Summoned into emergency session three weeks ago amidst Russian cries of threatening war, the U.N. General Assembly met in Manhattan to defuse the international time bombs threatening the peace of the Middle East. Last week, after eight days of palaver, the Assembly brought forth its own novel method of bomb disposal. The technique: wrap the infernal device in verbal cotton wool—this deadens that unpleasant ticking sound—and tiptoe quickly away.
This inconclusive conclusion to the Assembly's deliberations, which many cheered, was largely the doing of the great powers. In their anxiety to avoid even implicit U.N. condemnation as "aggressors," the U.S. and Britain had thrown their weight behind an innocuous Norwegian resolution to turn the problem of Lebanon and Jordan over to U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. And Russia's Andrei Gromyko, though full of snarling references to Western "armed intervention" in the internal affairs of Middle Eastern nations, met privately with U.S. Secretary of State Dulles in a small office in the U.N., and agreed that "a quieting down" was in order.
At this unexpected turn of events, an idea came to suave, balding Mahmoud Fawzi, Foreign Minister of the United Arab Republic and the only Farouk-era holdover to retain a senior post in Nasser's revolution. Fawzi, a topflight international lawyer, skillfully pounced on a fact which almost everyone else had overlooked: if the great powers were prepared to accept a compromise settlement, they could scarcely reject a compromise proposed by a united front of Arab states. And there was every reason why all Arab powers, including the violently anti-Nasser governments of Lebanon and Jordan, might join in sponsoring such a resolution. By so doing, they would win position with their own people for having demonstrated the solidarity of the Arabs and their determination to run their own affairs. Yet, in the process, neither Nasser nor his opponents would be committed to anything not already implicit in the Norwegian resolution.
The Smell of Roast Camel. Little more than 24 hours after the Gromyko-Dulles conversation, Fawzi outlined his scheme to his fellow Arabs in the Hotel Pierre suite of Abdel Khalek Hassouna, Secretary-General of the Arab League, a moribund outfit invented in 1945 by the British and captured by the Egyptians. Fawzi's audience—the representatives of the eight Arab League nations* plus Tunisia and Morocco—personified all the quarrels which have rent the Arab world for 40 years. And some of the quarrels persisted at the meeting. But before long the beauty of Fawzi's plan had turned the meeting into an old-fashioned Arab love feast. ("You could practically smell the camel roasting," cracked one U.S. newshen.) At the end of the session, Lebanese Foreign Minister Charles Malik, who only a week ago was vigorously denouncing the U.A.R. for indirect aggression, impetuously enfolded Fawzi in a bearlike embrace. And two days later, when it came time for formal presentation of the Arab resolution to the Assembly, the job was done by the Sudan's Foreign Minister, Mohammed Mahgoub, whose country has spent most of its brief independent life fighting off annexation by Egypt.