The sullen enmity between infant Israel and its Arab neighbors, long acknowledged and long passed over by Western diplomacy, erupted last week with a violence that could no longer be ignored.
At 9:30 one night, most of the people were just going to bed in the Jordanian village of Kibya, 20 miles northwest' of Jerusalem, and a mile and a half beyond the Israeli frontier. A light still burned in the village coffeehouse, where a few late gossipers were preparing to depart; on this quiet night, as usual, everyone put his trust in the U.N. "truce" and 30 skimpily armed Jordanian national guardsmen. Suddenly, Israeli artillery, previously zeroed onto target, opened up, and a 600-man battalion of uniformed Israeli regulars swept across the border to encircle the village. For the next 2^ hours the town shuddered under shell bursts and small-arms fire; villagers, screaming and milling, rushed out to the surrounding fields and olive groves.
Then the guardsmen's ammo (25 rounds per man) gave out, and the Israelis moved into Kibya with rifle and Sten guns. They shot every man. woman and child they could find, then turned their fire on the cattle. After that, they dynamited 42 houses, a school and a mosque. The cries of the dying could be heard amid the explosions. The villagers huddled in the grass could see Israeli soldiers slouching in the doorways of.their homes, smoking and joking, their young faces illuminated by the flames. By 3 a.m., the Israelis' work was done, and they leisurely withdrew.
At dawn, the villagers crept out of the grass and made for the smoldering ruins, looking desperately for a husband, a wife, a child. They crowded around a young girl whose body sprawled grotesquely, forefinger raised to heaven as Moslems do when they say: "There is only one God, and Mohammed is his prophet." An old man dug furiously in the debris, occasionally looked up, terror in his eyes, then laughed hysterically. Once he shouted to the sky: "Allah! I have no relations now. Why didn't you leave me one person?" Sixty-six died that night; eleven from one family, ten of another. It was the bloodiest night of border warfare since the 1949 armistice—the armistice that won Dr. Ralph Bunche the Nobel Peace Prize, but brought no peace.
Stern Condemnation. Next morning in London, the news stirred the Big Three foreign ministers. Three identical messages went off to the U.N. requesting an "urgent meeting" of the Security Council, which took up the matter this week, and unanimously invited Denmark's Major General Vagn Bennike, Chief Truce Supervisor, to New York to report. The U.N.'s Mixed Armistice Commission, chief enforcement agency of the truce, which has only the power to urge and deplore, deplored the Israeli act as "coldblooded murder." Britain, which stands behind the desert state of Jordan, wired its "distress" and "horror" in an angry message to Israel's government.
From Washington went the harshest diplomatic protest ever addressed by the U.S. to Israel: "Shocking . . . Those responsible should be brought to account."