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Though Nasser is no longer regarded by the Arab masses as a new Saladin, he remains their best-known and most respected leader, the man to whom all other leaders listen — in other words, the key to the Arab world today, and thus to peace. He remains for many the embodiment of the ancient Arab dream of Al Umma al Arabia, or unity of all the Arab nations, the hero who threw off foreign domination. He is, above all, the man with whom Israel and the West must deal in seeking a settlement in the Middle East.
The Search for a Solution
The search for that settlement is now taking place far from the desert firing lines. In New York, the U.N. ambassadors of the U.S., Russia, Britain and France are in their sixth week of diplomatic talks on the Middle East. At the same time, the U.S. and Russia are together exploring the shape of a possible settlement at high-level talks in Washington. As Israel's protector-state and, in effect, proxy in the talks, the U.S. is seeking for Israel the ironclad guarantees for peace that the young nation demands in return for handing back the captured territories. The Soviets ideally would like to recoup diplomatically all that the Arabs lost militarily. Though each side is under heavy pressure from its client states not to yield an inch, each is also aware that both the Israelis and Arabs will have to make concessions. The great concern is that, in the 20 months that Israel and the U.S. have waited for the Arabs to sue for peace, the chance for a diplomatic settlement has receded as the antagonists have accumulated new hatreds and new scores to settle.
In any other part of the world the military blows that are struck daily by each side would have long since led to the march of armies and declarations of war. For 33 of the past 36 days and every day last week, heavy artillery dueled across the Suez Canal. Israelis last week directed their fire for the first time at now-evacuated Port Said. The Egyptians in turn killed seven Israeli soldiers and two civilian bulldozer drivers. On Israel's eastern front, the guns of Suez are faithfully echoed in daily artillery, tank, mortar, machine-gun and rifle fire across the Jordan River.
From the air, Israeli jets repeatedly pound with rockets, bombs and napalm Arab towns and encampments in Jordan suspected of harboring the fedayeen, the Arab world's "men of sacrifice," who are carrying on a guerrilla war against Israel. Undeterred, the guerrillas cross frequently into Israel to ambush a patrol, plant a mine or leave a plastique explosive in a marketplace. Israeli commandos cross the other way in occasional retaliatory raids against fedayeen bases or positions.
Nasser's army has been re-equipped and retrained by the Russians since the Six-Day War. The MIG-17s and MIG-19s that the Israeli air force destroyed on the ground have been either replaced or augmented by supersonic MIG-21s; most are now protected by a concrete revetment. Egypt is estimated to have 400 combat aircraft (compared with Israel's 350) and 800 tanks (against Israel's 1,100). For the past 16 months, Soviet advisers have been training the Egyptians to use the new equipment, going about the task so methodically that they have even supplied English-language instruction manuals on how to use Russian