some Israelis as a policy of shilly-shallying in the crisis.

Eshkol's speech last night indicating a temporary military standstill was badly received, in part for its content and in part for a disastrous rendition. Without sleep for 48 hours, unrehearsed and a poor speaker to begin with, Eshkol stumbled so badly that the influential newspaper Maariv, once Eshkol's sturdiest advocate for the prime ministry, suggested this morning that someone else ought to read his lines. The implied undertone was clear.

A great deal of "man in the street" sentiment has been heard recently that the crisis made confrontation inevitable and had better be faced now than later.

Quick at minting sharp political jokes, Israeli wags read this morning that Winston Churchill, grandson of the British leader, has given a blood donation while here as a journalist. By afternoon they declared that it should be used as a transfusion for Eshkol.

In a more successful effort to show the nations that a clear political decision had in fact been reached, Eshkol addressed the Knesset (parliament) this evening. Without giving the specifics, he hinted at the measures being worked on that have led to the temporary intermission period.

The conversations in Paris, London and Washington held last week by Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, and particularly President Johnson's May 23 announcement, "strongly impressed" his government, Eshkol said, on America's "clear-cut stand to insure free navigation in these international waters. America, Britain and other maritime nations, he continued, "have informed us of their readiness to support us effectively on the freedom of navigation and we are informed that concrete consultations are already taking place on the subject.

"Under these conditions it is reasonable to expect that the states which advocate freedom of navigation will act and coordinate their actions effectively to insure that the Strait and the Gulf will be open for passage of ships of all nations without discrimination within a short time."

The phrase "within a short time" was underlined in Eshkol's speech.

Israel's stand—in other words, the pause Eshkol announced yesterday—was strongly influenced by those "authoritative and specific statements," he said. Continuing his justification for withholding military action, Eshkol said it was Israel's obligation to test the international commitments. He added that it will soon be clear whether the expectations are realized.

Following Eshkol's speech, Israel's revered and longtime former leader, David Ben Gurion, made a doubled-edged statement both patriotic and critical, to reporters in the corridors of the Knesset building.

On the one hand, Ben Gurion tended to support Eshkol's basic point - the necessity of consultation and action with other friendly nations - and explained to the country's armed forces, frustrated and bewildered by the uncertainty, that decisions on war or peace had to remain always in civilian hands, the army must follow them, even if it had not been completely informed of the considerations behind them.

But veiled in Ben Gurion's comment was the clear indication that his own opposition party would have handled matters much better and that its decisions would have come clearer and sooner.

Eshkol also implied that Israel's mobilization would remain in force as long as the Arab troops were massed on its borders.

It is considered impossible here for such a mobilization to continue more than a few weeks. If the international attempt at solution is not successful by then, the government is, as of now at any rate, determined to go to war, regardless of whatever condemnation it may encounter.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

JERUSALEM—Diplomatic procedures to solve the Middle East crisis are seen by the Israeli government as being close to failure and in any event proceeding on an unacceptably prolonged time schedule.

The decision, it was learned here tonight from a uniquely informed source, "now rests with Israel alone."

"The picture couldn’t he blacker," according to another authoritative informant.

The Israeli government analysis of the sensationally successful moves of Egyptian President Nasser over the past two weeks has led to the conclusion that "we have to do it alone."

Earlier hopes, arising last Monday, that the Western maritime powers could agree on a declaration guaranteeing the freedom of ship passage through the Strait of Tiran, and would follow that announcement, if necessary, with a concrete show of determination, have now collapsed.

In Washington, Israeli sources said last night they were highly disturbed by rumors that Egyptian troops were moving into Jordan and that Iraqi troops were on the Jordan border.

They said these reported concentrations make the issue of the Gulf secondary to the possibility of what they termed a real confrontation on a massive scale.

As officials read the news, public and private, from Washington, they believed that the United States has been unsuccessful in marshaling other nations in the commitment. Only Britain, Holland and perhaps one or two other; countries seem willing to join the attempt.

Moreover, whatever success the United States might later achieve in corralling an impressive list of signatories and activists, the pace cannot be swift enough to meet what Israel sees as its military imperatives.

See Johnson Blocked

Officials do not question the sincerity of President Johnson's intent to devise the multinational mechanism, but have concluded that he is unablcd to do so.

He is blocked, they feel, by what they deem is a real—although in their view utterly unrealistic—demand by other nations for action only through the United Nations, by a widespread American and international sentiment that a compromise with Nasser of a sort unacceptable to Israel is preferable to war. and by a feeling that the U.S. Congress has, ns one official put it, "an allergy to further military commitments."

"The Western world, perhaps for a thousand good reasons, has simply failed to grasp the situation as we do." The Washington Post was told by an informed executive, who added: "But don’t think we can wait until it does."

Israel’s Best Hope

Even if some diplomatic miracle now came about, he said, the best Israel could hope for would be some compromise permitting Israel ships to ply from the Nation's southern port, Eilat, through the Gulf of Aqaba.

But there seems to be signs of diplomatic proceedings to disperse the Egyptian forces on the Sinai front or to end terroristic border attacks, two circumstances that Israel cannot long endure.

The Aqaba issue is no longer the focus. The essential requirement for Israel’s continued existence is the deflation of Nasser, he said.

That is simply another way of staling that Israel cannot survive in an Arab world united under Nasser—which is almost precisely the situation that exists today.

High-Level Opinion

In a sense, he was reflecting not merely high-level government opinion but a strong popular sentiment which was at the root of the pressure that installed Gen. Moshe Dayan, Israeli commander in the Sinai War, as Minister of Defense Thursday night.

The governmental change, characterizable as revolutionary in terms of Israeli political history, was in effect a demand for decision in terms of days and not, according to a previous timetable, in weeks.

Dayan himself, at a press conference this afternoon in Tel Aviv, went through the forms of endorsing further diplomatic procedures for settling the crisis. But the undertone of his answers was a deep dubiety about their effectiveness.

He insisted that Israel had not forfeited its chances for victory by failing to go on the offensive earlier in the crisis. He indicated that, if war came, much would depend on where and when the battle took place.

He conceded a superiority in numbers of men and equipment to the Arab forces, but argued that it would be as difficult for them to march on Tel Aviv as it would be for Israeli forces to capture Cairo.

Despite the numerical imbalance, however, Dayan dismissed the need for volunteers from other countries, saying it would be hard to know what to do with them. And twice he repeated a declaration that Israel wanted no foreign troops to fight for his country.

"If fighting comes," he said, "we wouldn't like British or American boys" to join. Israel can win alone, he said.

Not Yet Sworn

A lithe man, animated and genial with reporters and with a twinkle in his one eye, Dayan ducked the hard questions, on grounds he had not yet been formally sworn into his new post.

But he was emphatic in declaring that no diplomatic solutlon could ho expected from the United Nations, he went on to argue that in the past week all diplomatic endeavors have collapsed without any sign of anyone trying to prevent the consequences of their failure.

Much the same tone of warning came earlier in the day in the public address by Israel’s Information Minister, Israel Galill. He said he would answer an "emphatic yes" to any question about the danger of war. He spoke frequently of tbe ominous prospects. Israel had no regrets at having explored diplomatic avenues to prevent a conflict, he said, but implied that the statute of limitations now applied to those efforts.

A consensus in the government, it appears here, has reverted to tbe gloomiest forebodings of about ten days ago.

At that time, the unhappy conclusion was that Nasser was not merely the beneficiary of a series of lucky accidents, but was carrying out a brilliantly conceived plan to restore the position he and Egypt held before tbe 1956 Sinal War.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

TEL AVIV—Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union will be crucial in determining how peace is to emerge from the Middle East war.

This is the conclusion of some of Israel's most thoughtful officials charged with diplomatic policy making. Like most top officials here, they reject any notion of living under armistice agreements or United Nations or other international truce supervision arrangements. They want the final settlement to be one to which their Arab foes have affixed their signatures, eonceding that Israel is here to stay, sovereign and independent.

But they point out that this may be easier said than done. They think the key will be the kind of advice and support—or lack of support—that the Soviet Union gives to Egypt, Syria and other Arab nations that, in turn, appears to depend on Soviet hopes and plans.

Meantime, Israel's tactics to put itself in a good position for the ultimate settlement are not difficult to fathom.

With Egypt and Syria having rejected the UN Security Council's resolution for a cease-fire, Israel anticipates about two more days of fighting. It has agreed to stop shooting as soon as there is similar agreement from the other aide.

That, by about Friday—when it is thought the Arab nations will agree—Israel's armed forces will hold all of the Sinai Peninsula. The conquest of Cairo would be militarily possible, although almost certainly will not be attempted under present conditions.

On the Jordanian front, Israel's Army will probably occupy all territory west of the Jordan River.

In the interim, the Israelis will find time to deal with the Syrians, for whom they reserve their bitterest feelings, as the provocateurs of this war. They have remained virtually unscathed so far. But it is heard more frequently here that "our Syrian cousin’s time has come."

Israel will certainly occupy enough of the border to take the hills from which Syrian fire has been directed at Israeli settlements for years and enough territory to assure of the Galilee and upper Jordan water supply.

In such a posture, Israel could go into negotiations with a strong hand. The guess here is that although Israel wants no major territorial gains, it will not give up what it has by then taken until it sees the clear outlines of the peace settlement to come.

Officials will give no clue as to territorial ambitions, but the logic of the situation makes possible some reasonable guesses.

Israel will certainly want to end the Latrun salient athwart what would be the direct road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It might offer holy places of the Old City of Jerusalem to international control. And it certainly will want to hang on to the Gaza Strip, which it has considered its territory since 1948. Less predictable is what it wants on the Syrian border.

With an expected cease-fire, the position of the Soviet Union is seen as cruicial in its influence on the defeated countries. Russia is thought to have three alternatives:

It could decide it has backed the wrong horses and cut its losses by giving them no promises or material support. Such a reaction would mean a renunciation for some time of aspirations to be the dominant power in the Near East.

It could probably save some face as a peace maker with oratory about protecting the rights of its Arab friends. But this, it is thought here, would come about only if the Soviet Union wants a general detente with the United States, or at least an end to active cold war in this part of the world.

It could decide to make matters very difficult for Israel by giving economic and moral support to the Arab states. Egypt and Syria, thus backed, might refuse to sign a peace treaty and hold out for some time. Israel would then be obliged to maintain its forces on all cease-fire lines—an enormous strain to a nation whose army is also its major civilian working force.

If such were the turn of events, the firmness, diplomatic skill and power of the United States to marshal world opinion are seen by thoughtful Israeli policy makers as crucial.

A somewhat different view of possibilities is taken by Gen. Yigal Allon, commander of the armed forces that won Israel's independence in 1946, and now Minister of Labor. Accused of being an "activist," he is also an optimist. Allon subscribed to the almost universal Israeli demand for a peace treaty to which the Arab states consent.

But he rejected the idea of obtaining their signatures by force and hinted at the possibility of persuasion.

"The victory," he said, "furnishes the Middle East and the world a chance to think afresh and conclude this crisis by a permanent solution which will be nothing short of peace."

The Arab countries, he continued, have had a "bitter lesson" that may create a new state of opinion among the civilian masses. 

"Maybe, after the collapse, it will look more reasonable to them to conclude a peace with Israel than to start a new round of military preparation."

Allon added that "anti-Israel propaganda of recent times has been artificially developed. In the days of Turkish and then British control of Palestine there was Arab acceptance—not without kicks, to be sure—of what the Jews did."

Many Israelis consider Allon the best mind in the present Cabinet, a probable future Prime Minister.

Would Israel be prepared, in peace negotiations, to offer the Arab states the same kind of courtesy that President Kennedy offered Premier Khrushchev after the Cuban missile confrontation, he was asked. "I'd be delighted to have the peace negotiations conducted in Arabic," said Allon. He happens to speak it fluently.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

TEL AVIV—In the nightmare period when the war is over and the killing still goes on, those who bear the fight and those who only watch it begin to think how future nightmares can be prevented.

The Israelis, to whom the nightmare has come three times in ten years, are not turn what the totality of the preventive measures must be. Their government hat not yet discussed it, in any official sessions of parliament, cabinet or committee.

But officials and plain people alike are sure of one thing: There dare be no return to the status quo ante 1957 or 1949. There will be no armistice agreements of the kind that prevailed before, no acceptance of a continued state of "belligerence," no UN truce supervisory arrangements.

They are rejected out of hand by Israelis for a single reason: They failed to keep the peace.

Two Views

The trouble with tht armistace agreements after Israel's War of Independence, one top policymaking official explained today, is that they were envisioned in diametrically opposite ways by Israel and the Arab states—Israel conceived of them as a transmission mechanism to peace, the Arab slates as a device to contein Israel for a time until the battle could be launched again.

After the Sinai War, Israel argued that the agreements had lapsed by an act of war. It declared that war had been brought to it by the Fedayeen terror raids from Egypt and that it had responded in self-defense. The United Nations never conceded the point, and ruled that under its terms the agreement could not be denounced unilaterally.

But on June 5, Egypt, Jordan and Syria formally declared war on Israel. Now the old agreements are gone, new ones must take their place.

Two Changes

Peace for Israel, some of its most thoughtful people feel, must be based on two changes—changes in the kinds of peace agreements and changes in the status of certain physical areas that they say represent a constant military threat to it. The politics of the last three weeks are proof enough that the old arrangement did not work to keep the peace. The military events of the past four days are proof enough, say Israelis, of the geographical menace constituted by Israel's boundaries and by the political status of some neighboring lands.

The first geopolitical threat is the divided status of Jerusalem. Israelis hold, as demonstrated by the 2 1/2-day artillery siege of the Israeli sector from the Jordanians. The second is Sharm el-Sheikh and the Strait of Tiran which, when in the possession of a hostile nation, form a noose to be drawn at will around the throat of Israel's commerce to and from Africa and Asia and around its hopes for development of the Negev. The third is the most complex—the land on the West Bank of the Jordan River, its border within artillery range of Israel's industrial concentration and the major city of Tel Aviv.

Old Idea Revived

Back in the days of the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations, the West Bank was destined to be a Palestinian state, associated with the state of the Jewish homeland. In the war of Israel's independence, the Kingdom of Transjordan penetrated it, held it and incorporated it into present-day Jordan.

The old idea is being revived today, with several variations. Some months ago, Gen. Moshe Dayan, now Defense Minister, talked of a confederation of Israel, the old Transjordan and a new Palestinian nation comprised of the West Bank.

Israel believws the solution of these political and geographical problems is a requirement for its future security. But it may be that they—and solutions to other Middle East problems—are also requirements for the peace of the world.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

TEL AVIV—Israeli tanks, in a daring maneuver yesterday, raced from Israel's northernmost area to the top of the Syrian ridges that have been pouring artillery fire on collective farms in upper Galilee.

The foray was as unorthodox as it was bold. A column of tanks raced from the area of Dan across the tribu taries of the Jordan River to ridges several miles away and then turned back down again to wipe out Syrian defense positions in hillside villages.

The objective was to silence the Syrian guns which, despite that country's agreement to the UN cease-fire, continued yesterday to bombard Israeli settlements. The Gadot kibbutz (collective farm) was heavily shelled and almoat obliterated Friday morning.

A minimum objective was to eliminate the Syrian artillery observation posts. With Colin Simpson of the London Sunday Times, I watched infantry and heavy mortar groups follow the tanks. They moved in on roads cleared moments before by huge Israeli bulldozers. As we followed the troops half a mile into Syria, we watched Syrian prisoners of war being led down the slopes blindfolded.

Also coming down in Jeeps were Israeli casualties, tended by medics. There seemed to be only a handful.

Simpson, who was in exactly the same spot but on the Syrian side just a week ago, reported that the Syrians had expected the Israeli attack at that site.

Nevertheless, the Israeli operation moved ahead swiftly as night came and seemed in good position to occupy the crests of ridges all along the upper Galilee border.

Simpson’s observation of at least 400 Russian advisers on the Syrian side was confirmed by the radios at a forward command post and in jeeps of military police. The Israelis were amused to hear Russian voices, apparently giving firing instructions to the artillery.

The view from an Israeli command post high in the hills showed a sea of fire below. The stubble fields were aflame from the mortar sheila that dropped on them. Syrian villages high on the ridges were on fire. Israeli officers reported, however, that all civilians had left the villages by the time the attach was launched.

The speed of the operation was incredible. The tanks raced up the ridges about 2 p. m. By 5, battalions of infantry and mortar companies were following their bulldozers into positions where they would defend against any Syrian counterattack.

Equipment Destroyed

On the way up the ridge, a couple of Israeli half-tracks and an abandoned antitank gun were to be seen, the first destroyed by Syrian mines, the second by a Syrian artillery shell.

It appeared that one of the objectives of the thrust was the Syrian town of Banias. However, the ultimate objective might be a town behind the ridges, Qunitra, which commands an important road junction.

Later in the night, I watched fires set by the weapows on a second Israeli sortie in force which pushed about six miles to the south.

According to the Israelis, their objectives are simply to occupy the ridges and end further shelling of the valley below. It may be, however, that the Syrians expect the Israelis to thrust on to Damascus and are reserving their heaviest armor for that contingency.

Convoys of Weapons

Amazingly, as we drove past convoys ef heavy weapons and reserve troops on the roads leading to Israel's north eminent boundaries, there were no signs to be seen of Syrian artillery shelling of Israeli military positions or troops.

Instead the Syrians continued their barrages on the civilian settlements. Israeli officers believe the Syrian artillery has only six targets, all farm settlements.

Although the Syrian guns had long-range capability, they were either unwilling or incapable of changing their aim to the large Israeli military movements coming into striking range.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt—Under the eyes of the first visitors permitted to enter Sharm el Sheikh, an Israeli merchant ship steamed peacefully through the Strait of Tiran, which President Nasser of Egypt blockaded three weeks ago—provoking a six-day war.

Israel also put on view for reporters the panorama of Egyptian defeat. It was the western Sinai, scene of colossal destruction of Egypt's army, with the blackened carcasses of 500 trucks and 50 tanks stretching bumper to bumper for four miles through the Mitla Pass.

Four American news reporters and a few European journalists saw the theater of war and its peaceful climax at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba from a plane flying less than 50 feet above the ground for most of the day-long trip.

What we saw below us and at our stops validated beyond doubt Israel's claims of Egyptian planes and armor destroyed.

Flying over one of the three main roads through the desert, I counted at least 200 shattered Egyptian tanks.

At each of three airfields viewed in the middle of the Sinai Desert, an average of 20 planes, mostly Migs, presented their bare bones and ashes to the sizzling sand.

All the mechanized equipment, guns and armor lying about was of Soviet manufacture.

A reporter's running notes of a tour over the cemetery of Egypt's hopes tells a small part of the story:

10 a.m. Off at wave top level down Tel Aviv's glittering waterfront. Everyone in the city appears to be on the beaches or in the water this Sabbath morning.

10:15 a.m. Except for the thoroughly smashed radar station, the city of Gaza seems untouched. The people are again in the streets, the houses of the huge refugee settlement stand in neat rows. Further to the south, along the beach, the grass and reed-thatched huts come into sight, many with white flags hoisted on poles.

10:30 a.m. Over the road from Rafa, at the bottom of the Gaza Strip, to El Arish, front headquarters which the Israelis reached by noon the first day of the war.

The navigator points out the sights. Until two weeks ago he was flying the New York-Tel Aviv run for El Air airlines, at a leisurely maximum of 70 hours a month. In the last five days he has been in the air 80 hours, mostly ferrying food and water to the forces in the desert and evacuating the wounded. 

Smashed and burned trucks begin to appear below, dotting the road as grisly milestones. Enough wheels there to make a traffic jam in Moscow. New tanks, a couple seemingly untouched.

More and more materiel, mostly guns and trucks, with the camouflage nets never removed. Whole cities of Egyptian tents, unstruck.

11 a.m. Over El Arish, which looks unscathed, again except for the radar stations. But the field looks like a junkyard. As far as can be seen, and we circled from 30 feet, there were no random shots. The Israeli planes seemed to have wasted no rockets, making precise hits in each revampment.

Some bombing, too. however, as the black spots on the runways testified. They are the repairs the Israelis have made to put the field back in operation for their own use.

Below is a Mig, still coupled by a hose to an equally-ruined fuel truck.

11:30 a.m. The mnde-in-Russia, destroyed-in-Sinai cadavers on the road below, leading southward to Jebel Lidni, the second day target of the central Israeli thrust, grow more abundant, and the proportion of dead tanks to transport vehicles increases.

11:45 a.m. We land at Jebcl Lidni, between the blackened revampments on each side, each Mig lying in its open coffin, not pretty to look at. No craters, no random destruction, just direct hits. But the craftsmen who made dummy planes which such loving care need not be unhappy. Their products, placed around the field, are as good as new. The Israeli airmen didn’t touch them.

Visit Headquarters

We climb into a truck for a 20-minute drive through the buildings that were the Egyptians’ Sinai headquarters and now serve the same purpose for the victors.

Signs of a sudden assault and a hurried retreat arc everywhere. Piles of bedding, mess equipment, personal belongings are everywhere. A hell of shells, half unused, hangs from the breach of a 17-pounder anti-tank gun.

But mostly shoes. Heaps of shoes. Shoes, the hallmark of Egyptian defeat in Sinai in this war and the one in 1956. The photographers in our party have a field day.

A sudden, blessedly brief, stench passes across our speeding truck. To the west, five bodies, rotting in the sun. Then a couple more. Then one, bleated, on the right.

12:10 p.m. Four generals, including Joshua Gabish, chief of the southern command, meet with us. Gabish tells us in French: "We have finished the war in four days, from Israel to the Canal. We beat seven divisions, two of them armored. I believe we have knocked out 500 tanks and we have engaged several tens of thousands of soldiers. You will see for yourself."

The commander of one of the task forces can hardly speak above a whisper, having shouted in the field telephones for five days. He says:

"We haven’t talked very much. Our friends on the other side of the Canal, they talk a lot. Instead we have tried to show through acts and deeds what we can do when our country is threatened.

"I know a little hit about military history and I have never before heard of such a thing as our tank crews did, not to mention our pilots. In 50 hours we've smashed the enemy in Sinai.

"Everything depended on the troops. They had the spirit. All we needed was one word, 'Go.' They got it. Then there was only one word. 'Stop,' that prevented them from going on to the other side of the canal.

"I have just come hack from visiting the Canal area. I have never seen anything like it."

Brigadier Generals

A reporter asks the four officers their rank. All are brigadier generals.

"We have only one major general, the Chief of Staff," says one. "We are a small country, you know. Of course, in Egypt they have Field Marshals and all that."

1 p.m. On the way back to the airfield we looked at the big T-55 tanks, drilled from the front through its four inches of steel by a Centurion 105 mm. The lank is so fresh from Russia as still to he painted forest green, for use in Europe, instead of the ochre suitable for the desert.

An Israeli officer looks at the 14 other tanks, mostly light T-34s, drawn up almost in a straight line on the other side. Trucks, upside down, on their side, plunged forward on their nose, on both sides of the road.

Aloft again, but not very much so the pilot flies so close to the dunes that we rise and fall with their contours.

More Wreckage

What we saw before was mere prologue on the way to the Suez Canal. Above the road leading to Ismalia, we see what were two convoys, each with 50 to 75 burned-out vehicles. The Israelis. whose trucks and jeeps are now using the roads, have hauled the hulks to the side, where they lie grotesquely.

Shattered tanks, occasionally two or three together, but mostly at intervals of a few hundred yards on the sides the road or back in the dunes.

1:20 p.m. We are flying south, a few miles to the oast of the Suez Canal. The ship channel lies on our right, peaceful, vast and empty.

1:50 p.m. We swing back east through Mitla Pass. Tile destruction is staggering.

The natural scene is dramatic enough. The roads in the sand dune drop into a canyon with sheer cliffs on each side, reminiscent of southern Utah or New Mexico. It was the scene of the most fierce battle of the war.

Now. for four miles, it stretches like an incinerated snake. I estimate a vehicle to every ten yards. Oil and ashes cover every inch.

Trap Sprung

Israeli aircraft, we are told, blanket[ed] one end of the pass with bombs while Israeli tanks drove through from the other. The ruins are two days old.

3:30 p.m. We have been flying what seems an endless trip, along the shoreline of the Sinai Peninsula. The oil fields of Radis and Dina seem to be touched and deserted, the drilling [remains] motionless, like ostriches with their beaks tethered close to the ground.

But at Ras-Sudar, a farm of six tanks is blazing furiously, flames seeping up a greasy plume of smoke that stretches down the peninsula at least 10 miles. The Israeli officers aboard say the Egyptians sabotaged it before they pulled out.

3:55 p.m. Sharm el Sheikh, [a] regular hook of flat land just around the corner from the southernmost point of Sinai, comes into view, with its United Nations buildings and Egyptian antiaircraft guns, tents and shacks still in place. Israeli troopers throng below.

Col. Ram Ron, Israeli military attache in Washington from 1963 to 1966, and Col. Asher Levy, tense [?]. Levy led the successful assault in place against the Egyptians in 195[?]. Ron was its commander for f[?] months, until he handed it over to Danes of the UN Emergency Fe[?] in 1957.

"I told the Danes," he recounted, "to keep the Strait of Tiran open. 'If you don't,' I said, 'we'll be back.'"

Now he is back.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

JERUSALEM—According to the standard regulations of war—which, to be sure, have never been codified into an official Spaulding handbook but which are sanctified by five or six millennia of practice—the victor annexes the lands he has conquered and gives them back, if at all, only in return for a large payment.

But Israel, which irritates a large number of people by often disregarding the rulebook, does not wish to hold any of the land it has conquered except the eastern part of Jerusalem and a few square miles to straighten out the border on the way there. It is prepared to give back all of the Sinai to Egypt and the Golan Heights to Syria, exacting only the rather modest price of effective guarantees of peace from the former proprietors.

Furthermore, some of the nation’s leaders think that Israel should not only return the most important piece of land it overran, the Palestinian West Bank, to Jordan, but also pay King Hussein to take it back.

Be it said at the outset that this is not the majority viewpoint nor the most likely eventuality. The best guess at the moment is that Israel will propose that the West Bank become a sem-iindependent Palestinian state within defense perimeter, dependent on Israel for economic development.

But the notion of returning the territory to Hussein has such implications for change in the Middle East and the American position there that it deserves more than a passing thought.

The sweetener that Israel would add is the promise of joint economic development, not only of the West Bank but of Jordan itself, with grants of the Middle East’s scarcest commodity—agricultural, technical and administrative know-how. Israel would probably also offer Jordan rights to a free port on the Mediterranean.

Hussein, too, would have to pay a price, a high or a low one, depending on how you look at it.

It would be a treaty of peace and an agreement to work with Israel rather than against it.

It could be the salvation of Jordan or it could cost Hussein his life, just as an incipient tendency toward a settlement cost the life of his grandfather, King Abdullah.

Doubtless Hussein is weighing the matter now, for he has been made aware of the possibility of such an arrangement with Israel. If he rejects it, Hussein remains the big loser in the Six-Day War, the head of a small and poverty-stricken desert kingdom with no very attractive place to turn for protection against the perpetual menace of the Ba’athists of Syria.

Russia obviously has no use for him. The United States apparently gave him little comfort during his recent visit to Washington. Putting his trust in Nasser would be, as he knows, the ultimate in folly, and turning to Saudi Arabia would mean becoming one of King Faisal’s minor satraps. On the plus side, Hussein would escape being branded a traitor to the Arab cause by the "progressive" Arab states.

Accepting an arrangement with Israel would get him back most of the land he lost. Presumably it would also get him very substantial financial support from the United States, for having an impeccably Arab state break away from the Russian-backed "progressive bloc" and openly cooperate with Israel should be worth a great deal to American policy.

And though it could get him shot, Hussein has no guarantee against that whatever he does.

A Jordanian-Israeli settlement predicated on cooperation would create an enormous change in the American-Soviet balance in the Middle East.

The cliche here for years has been that Lebanon would be "the second nation to make peace" with Israel if only another would be first. The third and fourth nations would surely be Tunisia and Morocco.

More important, a settlement would provide an opening for the two truly important states in the Middle East, the developing ones of Turkey and Iran, to act publicly, rather than furtively, in their real interests, which are anti-Nasser and anti-Soviet.

An Arab world united against Israel gives Russia an opportunity to gain its objectives, both traditional and Communist, in the Middle East. These are to become the dominant big power, the keeper of the bridge between three continents, the controller of its governments and of their oil, commerce and military potential.

In pursuit of those objectives, the Soviet Union in recent weeks has taken a scries of stunning defeats, of its allies, its military equipment and its diplomacy.

But a settlement between Israel and an Arab state as simon-pure as Jordan would make them seem trivial by comparison.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

TEL AVIV—Imwas, an Arab village of about 2,500 inhabitants in what was Jordanian-occupied Palestine, was totally destroyed by the Israeli army in the Six-Day War, reduced to a rubble of mud brick and chunks of cement.

No wall stands higher than two or three feet. The destruction extends over an area equal to half a dozen city blocks.

Stories of what brought about the "Imwas affair" have been circulating by word of mouth ever since, and the argument is likely to continue for a long time because the truth is far from evident.

The question is why it was destroyed—whether wantonly, as pro-Arab sources allege, or necessarily, as a consequence of the fierce fighting there, as Israeli military sources assert.

Why it was destroyed is interesting because, except for the town of Qalqilya, also on the Israel-Jordan border, whose partial destruction was almost certainly the result of a heavy battle, Imwas is the only other settlement to have been even seriously damaged in the war, much loss destroyed.

That remarkable aspect of the war is worth detailing to put the lnnvas affair into perspective. No modern war fought so furiously by the armed forces was so astonishingly sparing of civilian casualties or was followed by such an absence of brutality to the vanquished population.

Although roads are littered with the burned-out hulks of tanks and armored vehicles, it is difficult to find any damage in the cities and villages. Hebron. Bethlehem and Jenin are untouched; there are only scratches in Nablus; in Gaza City the radar station is destroyed and almost nothing else.

No Israeli soldier seems to have set foot inside any West Bank refugee camp. Looting was minimal and rape nonexistent. In dozens of trips to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, neither I nor any reporter of my acquaintance heard a specific incident of brutality alleged by Arabs.

The essence of the matter is perhaps best illuminated by an account of Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.), who recently visitcd Jordan and spoke with top officials. He remarked to a cabinet minister of the absence of any assertions by the Arabs of instances of brutality or atrocity.

"Oh, not so," the minister replied. "Only today, a lady from East Jerusalem came to my office and related that after the fighting ended there, an Israeli soldier sidled up to her and whispered: 'How about coming with me and I'll show you the sights of Tel Aviv?'"

Why, Then, lmwas?

Why, then, the leveling of Imwas?

As the crow flies and as the old road once ran, lmwas lies about halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It was the main settlement of the so-called Latrun Salient, a ballooning little bulge in the border which Jordanian troops held at the time of the armistice ending the 1948 war of independence.

For several miles along the border and around the salient, the armistice agreements decreed a demilitarized zone, which soon lapsed into a no man's land where the fields were left empty and uncultivated.

On one of the hills a few hundred yards from the settlement stands a Trappist monastery, for Imwas is deemed to be ancient Emmaus, where, according to St. Luke, Christ revealed Himself to two of the Apostles three days after the Crucifixion.

The town stands beside the old and direct road from Tel Aviv and Ramla to Jerusalem, and also athwart the road to the important West Bank city of Ramallah, north of Jerusalem.

Accordingly, when the war with Jordan began about noon on Monday, June 5, an Israeli armored force pushed quickly into the Latrun Salient and passed through Imwas, intent on following a Jordanian tank force rapidly retreating up the Ramallah road. There was a minimum of fighting in the village at that time.

But by nightfall, the Israelis, by then at or close to Ramallah, discovered what they had not known earlier: the Egyptian commando battalion that had been flown to Jordan a few days before had holed up in Imwas. Its mission was to raid Israel’s main civilian airfield, Lydda, a few miles distant, and other military airfields in the area.

With a more immediate opportunity in front of them, the commandos waited until the main armored force had passed and then fell upon the supply convoys following behind. In the process, they killed about 20 Israelis and blocked the flow of supplies.

The Israelis responded by sending in tanks to clean out the Egyptian unit. A sharp night action ensued, beginning about 2 a.m. Tuesday. There were no known civilian casualties. By that time, the 2,500 inhabitants of the village had abandoned it, most fleeing to Ramallah and some taking refuge in the monastery.

Differing Accounts

So much is agreed upon. But from that point on, the accounts differ. The Israeli military version is as follows:

The action lasted 24 hours, with tanks blasting out the dug-in commandos. A few were on top of the hills above one side of the village, but most were In the settlement. By the time the fighting was over, the place was a ruin with no house left fit for habitation.

Accordingly, some days later, the Israelis brought in bulldozers to level the rubble and help dig out the corpses.

A full month after the action, as the first reporter permitted by the Israeli authorities into the ruins, I can testify to at least one spot where something dead still remained.

The version of the Trappist fathers at the monastery is very different. The report is given by Father Reimi (he hails from Reims), a tall and genial man with a striking physical resemblance to Gen. de Gaulle. He was acting as father superior during the war. A French artillery officer in both World Wars, he was complimentary of the Israeli shooting. Only seven shots, none seriously damaging, went into the monastery, which Father Reimi thinks was minimal under the circumstances.

But, he declared, the fighting lasted only three quarters of an hour and the Israeli fire was directed almost entirely at the Egyptian commando positions on the top of the hill, with little or nothing into the village.

At the end of the affair, he said, the houses were not damaged, as he verified by a visit Wednesday. But on Friday, Israeli military engineers returned and bulldozed down one half of Imwas, and a week or so later the rest of it.

Paying an Old Score?

If, in fact, Father Reimi’s account is the more nearly accurate one, the question arises of why the Israelis would level the whole townlct. There are several theories, none completely convincing.

One is that Israel was paying off an old score. During the war of independence, the most ferocious attacks on the blockade runners trying to supply besieged Jerusalem came from the Latrun area. Moreover, the first act of the Jordanians there, half an hour after the armistice agreements were signed, was to blow up the pumping station supplying water to Jerusalem—in direct violation of the agreements.

Subsequently, border incursions and sabotage raids were mounted from there.

Yet in the last several years, those attacks ceased altogether. The border around the Latrun bulge was quiet.

Another theory is that the Israelis were punishing Imwas for harboring the Egyptian commandos. Yet the commandos had just arrived and the villagers clearly had little option.

A final theory is that the Israelis want no Arab farmers in the neighborhood to challenge the cultivation of the rich but formerly idle fields in the no man’s land by members of nearby kibbutzim (collective farms). They have already put the plow to those lands.

As a resident of Jerusalem asked 2,000 years ago, "What is truth?" What is truth about the Imwas affair, as well as the more general question, remains unanswered.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

JERUSALEM—Newspapers from home tend to arrive in batches and to be read in great gulps at one sitting. They may thereby leave an impression of America’s summer of sickness that is swollen beyond its reality.

Swollen or not, the image they present of our society clamors to be contrasted with the one that emerges here at the end of three months of observing Israel’s trial and triumph.

The portrait of the American scene brings the Israeli one into sharper focus and somehow helps make clear what is central to it. Israel is a society that can live with itself. "Alienation," key word in the exposition of what is supposed to afflict America—alienation of young from old, rich from poor, ignorant from educated, dark skin from light—is here unheard of as an idea; unknown as a fact.

There is one huge exception, of course. The quarter of a million Arabs in Israel are in fact alienated. They may have the highest living standard of any Arab population, enjoy infinitely better schooling, also vastly more democratic participation and the most careful regard for their legal and civil riehts. yet the Arabs are not part of the mainstream of the Israeli community.

Israelis know this and recognize it as an affront to the principles they champion. But among the 2.5 million Jews, the individual is at peace with his purpose and with his nation’s purpose. He is at peace with his fellow citizens.

No doubt Israelis search their souls as much as any educated and introspective people. But they do not seem to ask the question of "Who am I?" or "What is our national life all about?" They believe they know. Their judgment on values, on the kinds of rewards and satisfactions they seek, on what is admirable and deserving, comes close to a national consensus.

It is shared by all elements but the extremists—on the one side the newly arrived immigrants from the archaic Middle Eastern environments, and on the other the ultrareligious, living almost a life apart. The satisfactions the central body of Israelis seek and the goals they strive for have a plentiful component of the strictly materialistic; Israelis like possessions and luxuries even as everyone else. Yet the desire for the physical goods of life is, it seems, accompanied and tempered by a stronger insistence than elsewhere for the values of the mind and spirit and for a community that honors a moral purpose.

This is not to say that Israel is a nation of doughy sweetness and light, of cloying and placid righteousness, as one suspects last century’s utopian societies would have been had they ever been achieved.

Israel has its fair share of hoodlums and Communists, as ugly and as shrilly tiresome, respectively, as hoodlums and Communists anywhere else. It has money-grubbers and corner-cutters, cranks and knuckleheads. And it has as many- internal wrangles as a dog has fleas.

The Jews were always a disputatious and quarrelsome people, as the Old Testament makes painfully clear, and they continue to be. They battle among themselves over politics, wrestling with a system of proportional representation that has miserable and even-potentially dangerous consequences.

Prejudice is far from unknown. The citizen of a European background, the Ashkenazi, looks down his nose and worries about what may happen if the Sephardim, or "Oriental" Jews of North Africa and the Middle East become a majority. The Ashkenazi attitude is sometimes reminiscent of that well known American one that alleges, "If you gave them a bathtub they’d put coal in it."

Yet for all that, the Israelis know themselves to be interdependent and they conduct their national and personal relationships accordingly. They know for whom the bell tolls. When all are brothers, there is no need for, no room for, special categories of brothers, like "soul brothers." In personal dealings, they are simply not mean to each other.

Why is this so? How did it come about? One can offer a dozen answers, without being sure of any.

Perhaps because it has been dedication to the law for more than 3,000 years; the law framed—often cruelly so—to make the community cohesive. Perhaps it was that which makes the Jews, or at least the Israeli Jews, know that they have a clear, inescapable identity, regardless of the fact that most of them are non-observant-tending-to-atheist and pay no heed to the details of the law, which are barbarous and archaic. But the essence of The Law remains with them.

Maybe, instead, it is the personal realization of every migrant that the world rejected his or his family’s supposition that they had "passed" or had at least been accepted into a gentile society. Hitler and Stalin proved that the assumption was wrong, that Jews were "separate," not to be assimilated.

Maybe it was the threat of extermination, as an individual and as a state, for the last 20 vears, at the hands of 50 million neighbors: or the reality of the extermination of six million Jews in the years immediately preceding. Or perhaps it was the other side of the coin: the demonstration that if they did not hang together they would hang separately.

Maybe it was simply the challenge, handed down by the idealists, Jewish and gentile, over the last two centuries, to build a society with the most lofty goals of moral and spiritual satisfaction on the most humble foundations of toil and egalitarianism.

Maybe it was all of these or maybe none. But the fact remains that Israel has built a society to which all its Jewish citizens feel they belong, which is sure of itself and united in its objectives.

The American observer, shattered by every report from home, senses that he finds here, in contrast to his own, a society that is wholesome—except that "wholesome" sounds priggish and nambv-pamby, and Israel is anything but that. Say, better, it is a society that is whole.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)