MIDDLE EAST: The Critical Mass

The Middle East, somnolent, hot, primitive, resembles what scientists call a critical mass. Add one extra gram, and all sorts of violent reactions are set off: atoms break loose, rush about, rearrange themselves in new patterns. The extra gram that had set the Middle East fissioning and fusing was the sale of Communist arms to Egypt. Last week this dance of the atoms was going on to the accompaniment of shudders, groans and forebodings from the journalistic moaner's corner, led by those partners in anguish, the Alsop brothers. But despite their outcries, all was not yet lost in the Middle East or yet won.

Some of the shiftings and skitterings:

Britain, fed up with trying to please or appease Egypt, decided that proven friends are best, and made a big fuss over its new Baghdad pact (METO) partners, particularly its old partner-in-oil Iraq. By proving that it pays, militarily and economically, to be friends, the British hope to recruit as another METO prospect, Jordan, whose national budget and Arab Legion they underwrite at the rate of $24 million a year. The British are determined to show Egypt's Nasser that flirting with Communists is not the way to get arms or anything else from the West. The British have another reason for bestirring themselves: kicked out of the Suez by the Egyptians, they must now base their Middle East operations on uneasy Cyprus, which is under state of emergency.

Help one Arab power Iraq and two other Arab nations bristle. Saudi Arabia's ruling Saudi family mortally hates and fears Iraq's Hashemite rulers and intrigues expensively with the riches provided by U.S. oil royalties to prevent the Hashemite Arabs (Iraq, Jordan) from ever getting together. And Egypt jealously regards Iraq as its chief rival for Arab leadership.

France, which grudgingly left Syria and Lebanon in 1946, has misgivings about British ascendancy in the Middle East, deplores METO, and would like to reassert its old influence in its lost territories.* Therefore, France works to help the other half of the Arab world: three weeks ago it resumed arms shipments to Egypt. Egypt reciprocated by ceasing its own fiery broadcasts to the Moslems of French North Africa (while persisting in stirring up hatred against the British by broadcasts beamed at the Sudan, Kenya and Uganda).

Israelis, who greeted the Soviet arms delivery to Egypt with hints that it might find itself driven to preventive war, and denounced Eden's talk of border compromises as "dismemberment," last week admitted privately they might have been too abrupt. They talked of a corridor across the Negev, of giving Jordan free access to the port of Haifa, of compensation for the 900,000 Palestine Arab refugees huddled on its borders. (The U.N. commission which feeds and shelters the refugees believes the problem will never be solved until the Israelis offer to take back a token number of them.)