World: MIDDLE EAST: THE WAR AND THE WOMAN

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responsibility on her. English-speaking Arabs used to refer to her contemptuously as Golda Lox. Now, by and large, they no longer joke about her. "Under Eshkol," says an Arab professor, "I had a vague hope that something was possible. Under Mrs. Meir, I have no such hope." A Jordanian Cabinet member agrees: "Eshkol hated the hawks, but Golda flies in formation with them. She has always been hard as nails." Part of the time, she has had to be. Nine days before she was sworn in, the Egyptians, having turned the Suez front opposite Sinai into one vast, armed camp, loosed a thunderous artillery barrage. What Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser described as "the war of attrition" went into high gear. Since then the artillery has rarely been silent.

Nor was Suez the only scene of action. The Israelis carried out raids deep in Egypt and against terrorist camps along the borders of Jordan and Lebanon. Arab guerrillas lofted Soviet-made Katyusha rockets into Israeli kibbutzim, or crept across the borders to plant mines and blow up pipelines. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine proved particularly nettlesome. Three weeks ago, the P.F.L.P. hijacked a TWA jetliner with 113 aboard and forced it down in Damascus; two Jewish passengers are still being held by the Syrians. Last week several of the Front's teen-aged "cub commandos" tossed hand grenades into Israeli offices in Bonn, Brussels and The Hague, gravely wounding one employee of El Al Airlines.

To the Israelis, the situation along the Suez Canal front was the most worrisome of all. There the unremitting attacks by President Nasser's Russian-trained gunners and snipers as well as occasional Egyptian commando forays were taking a toll greater than Israel felt it could bear. In the past month alone, 21 Israelis died in such attacks. The Israelis felt that they must reply somehow.

The ten-hour war was their answer. It began when a column of six dusty, yellow-painted tanks and three armored personnel carriers began lumbering across the Sinai Peninsula, headed west. The vehicles were Russian, captured during the Six-Day War. The Israeli soldiers aboard them spoke fluent Arabic and wore Egyptian-type uniforms. Moving only at night to escape surveillance by Egyptian planes and hiding under camouflage during the day while temperatures soared above 100° F., the strange convoy reached the Gulf of Suez early last week.

Unbearable Burden

The night before the armored unit set out, Israeli frogmen in boats with muffled engines moved quietly out to sea and headed for the small Egyptian naval base of Ras Sadat, twelve miles south of Port Suez. There the frogmen slid into the water and planted powerful charges under the hulls of two Russian-built Egyptian navy torpedo boats assigned to patrol that section of the gulf; the Egyptian craft blew out of the water.

The way was clear for the Israeli tankers. The next night, landing craft carried them without opposition across the gulf to the Egyptian coast. Laden with extra fuel, extra guns and extra ammunition, the Israelis swiveled off the landing craft before dawn. They achieved total surprise and inflicted heavy casualties on their 40-mile sweep down the coast. As the convoy moved south through El Hafayer, trucks pulled off the two-lane asphalt highway with friendly waves to make way for what appeared