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Almost time for the watchman to go to sleep and for the rest of Israel to rise and work. But how long can the Israelis go on this way? In the years since the fighting was officially declared over, they have not dared to fill in their trenches or coil their barbed wire. The direct cost of the peacetime raids has been $4,500,000, the indirect cost incalculable. Instead of bleeding to death in a thousand places, as her enemies hope she will, Israel is growing bellicose. Increasing numbers of Israelis see no chance of a permanent settlement unless their army wins it for them. Says a top Israeli general: "Only by making the Arabs realize that if they press hard they will be met with another Kibya can we deter them . . . We must adopt an aggressive posture."
From the Jordan side, TIME'S Middle East Correspondent Keith Wheeler reported:
The Arabs feel the same way. One windy morning I drove to the Jordan village of Husan, which is less than a mile from the frontier. All of Husan's 1,200 inhabitants were gathered gravely, a little proudly, in the muddy village square. The Jews had attacked Husan the night before I arrived, and Husan's home guard had helped to give them a bloody nose. Now the whole village was assembled, waiting for the U.N. armistice team to piece together the Arab version of the attack.
A young lieutenant in the red and white headgear of Jordan's Arab Legion had charge of the evidence: a scattering of spent .30-caliber cartridges with Israeli markings; a demolition charge, an empty morphine syrette, several deposits of dried blood, and—out in a wheat field on the south side of the village—a crushed-down trail through the wheat where something heavy and inert, like a body, had been dragged away in the direction of the Israeli border. "We got this one with the Bren gun." the lieutenant said proudly. "It was about 10:45 p.m.when they came. My sentries heard them moving about in the rocks, so we opened fire . . .
"They replied with so much fire so fast, and so many grenades, that at first I pulled back my men behind the village walls. Then the Arab Legion got here—they made it in 15 minutes. The Israelis pulled out some 45 minutes later. We heard one of them yell when he got hit . . ."
"Suppose they come back?" I asked the young lieutenant.
"They'll be welcome," he snapped, staring westwards across the demarcation line towards the squat Israeli barracks at Camp Opper, less than a mile away. But the lieutenant's jaunty confidence was tinged with apprehension, for everyone in Husan knows that it takes almost no effort—only the desire—for the Jews to come again any night they choose. Next time Husan might not escape unscathed.