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Many Americans were inclined to think that the Israelis had put themselves in the wrong by going into Egypt, and ought to get out of there. But in the U.S. as well as elsewhere around the world, sympathy had built up for Ben-Gurion's position. Last week the Israeli government in Jerusalem and its consulates overseas reported receiving thousands of letters of support from places as far apart as Bangkok and Bangor, Me., Stockholm and Santa Ana, Calif. Samples: "Don't surrender to Nasserism"; "Stick to your guns and positions"; "Call Ike's bluff"; "Don't give an inch"; "Stand pat"; "Hold tight."
The Fruits of Victory. If Israelis could accept "assumptions" which were widely approved, instead of gun positions held in defiance of U.N. resolutions, they would not come out of their retreat at all badly.
They have shown that they can lick the strongest of their neighbors. They have shown up the extent of Soviet penetration in the Middle East by capturing huge stockpiles of tanks, guns and motorized equipment. They have shown up the hollowness of Nasser's vaunted four-power pact, signed just before the Sinai invasion, by which Syrian, Saudi and Jordanian troops were supposed to march under Egyptian command. And the first frightened session of desert kings that convened after the Sinai rout in Beirut last November signaled a shift which may well make last week's Cairo session the last get-together of "positive-neutrality" Arabs.
The Fruits of Retreat. Finally, in any assessment of what the Israelis win or lose by giving in, their most significant gain may be the degree to which President Eisenhower has now committed the U.S. in the Middle East. Lacking a steadfast and mature Middle East policy, the U.S. in the past tended to follow the British lead there long after it ceased to in other parts of the world. All that ended in the wreckage of Suez, and the U.S. has moved to fill the Middle East "power deficit" (the State Department avoids the word "vacuum" as offensive to Arab nationalist pride). The new U.S. policy, of which the Eisenhower Doctrine is the core, is by far the most important extension of foreign policy enunciated by the present Administration. In one sense, what Ben-Gurion accepted last week was worth more than what Dulles had suggested back on Feb. 11. What had begun as another several-sided statement by a Secretary of State had been reinforced and made authoritative by the public affirmations of the President of the U.S.
By his Israeli intervention, Ike is more committed than the U.S. perhaps originally intended to a peaceful and prosperous Israel in the Middle East. When the President of the U.S. summons the restive leaders of the Senate to a tough-talking session and then goes on the air to say what the U.S. is prepared to do to see that the Israelis do not have to face the same aggression again from Egypt, this amounts to more than sounding words of sympathy. The personal messages that Ike sent Ben-Gurion mark a further degree of commitment.