Middle East: Posturing on the Morning After

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Israel talks tough; Mubarak vows to uphold the peace

"We said we would evacuate the Sinai when certain conditions were met, and we did. Here [on the West Bank] we said we would not withdraw, and indeed we won't."

Israel's stubborn Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon, issued that pledge last week as he spoke at the opening of a new Israeli military outpost in the West Bank Valley of Elah where, according to biblical tradition, Goliath was slain by David. Having returned the final third of the Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian control, the government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin was showing that it had no intention of ever agreeing to a similar withdrawal from the other Arab territories occupied since 1967. "Israel has now reached the red line of its concessions," declared Sharon. Begin, whose government announced last week that six more settlements will be built on the West Bank, and another one on the occupied Golan Heights, described the West Bank as "an empty land."

It is in fact the home of 800,000 Palestinians, and last week a goodly number of them were once more demonstrating against continued Israeli domination. Some threw stones. Others were armed with the very weapon that David had used in his fight against Goliath, the slingshot. At least three Palestinians were killed, and more than 50 were injured in clashes with Israeli troops and police. Half the injuries took place in Nablus, one of four West Bank towns whose elected mayors have been forced from office by Israeli authorities in the past two months. Five secondary schools on the West Bank have been closed indefinitely.

By contrast, only a few bureaucratic mix-ups marred the transfer of power in the Sinai. At the newly established border post at Taba, five miles south of the Israeli town of Eilat, an Egyptian officer politely but firmly explained to the Israeli drivers of 15 vehicles that they could not yet be allowed to go any further. A rubber stamp needed for validating travel documents had not arrived from Cairo, he explained. At the scruffy northern Sinai town of Rafah, which is now divided by the Israeli-Egyptian border fence, matters were also confused. The system that will permit Arab residents to move freely throughout the city was not yet in effect, so the border was temporarily closed.

Perhaps the saddest scene in the Sinai was the ruins of Yamit, the Mediterranean coastal settlement (pop. 2,400 at its 1977 peak) that the Israelis destroyed with bulldozers before leaving. Previously the government had hinted that this was necessary to prevent the Israeli settlers from returning to it or the Egyptians from inheriting a city dangerously close to the Israeli border. Last week, however, some Israelis complained that the matter had been settled by Begin and Sharon without consulting the Cabinet or any ministerial committee. Said a puzzled Israeli general: "We should have left Yamit intact and handed it over to the Palestinian refugees living in the area."