United Nations: No Practical Help

While the U.N. General Assembly debated the Middle East crisis last week, small-scale fighting broke out again. The action occurred along the Suez Canal, where Israeli and Egyptian forces have been staring angrily at each other ever since they agreed to cease fire. Each side apparently used halftracks and mortars, and each blamed the other for starting it. Warned an Israeli official: "I trust the Egyptians remember that we are less than 100 miles from Cairo."

Heroic Albanians. Whoever was responsible for the flare-up by the canal, it was obvious that it is going to be a painfully slow business to work out a settlement in the Middle East. Nor is the U.N. offering much practical help. After Soviet Russia weighed in with a draft resolution demanding that Israel give up all it had won, delegates from Zambia, Somalia, Malaysia and Burundi read off lengthy speeches asking that Israel be condemned for attacking the Arabs and forced to retreat from Arab territory. Yugoslavia, supported by 16 pro-Arab nations, submitted a resolution calling for Israel's unconditional withdrawal but not condemning her as the aggressor. Nepal, Peru, Ireland and Argentina, among others, supported the U.S. view that any withdrawal must be accompanied by an Arab agreement to live in peace with Israel. Nigeria offered a complicated scheme to turn Israeli-occupied Arab border areas into neutral buffer zones.

Farthest out of all was Foreign Minister Nesti Nase of Peking-lining Albania, who proposed a formal resolution to condemn not only Israel but also the U.S. and Britain. Russia, he indicated, should really be included as well. "The American-Soviet alliance is so flagrant," announced Nase, "that if there were women aboard the warships of these two powers, there would be dancing every night on the decks." Then he added: "You know very well, you American imperialists, that the so-called aid of the Soviet leaders is a vast fraud.

You American imperialists and Soviet revisionists are in no position to scare anyone, much less the heroic and inflexible Albanian people."

Somehow, amid all the jostling for platform time, the combatants also managed to make themselves heard. Jordan's King Hussein, who had not been anxious to go to war but gave the Israelis a respectable fight, demanded that Israel be condemned and that it give up "the fruits of aggression" before any peace talks could be considered. Unlike the intransigent Syrians and Egyptians, Hussein did not accuse the U.S. of tak ing part in the scrap. Instead of looking for scapegoats, he admitted that the Arabs had lost all by themselves. "It is apparent that we have not yet learned well enough how to use the weapons of modern warfare," he said. "But we will if we have to."

Squandered Opportunity. On the defensive, as he has been ever since the General Assembly convened, Israel's Foreign Minister Abba Eban replied that Jordan had "squandered an opportunity for peace" by shelling Israeli cities. When fighting broke out in the Sinai desert, Eban said, his government sent Hussein a cable promising that "Israel will not attack any state which refrains from attacking Israel." That cable, he recalled, was ignored.