Foreign News: Eye for an Eye

(2 of 2)

At midweek Dictator Nasser's Radio Cairo broadcast that the fedayeen raids had been ordered in "revenge" for last fortnight's Israeli artillery bombardment of a village in the Gaza strip, in which 59 civilians were killed. It said that the raids were over, and Egypt's 300 fedayeen, except for ten lost in action, had all returned to base. Even the Israelis recognized that if this was the sum of Nasser's eye-for-an-eye reprisal, it was certainly not the sort of countermeasure that would lead to war. The Egyptian radio had hardly spoken before the fedayeen staged their last brutal assault at the Shafrir synagogue.

Jets in Time. In Israel such was the anger in government offices and in the streets that the next night might well have seen a full-dress Israeli attack on the Gaza strip or at least on the fedayeen training camp at Khan Yunis. But the touchiest moment in a touchy week passed. The Hammarskjold mission was applying pressure. Israel's militant Premier Ben-Gurion behaved with restraint. At precisely this moment, moreover, Israel's air force gave the Jews something to crow about. Two jet fighters caught four Egyptian planes over the Negev desert and shot down one, a British-made Vampire jet. The pilot was captured and triumphantly handed over to U.N. truce-keepers. In the streets men threw their hats in the air and cheered.

By week's end a tense stillness had settled down over the Gaza front, and Israelis, suddenly sensing that the worst was temporarily over, hung out more flags in Jerusalem on the eve of their eighth independence day. But none could be sure yet whether Israel would be celebrating its independence this week, or fighting for it.