ISRAEL: Fingered Triggers

In a bare, battered stone building in Jerusalem's no man's land, a mild-mannered U.S. Navy commander named Elmo Hutchison strove one day last week to save what passes for peace in the Middle East. From the Jordan delegates sitting on his left and the Israelis on his right came a steady barrage of accusations and complaints. Commander Hutchison, chairman of the U.N. Mixed Armistice Commission, tried patiently to winnow the facts from the frenzy. The problem was to fix responsibility for the cold-blooded massacre of eleven Israelis at Scorpion's Pass (TIME, March 29).

After 7½ hours of wrangling, the Israelis demanded a formal condemnation of Jordan. The deciding vote of the five on the Mixed Armistice Commission was Commander Hutchison's. "I abstain," he said slowly. The investigators for MAC, added Hutchison, "worked almost beyond endurance to establish the guilt. Even so, the evidence is far from conclusive." The Israelis rose, announced that they would no longer participate in the commission and stalked out.

But next day, before a jammed Knesset, Premier Moshe Sharett defied hothead cries for war and promised: "Israel . . . has no intention of embarking on aggression or provocation." The Parliament unanimously voted him confidence, endorsed his moderate course of appealing to the U.N. for redress against Jordan. But would moderation prevail?

Within hours, grim reports began rolling in. Israel charged Jordan with machine-gunning to death a 50-year-old watchman in Kissalon. Two days later, Jordan reported that in the dead of night Israeli troops hit Nahalin, just across the border from Kissalon, with machine guns, mines and grenades. While local national guardsmen stood off the attackers, Lieut. General John Bagot Glubb's Arab Legion raced to the rescue. Outnumbered, the Israelis fought their way three miles back to the border, carrying dead and wounded with them. Jordan's casualties: nine dead, including one woman.

Said Premier Sharett laconically: "It looks like a reaction to the Kissalon incident." Said Jordan's impetuous young King Hussein: "Victory will be ours." This week men tautly fingered triggers along the frontiers, and Arab-Israeli relations boiled up toward the worst crisis in the five years since the Palestine war ended.