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It was all more than Ben-Gurion could take. "He is a disgrace to the people and the nation," announced the old man. "He does not know how to distinguish between truth and untruth. He should be fired." And, at the age of 80, Ben-Gurion tried to see to it that he was. After being rebuffed in his attempts by the laborite Mapai Party, which he had founded, B-G rallied his old friends around him to form a new political party and set out to defeat Eshkol in the 1965 parliamentary elections. Even with Dayan at his side, he did not come close. Eshkol, with organized labor behind him, swamped Ben-Gurion at the polls, put together a solid government coalition in Parliament that could outvote the combined opposition by nearly 2 to 1.
Despite the proportions of Eshkol's victory, it brought Israel no more than a brief period of political peace. Hard after the elections came the first signs that the economic boom was ending. At first, Eshkol was in full control, correctly arguing that Israel would simply have to learn to live within its means. But then he made the mistake of bowing to labor demands for a general wage increase, which could only contribute to the inflation he professed to oppose. He made other mistakes as well. Driven to distraction by the increase in border terrorism, he lunged out wildly in a massive retaliation raid aimed not at Syria, whose government trains and finances the Arab commando units responsible for the incidents, but at relatively peaceful Jordan, where King Hussein had been doing his best to keep the terrorists out of his kingdom.
In the main, however, Eshkol has been criticized more for lack of action than for taking the wrong action. Once, when he was reminiscing about his childhood in the Ukraine, he recalled that in the pogrom that followed the Russo-Japanese War he and his family had spent weeks barricaded inside their home. "I realized in my own immature way that striking back never entered our heads," said Eshkol. "I wished in a desperate kind of way that when I was older I would know what to do." Last week he—and all of Israel—faced the same dilemma. Barricaded inside their land, the Israelis wanted desperately to know what to do.
Small Sliver. From Arab diplomats in both Cairo and Beirut last week came hints that the crisis might be negotiated. Nasser, who has won a political victory by leading the Arabs to the brink of war, does not want to gamble his winnings by actually leading them to war. He is reportedly ready to bargain with Israel for the lifting of his blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba. His price: "acceptable" Israeli compensation to the 1.3 million Palestine refugees, plus a token "border adjustment" that would return a small sliver of Israeli desert to Arab sovereignty. The border adjustment is a question of repairing Arab honor and is relatively unimportant—though Israel may be reluctant to cede even a splinter of its land. The real key to an eventual political accommodation—after the present tensions abate—lies in finding a solution to the refugee problem.