Israel: Digging In to Stay

On the morning after its swift and stunning victory in the "Six Day War," Israel awoke to vastly wider horizons and vastly expanded responsibilities. Suddenly the writ of Jerusalem had been extended over lands three times Is rael's prewar size, and over hostile Arab populations amounting to 1,330,000 people—nearly half Israel's own. How long would Israel want to hang onto such problems?

Most people assumed that the bulk of the "new territories," as Israelis soon dubbed them, were negotiable in any peace settlement with the Arabs. The new boundaries would be hard to guard, so the argument went, the new lands hard to govern. But the Arabs have yet to show any interest in a settlement, and the Israelis are clearly in no hurry to give up what they have won.

The new territories make "a very nice map to look at," observes Defense Minister Moshe Dayan with a smile—and with good reason. Far from overextending the Israeli army, the conquered lands have, in fact, shortened Israel's land borders and made them much easier to defend. Israel's new frontier with Jordan runs for 60 miles rather than 180 and, equally important, it runs along the Jordan River rather than through a twisting, tortured no man's land of hills and scrub. The old Negev Desert border stretched a porous 160 miles. With the addition of Sinai, Israel's underbelly is now bounded by open water, save for the 107-mile stretch facing the Suez Canal. Israel's classic military victory on the Golan Heights of Syria has driven the Syrians well out of shelling reach of the Galilee villages that suffered random Arab bombardment for 19 years. And with the seizure of Nasser's airbases in the Sinai, the closest Egyptian jet field is now Cairo.

Gawking in Gaza. For Israel's civilian planners, the new territories that so please the army are wildly diverse in prospects and problems. Sinai is a vast empty space, valuable chiefly for the oil wells south of Suez, as a buffer against Egypt and an air route to the 14 tourist hotels at Elath. Syrian land, too, is largely deserted—abandoned by some 80,000 inhabitants who fled the Israeli advance. Gaza, however, constitutes a monumental nightmare, with its 330,000 Palestinian refugees in stucco and mud-hut camps, plus an impoverished civilian population of 100,000. And though the West Bank of the Jordan, now in Israeli hands, was the jewel of the Jordanian economy, its roughly 1,000,000 people scratched out an existence five times more meager than the Israeli standard of living.