A British royal commission investigating the struggle between Arab and Israeli 17 years ago arrived at a tragic conclusion. "Fundamentally," said the Peel Report of 1937, "it is a conflict of right with right." Last week—one world war and one local war later—the judgment was still valid. The Jews were right, because 4,000 years ago the narrow strip of Palestine, where 1,670,000 today carve out their earthly Zion, became the cradle of their culture and religion. The Arabs were right, because for more than 1,000 years the land had been theirs.
The Arab-Israeli war, which the Arabs lost but the Jews did not win, ended only on paper. In five years of truce, some 500 Israelis and an uncounted number of Arabs have been killed or wounded in fierce border clashes which the U.N. and its armistice teams are powerless to prevent. Some in recent months have assumed the gory proportion of massacres—Kibya last October, when Jews killed 53 helpless Arabs, Scorpion Pass last March, when Arabs slew eleven helpless Jews. But those are only larger, remembered episodes in a situation that is worsening rapidly. Last week TIME correspondents concluded tours on opposite sides of the border between Israel and Jordan.
From the Israeli side, Contributing Editor Sam Halper cabled:
As night fell on Mishmar Ayalon, a frontier settlement which stretches to the Jordan wire, 20 miles northwest of Jerusalem, a tired, unshaven man, coated with the dirt of the field, picked up his Sten gun and climbed to the roof of his house. The village generator, silent all day to save fuel, started to put-put, and 73 floodlights splashed light across the rocky fields. So began another night in the siege without respite that has been going on for five years.
The man on the roof peered towards the rude enclosure where the village's sheep were penned. He was the shepherd of Mishmar Ayalon, and the Sten gun his crook. Since 1951, six of Mishmar Ayalon's men had been killed by bullets out of the night. The villagers took to arms and appointed as their captain Shmuel Schiff, a wiry youth with a hussar mustache.
One night I joined Shmuel Schiff as he made his watchman's rounds. We stumbled through the dark across whirls of rusty barbed wire, past shoebox houses pock-marked with bullet holes. He poked his pistol at the heavy-meshed windows, to make sure that they were strong enough to keep out hand grenades. A rifle barked in the distance. We turned about at the end of the village near an abandoned house. A widow had lived there until one morning last June, when three men poked dynamite underneath the floor and blew her to pieces. U.N. officers tracked the killers to the Jordan border.
We moved on to Schiff's house, where he told me his story:
"My father and brother died in Auschwitz. My mother and I survived in Budapest because we forged identity cards that made us into Christians. My wife comes from Rumania. Her six brothers and sisters were also killed. We passed through many hardships, but now we have a cow, 250 chickens, a kerosene stove and seven acres, and two children. We have found our place . . . Nothing can move us from here."