MIDDLE EAST: Hounding the Helpless

For more than a million people in the Middle East, life seemed to have exhausted its stock of misfortune. They are the hapless and for the most part innocent victims of man's inhumanity to man: the 875,000 Arab refugees from Palestine and their opposite numbers, 200,000 Jewish immigrants, admitted to Israel but not yet absorbed. They huddle in tents and makeshift shelters, queue for meager rations. Last week Nature added to their misery, in a howling of winds and a downpour of rain such as the Middle East hadn't seen for a quarter-century.

Sixty-mile-an-hour gales shredded tents from Dan to Beersheba, tossed flimsy huts into the air and tore ripening oranges from trees. Thirty-six thousand refugees were homeless in Gaza. Trapped by rising waters, refugees died in Jordan. Part of the Negev desert that had been arid for as long as the oldest inhabitants remembered was suddenly laced with freakish torrents of brown water that cut off a camp and threatened starvation. Soldiers waded waist-deep to isolated camps, tightened sagging guy ropes, improvised drainage canals and dished out hot food. Israeli planes dropped food and medicine.

The worst casualty, however, was not the camps or the crops but the morale of the refugees. Yemenite Jews stoned passing cars to express their resentment of those who lived comfortably. Women stood over spluttering stoves in tents and wished they'd never seen Israel.

A high Israeli officer reported husky, 16-year-old boys smoking in their damp beds while a few feet away 18-year-old soldiers, called to emergency duty, struggled to repair their tents. "They're like the D.P.s in Europe," he complained. "They don't see the point of helping themselves."

But disaster brought these people something they never had before: the first friendly attention from old Israeli hands. Willing Tel Aviv householders took in strange babies with bad colds; one businessman collected 15 shivering children and bedded them down in his cellar. Tel Aviv's Mayor Israel Rokach beamed, said: "At last we are a united people again."

At week's end in Israel's holy land, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared a state of emergency to last as long as the windows of heaven were opened and the flood of waters was upon the earth.