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Arab crowds in Amman, Nablus and Old Jerusalem cried for arms to "avenge ourselves." Jordan begged her fellow Arab League states for troops, planes and tanks. John Bagot Glubb, British commander of Jordan's crack 15,000-man Arab Legion, the strongest force in the Arab world, announced a shoot-on-sight order directed at any Israeli cau^it in Jordan. But further he would not go, though Jordanian Deputies demanded retaliation. Said Glubb: "The Jews of Israel must be as well aware as anyone else who knows the Arab world that every one of the survivors of such an attack now considers himself in on the blood-feud custom—violence which breeds more violence still."
"Lost Patience." The Western protests found Israel defiant and uriapologetic. Extras reporting the Kibya massacre were soon sold out. "When I heard the news, my heart swelled with pride," said one Israeli. In the Mosaic tradition of an eye for an eye, the Israelis produced statistics to show that since May 1950, 421 Israelis had been killed or wounded by Jordan marauders. Just that week, a cowherd had been murdered, a mother and her children blown to bits. The Israeli U.N. delegation commented that it wished the Big Three "would show the same compunction about Israeli dead." But no one accused the Arabs of so bloody a massacre as the night at Kibya. The Israeli Foreign Office, contrary to its usual custom, did not attempt to deny the attack; not until four days later did a spokesman claim with straight face that the soldiers involved were not regulars but Allied veterans of World War II, now farming on the frontier, who had "lost patience." In Jerusalem the government announced that it welcomed U.N. intervention.
But behind its confident tone, the republic was a bit scared; Jerusalem wore a crisis atmosphere. Premier David Ben-Gurion rushed back from vacation to preside over an emergency Cabinet meeting.
Israel was in deep trouble and knew it. The subsidy and sympathy of Western public opinion, which had sustained Israel in its first five years, was ebbing. Besieged from without, overcrowded within, Israel was near bankruptcy. It blamed the Arab economic boycott for depriving Israel of its natural regional markets and $60 million a year in trade. Israel needed water for irrigation, but a sensible water development program required mutual agreements with hostile neighbors. Last week, against the objections of Syria and in open defiance of the U.N., Israel went steadily ahead day & night with a canal project to divert part of the Jordan's waters for hydroelectric power, whereupon the State Department announced that it would withhold U.S. economic aid ($65 million last year) until the Israelis stop work on the canal.
To survive, Israel needs peace. Last week, in its defiance of the U.N. and in the slaughter of Kibya, Israel made peace harder than ever to attain.