ISRAEL'S JOSEPH
By a Middle East Correspondent Jerusalem
BEN-calRioN has something of Churchill's flair for the apt quotation. To the solemn meeting of the Knesset convened to hear the report of victory he quoted Isaiah xix, 16: 'In that day shall the Egyptians be like unto women; and they shall tremble and fear because of the shaking of the hand of the Lord of Hosts, which he shaketh over them.' The face of Moshe bayan, Chief of Staff, sitting in pullover with open-necked shirt, did not flicker. Neither at the beginning, nor during nor a, t the end of the Prime Minister's speech was there applause from the crowded House.
To Israel Operation 'Sinai' was just one more chapter in the long chronicle of bloodshed which has continued during every day of the State's eight years of life. There are other similarities between Britain's and Israel's Wartime leaders. Ben-Gurion also works from bed; this time, compulsorily. Throughout the campaign he was directing operations from two maps on his bed, suffering from para- typhoid with a temperature of 104°. Ben-Gurion has the same hankering for panache; when he made his radio announce- ment to the nation he kept the whole country waiting for an hour listening to funereal music before he finally spoke at 12.30 a.m.
Ben-Gurion had scarcely delivered his Knesset speech with its intransigent Point 6, declaring that Israel would admit no foreign troops to Sinai, when Britain, the US, Russia and the United Nations, each for their own reasons, started waving sticks at him. For the next twenty-four hours the Cabinet was in almost continuous session. Mrs. Golda Meir, the Foreign Minister, was intercepted at Paris on her way to UN and brought back to make the momentous decision. The Cabinet bowed to Eisenhower's pressure; with Russian forces building up in Syria, Israel did not dare jeopardise the prospect of defence from the US Sixth Fleet in the event of Syrian attack.
Ben-Gurion's voice sounded weak and sad beyond descrip- tion as he broadcast the news of his decision to surrender Sinai. If any other leader had made such a decision he would have been overthrown by public opinion; but Ben-Gurion is Israel's Joseph (as Weizmann was Moses) and the Israelites followed Joseph as he led his people out from Sinai.
When this broadcast was made, the campaign, which lasted ninety-two hours, had been over for four days. Already nearly half of the army had been demobilised. It took Israel's civilian army from Friday morning to Monday evening to mobilise and cross the frontier; the process of demobilisation was even quicker. Two days after the fighting men and women were back at their old jobs.
With the decision to evacuate Sinai drivers were recalled to the colours together with their vehicles. From then on an end- less column of trucks rolled down into the desert to collect anything and everything of military value. It was like an endless procession of ants, seventy miles long; empty trucks drove down to Sinai as the loaded convoys returned.
Included in endless streams of war material were the Russian jeeps, trucks, artillery guns, anti-tank guns, T34 tanks and even a colossal radar station on wheels. Behind Abu Agheila, where the Egyptians made their only stand, the Israelis found suffi- cient equipment. laid out in depots, for two complete divisions. They found weapons which the Israeli Ambassador to Moscow, previously an army general, said were more modern than any known to the military attaches in Moscow.
Ben-Gurion said that, as he read Russia's threatening note, he felt like crumpling it in his hand; if he had not seen the signature 'Bulganin' he would have thought that it had come from Hitler. There is no doubt in Israel that Russia is bent on the Jews' destruction. If Russian tanks could mow down the Hungarians when it suited the Communists, why should they show scruples about bombing Tel-Aviv and Haifa from Syria when to do so would loose a shout of triumph from Cairo to Damascus? Mrs. Golda Meir, Israel's Foreign Minister, herself Rusiian-born and one time Ambassador in Moscow, has little doubt that the hour of vengeance is only a question of time. 'If you asked me to sign a paper saying that they will not bomb while we sit here and talk,' she told me, 'I would not.'
Such is the mood of gallant despair in Israel since Russia showed her claws. 'Ain brera,' that is the Israelis' secret weapon which will bring them to-victory even though every house and farm shed is laid low; it means 'no alternative.' With the surf rolling against the strand behind them, with hostile neighbours along their 590 miles of frontier, the Israelis have nowhere to escape. So there is no panic, no evacuation, no buying-in of food. Life continues more normally than perhaps in England. except that all the lorries are rolling down to Sinai; and along the road crowds of Yemeni, Moroccan and Iraqi Jews, young and old, with dark skins and brightly coloured shirts, stand outside their immigrant shacks waving to the lorries as they come back, bedecked with Egypt's standards, like chariots of old. And as the sun goes down on Friday evening, on Sabbath, eyes will turn towards you in the West and lips will murmur all through Zion, 'Hear our prayer!'
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