Wherever we stroll there are always three—you and I and the next war.
—Contemporary Israeli Poem
FOR a few suspenseful days last week, the people of Israel wondered whether the next war might not be imminent. Israeli units were engaged in the biggest combined air, land and sea operation since the Six-Day War with the Arabs in 1967. Naval commandos were the first to go into action in the Gulf of Suez, blasting two Egyptian torpedo boats. Next, an Israeli armored unit of 150 men ferried across the gulf in landing craft, spent ten hours shooting up troops, bases and radar installations with utter impunity along a dusty strip of Egyptian coastline. Not until two days later did the Egyptians reply by sending swarms of MIG fighters and Sukhoi bombers aloft, but Israel's air force quickly routed them.
Throughout, the telephone wires hummed between Israel's general staff and a grandmotherly-looking woman who is the country's Premier. Mrs. Golda Meir, 71, listened to the reports with obvious relish. At week's end, in a message marking Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, she ushered in the year 5730 on the Hebrew calendar with a warning to the Arab nations. "Attacks on the frontiers, sabotage attempts within Israel and attacks of piracy against Israelis abroad," she said, "have fortified Israel's resolve never to return to the situation of constant peril which prevailed before the Six-Day War."
They were tough words from a tough lady. Golda Meir became Premier six months ago, after the death of Levi Eshkol. With the job, she inherited the difficult task of overseeing the territories captured during the Six-Day War: the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights. The new boundaries, created under a United Nations ceasefire, soon came to be violated almost daily. One of the deadliest border conflicts of modern history was under way.
It is not full-scale war, but far more serious than the nagging frontier clashes that sometimes go on between hostile nations for years. It involves issues that reason, self-interest and compromise could settle, yet it is wrapped in nationalistic and cultural hatreds that seem beyond resolution in this generation. Each side is backed by one of the world's two big powers and yet, while neither the U.S. nor Russia wants war in the Middle East, neither seems capable of making peace.
Formation of Hawks
The current phase of conflict started about 18 months ago with the appearance of sizable numbers of Arab guerrillas who called themselves "fedayeen" ("men of sacrifice"). Wellarmed, fairly well-trained, bound together by a mystical hatred of the Jews, the fedayeen swelled rapidly with recruits. Soon eleven different organizations, seven of which are loosely amalgamated and led by a burly fighter named Yasser Arafat (TIME cover, Dec. 13), were raiding Israel. Though most Arab governments were reluctant to give them open support for fear of retaliation, the fedayeen before long were powerful enough to defy the authorities. The fedayeen never were of major military significance, but they force the Israelis to maintain constant vigilance, exacting a steady toll not only of lives but of the spirit.
Since Mrs. Meir became Premier, the conflict has heated up considerably, and Arab leaders place much of the